Physical Labour and Equal Pay For Equal Value

If you have ever been involved in formal job evaluation schemes, you know they are rarely about neutral science. Behind every point-scoring matrix sits a deeper architectural driver, and the recent Equal Value judgements at Next and Birmingham and Glasgow City Councils display the long, intrusive reach of European law, and an ideological framework that treats men's health and human rights as expendable.

The Reality of Physical Labour

When corporate compliance and legal systems pit clean, indoor administrative roles against gruelling manual labour, a profound asymmetry is brushed under the rug. Men disproportionately step up to fill dangerous, body-wrecking roles out of economic necessity and a willingness to bear physical hardship.

Yet when those risk premiums are challenged as inherently discriminatory, the law penalises them for the physical toll they endure. We are told to accept that the destruction of a working man's body has zero economic worth. Let’s call it out for what it is: an assault on men's human rights, sacrificing their health in a dishonest pretence at addressing pay disparity between the sexes.

The EU Fingerprint

Equal value litigation traces its direct lineage back to Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. British courts once relied on common-sense reality, but relentless pressure from European courts changed the rules.

High-priced HR consultants rolled out analytical Job Evaluation Schemes to score "effort, skill, and responsibility" across radically different workplaces. In doing so, they flattened real-world conditions into neat bureaucratic boxes that ignore the actual cost of the work being done.

Free Choice and the Price of Pain

Look at the Next retail litigation. Female shop-floor and administrative staff argued their roles were of equal value to male warehouse operatives, and the courts dismissed market forces entirely.

The heavy warehouse roles paying higher hourly rates were open to everyone, yet Next struggled to recruit for them because the work was harsh and punishing. The retail staff largely stayed put because they preferred it. When those same administrative staff were offered the chance to move into heavy warehouse lifting for the same pay, they wouldn’t touch it. They would only do it for much, much more money—which is what a compensating wage differential is supposed to reflect.

When tribunals declare desk-bound administration legally identical to heavy warehouse labour, they erase the economic value of human endurance.

The Brutal Toll

Refuse collection, warehousing, and manual trades are physically punishing, injurious, and life-shortening. A man dragging heavy bins up steep tenement stairs or pushing loads across a warehouse is trading his physical wellbeing for a payslip, facing cumulative musculoskeletal failure and reduced life expectancy.

Standard job evaluation matrices treat an hour of sitting at an office desk the same as an hour of heavy physical graft. To a spreadsheet, time is uniform. To a human body, it is entirely different.

Worse still is the impact of physical overtime. When a manual worker puts in extra hours of heavy physical labour, the toll on their family and personal life is infinitely heavier than an extra hour of office administration. Heavy graft leaves you physically broken, requiring hours of recovery just to function. Office fatigue is real, but it rarely leaves you physically wrecked by the age of 50.

Proper Job Evaluation

Next management were told that to factor in market forces to job evaluation - i.e.the public recognition that these jobs were more difficult, unpleasant and undesirable - amounted to indirect sexual discrimination. Birmingham and Glasgow management and unions accepted Equal Value judgments, not realising that this meant bonus and overtime arrangements also had to treat each hour of office work and physical labour as equivalent, and pay them the exact same.

This is a nonsense. Job Evaluations must recognise the long term deleterious effects of manual labour, as well as the short term impacts to home life of manual overtime, and recompense work accordingly. When a business struggles to recruit into manual roles, addressing that in pay scales is not a mechanism of sexual discrimination, it is simple recognition that these jobs are undesirable and pay should be weighted accordingly.

Anything else is simply organised and court approved dismissal of men’s human rights.

Authors: Jim McNeill and Gemini AI

🤖AI Transparency and Disclosure Note: This article was drafted with the assistance of Google’s Gemini AI tool to help research, structure, refine, and polish the text according to the requested style and arguments.