One of the worst jobs I’ve had was working on the shop floor of a well-known department store in London.
As well as putting up with archaic rules forcing women to wear high heels, tight skirts and a full face of make-up (policies which have since been scrapped), the job was hard and monotonous.
“Smiles were made for sales,” a room full of women were told in one bizarre training session. The only reason I stuck it out was because it was better paid than other retail jobs and completely flexible. Everyone I worked with (all women) felt the same.
So I empathise with the thousands of shop floor staff who joined retail for perks such as flexibility but are now fed up with being underpaid and undervalued.
Department stores “once provided invaluable opportunities for ambitious women”, author Julie Satow wrote in her book When Women Ran Fifth Avenue. But that was a different era, when a retail job felt more stable, there weren’t many alternatives for someone seeking flexibility and there was less violence against staff.
A study by trade union GMB found earlier this year that Asda workers had been attacked with syringes and chased by customers.
Delivery drivers said they had been chased by people in cars and confronted by customers in the nude, while store workers had watermelons and joints of gammon thrown at them.
The rise of shoplifting has led to an increase of attacks on staff, who faced 1,300 cases of violence and abuse every day over the year to August 2023, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC), compared to around 870 the prior year.
That’s equivalent to 54 cases of violence or abuse towards retail staff across the country every hour, or almost one episode of aggression every minute of the day.
Like many female-dominated industries, retail has relied on the cheap labour of women for too long and many have had enough.
The issue will be brought into sharp focus this week as 60,000 Asda shop workers take their equal pay case to the employment tribunal on Monday in what will be the biggest private sector equal pay claim ever, just as Nike faces investor pressure to improve the way it treats workers in its garment factories.
At the centre of the Asda case is a claim that shop workers should be paid the same as warehouse staff, an argument which Next store staff made successfully last month. Next plans to appeal the ruling, which has spooked retail bosses.
There are more than 112,000 store staff across not only Asda but also Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Co-op who have filed similar claims.
The battle comes more than 50 years after Dagenham sewing machinists walked out when a pay regrade saw them classed as “unskilled labour”, while men doing a similar job in the factory were given a higher pay grade for skilled labour.
Women’s work has always been undervalued, although the tribunal acknowledged in the Next case that this was about cutting costs rather than any sex discrimination.
The Next ruling certainly has its flaws – surely just because someone is underpaid, it doesn’t mean they should earn exactly the same as a colleague in a completely different job?
I would rather work on a shop floor than in a warehouse – if one job is harder to fill, then it makes sense for pay to be higher. A study last year found that competition had pushed up rates for warehouse workers, some who were suffering from “gruelling” working conditions and stressful night shifts.
There’s technically nothing stopping female store workers from applying for a better-paid warehouse job. But in reality it’s not that easy.
Aside from the skills being very different, the draw of a shop floor job is flexibility and location – attracting carers, students and working parents who want to work part-time and close to home.
Flexibility and location is why I put up with working in a shop that told me “smiles were made for sales”, many years before I could begin to appreciate how vital a flexible job like that might be for a parent. That doesn’t justify poor pay.
The country’s (mostly female) store staff have realised that they’ve been short-changed and overlooked. The demise of the UK high street, as well as the rapid expansion of flexible working in other industries, means a retail job no longer carries the same appeal as it once did.
For those early in their careers with caring responsibilities, a part-time job in a physical store is no longer the obvious choice. Those who have been stacking shelves for decades are likely to be wondering why they haven’t spoken up before.
Retailers have to up their game. The industry is already under pressure to treat female workers in factories better, with investors and customers boycotting fast-fashion brands which sell dirt-cheap clothes made by exploited garment workers overseas.
The Government has been urged to block a proposed listing by fast-fashion brand Shein due to allegations around its labour practices. The vast majority of garment workers (around 80pc) are women, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign, which argues that employers take advantage of cultural stereotypes that portray women as passive and flexible.
Women who adhere to these stereotypes and so don’t speak out or have time to look for a job elsewhere are the “ideal employees in management’s eyes”, the organisation says.
Women’s work is considered less valuable everywhere – even Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman said this year that if her name was Oliver she’d be paid a “f--k lot more than I am” – but jobs which are flexible can be more easily exploited.
Fed up after the pandemic and amid a rise in violence, shop workers have found their voice.
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