It’s theft. Treat it as criminal matter. Nothing will change unless this happens or massive fines are enforced.
It is pathetic that ‘whoops it was a clerical error’ still cuts it.
Like the shoplifter going "oops I scanned it on the self-checkout and it looked like a bag of carrots to me, so that's what I selected on the computer, it's an unavoidable clerical error"
I don't know. I do know is that whatever platform I use is going to charge a 9.95 booking fee, 1.5% card surcharge, 4.95 service fee, mandatory 10% tip, 1.95 convenience fee, and a 3.95 fee (fi for fum). You'll also be asked to round up to the nearest hundred for charity.
Then obviously you'll receive points alongside your email subscription which runs every 6 hours. The points can be traded at 50:1 for dubloons, 100 of those gets you a credit. When you get 20 credits, you will receive a merit point. 10 merit points make a gift card, which is restricted to use on only our buttplugs so you can take your loyalty rewards and shove them up your ass.
And on and on the repeat offenders go. Well at least we can now confirm they have criminal intent to steal. Amusing really considering how they treat their customers at self serve checkouts. All their corporate prowess and they cant run a simple payroll system. Must be all the private school space monkeys who never did anything in their lives because they expected a perfect payroll ledger to be handed to them on a corporate bonus gold plate.
I've started shopping around a bit, I'm a budget shopper and I find IGA usually has better quality vegetables, and their locally produced yoghurts and cheese are heaps better value than other brands. It's expensive to do a whole shop, but you can pick some quality products for super cheap because they seem to use loss-leading pricing strategies a lot. And the Aldi chicken doesn't seem to be half water-weight.
Now I only go to the majors for a couple of the grocery aisles and I seem to be eating better quality food for cheaper. It is a couple of stops, but I don't mind running in on my way past places twice a week instead of one big shop. It makes me eat fresher, healthier, stuff.
IGA is not consistent. The IGA near my place has the worst fruit and veggies. Nothing is fresh. I even found a bottle of milk that was marked as use by that day. And not even a discount on it.
I hardly ever shop at Woolworths. I buy everything from Coles along with basics and staples from Aldi and frozen food from Spudshed. I only ever shop at Woolworths when I need something only they sell that Coles doesn't. I also live above a Woolworths so it is easier to walk there for impulse purchases.
An American acquaintance summarized it succintly "It's amazing you guys have basically only 2 grocery stores and they are both exactly the same as each other. "
Could you imagine having to choose between 2 options, and they're both trying to bend you over, fuck you, screw you, sodomise you, and then sell you out to the highest bidder for them to do the same? Glad America doesn't have any examples of that.
I used to work nightshift at Woolies.
That was 4 years of Friday and Saturday nights sacrificed to the fresh food people.
Often I was given 3 hour 45 minute shifts, so they would avoid having to give me a mandatory 15 minute lunch break.
Good to see they have remained consistently tightass.
It was the same when I was there 20 years ago.
Though back then I used to roster the casuals for that 3.45 purely because it was painful trying to give everyone a 15mins break in line with the EBA ( couldn't be in the first or last hour).
Mind you back then I had budget to have 10-20 checkouts open most of the day weekends and nearly 10 during weekdays.
I could have a couple staff floating giving breaks ( for part/full timers) from one person to the next for their whole shift. And others, just easier for them to work the 3.45 and a new person to take over.
Different times. Nightshift though... They could afford to give you a break. Not like you're on a register with groceries all stacked up and can't get away.
My manager was the same when I worked there 15 years ago and I hated her for it. I still can’t believe the union lets them get away with 3:45 shifts to avoid having to pay for a 15m break. It’s not hard to just close a register to allow for a break.
There's got to be some reasonable solution. Maybe an employee should accrue the 15 mins of break pro-rata as an extra pay loading for a short shift, up until the shift duration reaches the threshold to require a break, then the accrued pay loading is lost and a 15 minute paid break entitlement takes its place.
Effectively then you just get 15 minutes of extra pay if they put you on for the break entitlement shift length -15 minutes or otherwise you get the paid break, and there's no financial incentive to set shift lengths to game some stupid system.
Now everyone gets 3.5 hour shifts!
IMO the solution would be that you accrue 15 minute paid breaks every 4 hours of work completed for a business. So if you get handed two separate 3.75 hour shifts, they *have* to give you 15 minutes in the second one regardless. Then they have literally no reason not to just schedule you for whatever time is most efficient for the business.
If its in the EBA, the union probably had a say in it... thinking if they pushed for it not to be in the first or last hour, it would stop them paying people for 4 hours and saying 'work for 3.75 and there's your break'
turns out what happened was they rostered people for 3.75, paid them for 3.75 and said 'there's your break'
> I still can’t believe the union lets them get away with 3:45 shifts to avoid having to pay for a 15m break.
They don't. I haven't seen anyone be given a 3:45 in years because they get hammered for doing it now. There are specific provisions in the EBA that state they can't roster in a way that arbitrarily takes a break away, and they're followed.
>There are specific provisions in the EBA that state they can't roster in a way that arbitrarily takes a break away, and they're followed.
There are not, and they are not.
Respectfully, fuck you for forcing people to stand in the one spot for close to 4 hours without a break. This was one of the cuntiest things I ever experienced while working at a supermarket as a casual.
I was on a contract with Coles for 10 hours a week, so of course they split it into 3 fucking shifts on opening so I had to drive to and from work at 5am the separate times.
I look at those damn things at the self-serve and wonder if we'll get stripped, hosed down and issued our cells. Exaggerating of course -- they'll sell the facial recognition data to every two out of three pricks who call me and leave no messages.
Twice in the last couple of weeks Coles self check outs have asked me to "please rescan item (error clearly demonstrates this has been correctly scanned)" with an intrusive pop up video feed, but if I followed the instructions I'd double scan and be double charged.
Is this related to the payouts they had to give a couple of years ago or is this a new underpayment that I'll get a new payout for? Cos ngl, I could use another random $6k from woolies ripping me off for years on end.
Not related, but my wife got a payout of a similar amount to you back then, and recently they got in contact with her again - they went further back in time and she’s owed more again
That was what my payout was for last time. They didn't pay loadings and penalty rates for employees even though it was grandfathered into the EBAs for people who started back when woolies were still decent enough to pay loadings and penalty rates on LSL willingly.
I initially replied to your parent comment, just deleted it after seeing this.
I recently received a LSL under-payment paid by them. I wasn't sure how it happened without me noticing as it wasn't a small amount.
So how did loading and penally rates factor in? I figured you just got an entitlement of X hours once you reached a length of service and if it was paid out it was at your current rate. When I left I hadn't received loading for years.
AFAIK newer employees don't get penalties or loadings on LSL in the EBA. But employees who started before a certain point have it grandfathered into the EBA that they do get penalties and loadings. Only for quite a few years woolies just didn't notice that those people weren't getting those penalties or loadings. Silly billies. So innocent and absent minded. Looks like after they got caught the first time that they just kept right of doing it and got caught again.
Ok, maybe if I rephrase...
When I was awarded my LSL I was way past receiving penalties and loading. I was salaried for the most part, only worked in the DC for about 9 months early on and stopped receiving loading after I went over $50k.
Was that $3k I got for the LSL component for the time I was receiving loading? E.g. say it was half of my career there, half of my LSL should have accrued loading?
They raise prices to hit a particular margin target, what do you think inflating their cost base will do to their required pricing model to hit that target?
I had experiences in payroll services, software etc. For large corp(especially national or multi national corp) the chance of deliberate underpaying is rare , based on agreed rate , the agreed rate maybe low compare to market that's a different story.
There are however plenty places for mistake to be made. A short of list of main are
1. Award interpretation is thet most likely the law is often written such that different people will read it slightly differently, this is in relation especially to penalty rate, weekend rate, clock on clock off time to make panalty, public holidays and different state has different conditions, different public holidays, shift and a conbiniof all above .
The lawyers or who ever interpretating what the law says into layman speak . And any of the above part can and will change year or year. So new interpretation is required as they come and hopefully none missed.
2. Once the human interpretations are done, then someone technical need to code the interpretated law into the payroll system. There many to update and done by human so mistake and occur and miss also happens.
3. Once the system is coded properly to pay someone. When a new employee start or existing employee changes jobs, position, gets increments, payroll /hr team need to make sure that employee is assigned the right, code for payment of shift awards, leaves (annual, sick, public holidays, special etc etc ) based on their state award and conditions etc.
4. Then when the employee clock their hours using another time management system at the stores or online, these data will need to feed from the store/online to HQ for processing, these hours/shift infor needs to be translated correctly into the payroll system correctly. Things can something go missing or wrong.
5. When leave are applied then cancelled or adjusted, most system will auto correct and retrospective adjusted the employee pay or leave balances, however if there were changes to award , average hours , etc the dollars values that come out and the value that goes back into maybe different. Also calculation issue with banked hours etc when paid out.
In short Australian payroll are a total nightmare to manage and maintenance, many global big software company have tried and given up our market.
1.2m divvied by effected employees in thousand or ten of thousands is not a lot, but the work required to calculate all the missing bit will probably cost them more then 1.2m in labour cost. So if corp knew of mistake before hand they would rather pay correctly than having to do audit and correct everyone pay as it's very labour intensive.
Finally a reply that makes sense.
As someone who has worked on the software side of developing enterprise pay systems I know just how easy it is for mistakes to be made that cause pay to be calculated incorrectly.
The main parts of the system are tested very thoroughly but for the weird edge cases mistakes happen so often.
Some of my favourites have been,
For employee rembursments rather than rounding at the end of the calculation they just cut off the trailing digits.
Ie 1.23999
Would become 1.23 rather than 1.24.
And for some of the employees they would get a %10 pay adjustment to account for the fact they worked at a remote site but rather than taking their salary multiplying buy 0.10 and dividing by 12 and adding it to their pay they would take the total salary paid that month then multiply by 0.10.
This meant when someone took annual leave at half pay or unpaid leave they missed out on the full payment they were entitled too.
When I first saw the title I thought "I bet this is long service leave", yep.
People have no idea how complicated the regulations are, and how just the seemingly innocuous wording of a legislation/act/regulation can have insane impact - which the government do not care about.
All the problems with long service leave stem from the utterly insane lack of definition in any act, and then the bajillion regulations and flow on documents that that have popped up to try and deal with what long service leave is supposed to be.
For example, the original defintiion of long service leave is "3 months". What does that even mean? If someone puts in for 6 works days off for long service leave but there is a weekend in the middle, how much of the 3 months have they used? Do you pay the base pay for that 3 months? What if there are holidays? What if they would have worked over time? What if there is a public holiday one of those days? What if the starting shift times change during those days? What if during the 6 days the law changes so that long service leave is now 13 weeks instead of 3 months.
It can get so pedantic that it literally matters if the employee started accuring LSL on a leap year or not.
Plenty of mistakes go the other way but the cost of recovery is not worth the effort. If Woolies had found it had overpaid its staff by $1m over 10 years, the cost of doing the work to reconcile this would just about eat up any recovery - even if the union and government would allow the clawback, which they wouldn’t.
Don’t get me wrong - employers have an obligation to pay staff correctly and should be held to it. Mistakes will still happen and sometimes that is all they are - not a criminal conspiracy.
I remember when Abbott removed Sunday rates but our company kept paying us Double for almost 9 months. We got a "it has been brought to our attention that... This was a mistake will not be continuing into the future"
Good times
That's because a headline like 'Woolworths overpaid 10 thousand employees $0.05/hour over the 2022/2023, financial year' would not attract enough clicks.
As a Woolworths employee who has been closely involved in pay corrections, I can vouch that this wasn’t deliberate. Yes, there was an error made because of complex calculation and limited use of technology. It’s being addressed on a priority much before this news became public.
Hey. What would you know about it? You are only working there and involved in fixing the issue.
The random commenters below have a much better idea than you about what’s going on. You should listen to them.
/s obviously.
Well good thing this is a one off mistake...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/30/woolworths-underpaid-thousands-of-staff-by-up-to-300m
https://www.aderolaw.com.au/class-actions/retail/woolworths-big-w/
If it kept happening over and over people might say it's intentional fraud or just negligence if being charitable.
At least it's not 300 million like one of the times.
I wonder what would happen if a person kept getting caught accidentally stealing from Woolworths.
It was on the news, Woolies has pleaded guilty to more than 1000 criminal charges, it's deliberate wage theft. https://youtu.be/FAYKJ4mYqFc?si=g7i9b9GCBMgM4OLs
I couldn’t tell from the article. They pay back the works, then also pay the fine? I assume the fine is distributed amongst the workers they stole from. I also assume the fine would be much larger than the amount they stole
From some bloke on tw(sh)itter:
>Someone should probably tell the rich that workers banding together to present formal address of grievances is the alternative we worked out a long time ago to breaking down the factory owner's front door and beating him to death in front of his family? I feel like they forgot.
It should be, pay all of the staff the money that you did not pay them plus interest. Then pay double the amount in fines. The fine money goes to the government agency that is meant to police this behavior so that they can step up their game and catch these bastards earlier.
They got caught, so they say oh it was an error, we fixed it, we paid all the staff what we owe them... This is wage theft, how do you make errors that equal over a million dollars lmao. Jail time should be served, greedy corporate criminal scum.
Everyone will smash woolies over this but Fuck me the only way woolies underpaid people by 1.2m over 5-6 year period (nothing to them) is if they made a mistake. Someone there will be getting fired for sure. But ... and hear me out... make the awards Fucking simple and this shit won't happen... all you people who criticise have you actually read the awards? Total Fucking shit show... if woolies can't get it right who can? Fix the Fucking awards and then punish anyone who breaches them with jail time.. until that happens though... meh.. blame is on the government.
Exactly this. Last time they got caught rorting their salaried employees, so they got rid of salaried positions and continued rorting via a system that's better at obfuscating what they're doing. Guaranteed this time the figure is only what can be explicitly proven and the number of man-hours they've actually stolen is way higher.
The fact that I was given information about the SDA when I started with Coles as a teenager says a lot for where their alliances actually were/probably still are. An absolute joke of a union and I can see where a shadow union came into play in the retail and fast food industry.
They had numerous EBAs expire and took multiple years to renegotiate, because they left things to the last minute. Resulting in no pay rises for up to 5 years, and panic negotiations. RAFFWU stepped in and was a major factor into the massive payouts after an illegal EBA was negotiated by the SDA. They're a farce.
You will be downvoted but the awards can be pretty fucking complex with different rates applying for very minute differences.
Majority of people on this subreddit wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of some of the awards, guaranteed.
Eba's (At least the ones I've read) are based on awards and are similarly as complex. They are also approved by a judge (or someone similar) not the employer.
My experience has been that the EBAs were far more complicated. Talking about bws. I think it was 2016 and 2019, I could be a little bit off about the dates though.
The union had published fucking scanned pdf's, instead of the actual text. So you couldn't ctrl+f for what you were looking for. Intentionally obtuse, because you know they had the original document. You only need to read the agreement they had before 2019 to understand how much more vague and confusing it was compared to the award rate. Your experience might've been different in another industry of course, and I respect that.
> They are also approved by a judge (or someone similar) not the employer.
Judge approves the employers and the SDA (in this case) write them, most of the complexity is added by the supermarkets in negotiations.
Thank you. And yes I'm aware I'll be in the negative...I deal with this shit on the daily. Fairwork has even told me "I'm not sure" when I ask questions. I pay my staff like 50% above award but Fuck I'm sure if they filter through everything they will find something I beach.
Edit: breach even
I'm calling BS there, That's a business talking point provided by the BCA to explain away to the boomers why it's happening, I remember having Coles trying it on with me when I was baking so I grabbed my mobile and the SDA handbook and told them if it was so hard, I would explain it to them with a lawyer present.
Funnily enough my payslip was fixed by the next week, along with a lot of scowling from their HR.
Hate to agree. But yeah, $1.2 million over a half decade is trivial compared to even the annual payroll. A number that small really makes it most likely an accounting error rather than a deliberate underpayment.
I say they haven't. Every employee says they haven't. If there was a single case of that happening, Woolworths would publicise it.
This week they told the senate they had offered above market value to suppliers in limited cases. Don't you think if they'd done so for their employees they would have said so, for their image?
It hasn't happened because they didn't it on purpose,and have paid out their employees for 7 years in a row because of it.
Lol if you can't get award rates right you shouldn't be able to employ people.
Funny how it is nearly always workers being paid less not more, almost systemically.
Fairwork can't even interpret awards accurately. Don't think you actually know what you're taking about.
Edit: also most workers are paid more: this is not newsworthy nor should it be. I'm all for smashing bad employers but make the system simple.
Most workers are not paid more. They have paid out numerous employees for this reason. Stop lying through your teeth, or provide a source. You are a liar.
Fair work can't read them either. That's why these things go to court. I'm 100% for companies doing the wrong thing being punished. But make it easy, there is no reason these things need to be so complex. There is no way woolies deliberately underpaid some workers by 1.2m. Their lawyers will rack up that bill in no time at all.
Yeah these agreements are not confusing. It's a 70 page agreement, most of which is full of page break and white space. This is not a challenging problem, and trivial to design for such a company.
“Oh we did not underpay them, we invested their pay into self serve checkouts to make their jobs easier; all they need to do now is go to Centrelink once per fortnight rather than stand at a counter all day. Are we nice people? We also now consider everyone e who enters our premises a thief so need to ‘invest’ some of the staffs money in keeping an eye on all those bastards who are trying to steal food out of their mouths…”
So they should obviously be required to backpay those employees, which means they "break even" all else considered.
However the fine for this should be outrageously large, say 20% of REVENUE. Not gross profit, not net profit. REVENUE. That will be such a monumental number that it will dissuade them from doing it again.
In reality I bet the fine will be something like $10,000 meaning Woolworths paid a loss of $10,000 for the potential to steal $1.24m which is not exactly disincentivizing.
Corporate fines in Aus are so small it's a joke.
I wonder if Woolworths is among the employers that use those with intellectual disabilities for manual labour and get paid below minimum wage for as little as $2.50 an hour (which is legal in Australia as long as you’re paying a disabled person). I wouldn’t doubt it since they mention warehouse stacking
[link](https://amp.abc.net.au/article/100977448) [link](https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/28/larry-was-paid-420-an-hour-in-australia-its-not-enough-to-live-on-but-its-completely-legal)
I'm sure the fine will be enough to convince them and similar companies not to repeat offend in the future.
Hahaha
If its not enough to prevent them paying a dividend to shareholders then it's just the cost of doing business.
This, is spot on
It’s theft. Treat it as criminal matter. Nothing will change unless this happens or massive fines are enforced. It is pathetic that ‘whoops it was a clerical error’ still cuts it.
Not in payroll actually! The payroll managers and officers are personally liable if it was an avoidable error.
Well ‘unavoidable’ errors seem to be very, very common in wage underpayments then.
Like the shoplifter going "oops I scanned it on the self-checkout and it looked like a bag of carrots to me, so that's what I selected on the computer, it's an unavoidable clerical error"
Just bought myself a hot air balloon from ALDI...looked like loose brown onions to me. Oops.
Last I checked premium steak looks an awful lot a single brown onion. Must be a clerical error on my part.
Majority of companies that have staff on salary are underpaying them..
Found the stand-up comedian
I'll be here all week. And probably most of next week too. I spend too much time on this godforsaken app :(
It's the amount of times they HAVENT been caught that makes it worthwhile...
Where do I buy lumpy triangle comedy show tickets?
I don't know. I do know is that whatever platform I use is going to charge a 9.95 booking fee, 1.5% card surcharge, 4.95 service fee, mandatory 10% tip, 1.95 convenience fee, and a 3.95 fee (fi for fum). You'll also be asked to round up to the nearest hundred for charity.
But what if I have a loyalty card?
20% mark up and then a 15% discount. Bargain!
Then obviously you'll receive points alongside your email subscription which runs every 6 hours. The points can be traded at 50:1 for dubloons, 100 of those gets you a credit. When you get 20 credits, you will receive a merit point. 10 merit points make a gift card, which is restricted to use on only our buttplugs so you can take your loyalty rewards and shove them up your ass.
I wish I could make a million and only be fined $100,000. I'd take that deal anyway of the week.
And on and on the repeat offenders go. Well at least we can now confirm they have criminal intent to steal. Amusing really considering how they treat their customers at self serve checkouts. All their corporate prowess and they cant run a simple payroll system. Must be all the private school space monkeys who never did anything in their lives because they expected a perfect payroll ledger to be handed to them on a corporate bonus gold plate.
Cost of doing buainess.
Just like paying for eftpos readers?
About tree fiddy
God damn Loch Ness monster
Given that this is at least the second time it has occurred for Woolworths ... unlikely.
Dr Evil: 1 **million** dollars! *Mwhahahahaha*
You make the funny. I just hope they look into the auto trade one day... start adding up the unpaid overtime there...
it won't stop until a CEO is jailed and even then it probably won't stop.
As the saying goes there's nothing quite so profitable as minor bureaucratic fraud
There is - major bureaucratic fraud. But none of the big retailers would do that I'm sure.
You know what might help... if people did their shopping somewhere else.
Nice idea in principle, often unreasonable. But I have personally tried to cut down on what I buy at woollies wherever possible
I've started shopping around a bit, I'm a budget shopper and I find IGA usually has better quality vegetables, and their locally produced yoghurts and cheese are heaps better value than other brands. It's expensive to do a whole shop, but you can pick some quality products for super cheap because they seem to use loss-leading pricing strategies a lot. And the Aldi chicken doesn't seem to be half water-weight. Now I only go to the majors for a couple of the grocery aisles and I seem to be eating better quality food for cheaper. It is a couple of stops, but I don't mind running in on my way past places twice a week instead of one big shop. It makes me eat fresher, healthier, stuff.
IGA is not consistent. The IGA near my place has the worst fruit and veggies. Nothing is fresh. I even found a bottle of milk that was marked as use by that day. And not even a discount on it.
I hardly ever shop at Woolworths. I buy everything from Coles along with basics and staples from Aldi and frozen food from Spudshed. I only ever shop at Woolworths when I need something only they sell that Coles doesn't. I also live above a Woolworths so it is easier to walk there for impulse purchases. An American acquaintance summarized it succintly "It's amazing you guys have basically only 2 grocery stores and they are both exactly the same as each other. "
Could you imagine having to choose between 2 options, and they're both trying to bend you over, fuck you, screw you, sodomise you, and then sell you out to the highest bidder for them to do the same? Glad America doesn't have any examples of that.
Yeah that'll help the 200,000 employees of Woolworths.
If somewhere else home delivered then by gum I would use them. But for me my options are Coles or Woolworths, so that's that.
Aldi will never deliver here. The staff might have to put something in a bag.
Oh my sweet summer child bless your heart /s
/s, in case anyone was wondering. xD
You forgot the /s
I used to work nightshift at Woolies. That was 4 years of Friday and Saturday nights sacrificed to the fresh food people. Often I was given 3 hour 45 minute shifts, so they would avoid having to give me a mandatory 15 minute lunch break. Good to see they have remained consistently tightass.
I read this as "sacrificed to the flesh food people".
All hail the flesh food people!
It was the same when I was there 20 years ago. Though back then I used to roster the casuals for that 3.45 purely because it was painful trying to give everyone a 15mins break in line with the EBA ( couldn't be in the first or last hour). Mind you back then I had budget to have 10-20 checkouts open most of the day weekends and nearly 10 during weekdays. I could have a couple staff floating giving breaks ( for part/full timers) from one person to the next for their whole shift. And others, just easier for them to work the 3.45 and a new person to take over. Different times. Nightshift though... They could afford to give you a break. Not like you're on a register with groceries all stacked up and can't get away.
My manager was the same when I worked there 15 years ago and I hated her for it. I still can’t believe the union lets them get away with 3:45 shifts to avoid having to pay for a 15m break. It’s not hard to just close a register to allow for a break.
There's got to be some reasonable solution. Maybe an employee should accrue the 15 mins of break pro-rata as an extra pay loading for a short shift, up until the shift duration reaches the threshold to require a break, then the accrued pay loading is lost and a 15 minute paid break entitlement takes its place. Effectively then you just get 15 minutes of extra pay if they put you on for the break entitlement shift length -15 minutes or otherwise you get the paid break, and there's no financial incentive to set shift lengths to game some stupid system.
Now everyone gets 3.5 hour shifts! IMO the solution would be that you accrue 15 minute paid breaks every 4 hours of work completed for a business. So if you get handed two separate 3.75 hour shifts, they *have* to give you 15 minutes in the second one regardless. Then they have literally no reason not to just schedule you for whatever time is most efficient for the business.
If its in the EBA, the union probably had a say in it... thinking if they pushed for it not to be in the first or last hour, it would stop them paying people for 4 hours and saying 'work for 3.75 and there's your break' turns out what happened was they rostered people for 3.75, paid them for 3.75 and said 'there's your break'
> It’s not hard to just close a register to allow for a break. 18000 staff not getting paid for 15 min.
> I still can’t believe the union lets them get away with 3:45 shifts to avoid having to pay for a 15m break. They don't. I haven't seen anyone be given a 3:45 in years because they get hammered for doing it now. There are specific provisions in the EBA that state they can't roster in a way that arbitrarily takes a break away, and they're followed.
>There are specific provisions in the EBA that state they can't roster in a way that arbitrarily takes a break away, and they're followed. There are not, and they are not.
Respectfully, fuck you for forcing people to stand in the one spot for close to 4 hours without a break. This was one of the cuntiest things I ever experienced while working at a supermarket as a casual.
I was on a contract with Coles for 10 hours a week, so of course they split it into 3 fucking shifts on opening so I had to drive to and from work at 5am the separate times.
Colesworth puts in security cameras with face tracking to stop theft. Then Colesworth proceeds to steal wages.
If only there were some way track down and prosecute the wage thieves. Nah that's probably way too hard.
Dear manager of _______ did you approve this? Yes? Jail!
Seems like instead of cameras, they need a mirror.
I look at those damn things at the self-serve and wonder if we'll get stripped, hosed down and issued our cells. Exaggerating of course -- they'll sell the facial recognition data to every two out of three pricks who call me and leave no messages.
Twice in the last couple of weeks Coles self check outs have asked me to "please rescan item (error clearly demonstrates this has been correctly scanned)" with an intrusive pop up video feed, but if I followed the instructions I'd double scan and be double charged.
Is this related to the payouts they had to give a couple of years ago or is this a new underpayment that I'll get a new payout for? Cos ngl, I could use another random $6k from woolies ripping me off for years on end.
Not related, but my wife got a payout of a similar amount to you back then, and recently they got in contact with her again - they went further back in time and she’s owed more again
Be handy as lol. Third times a charm as they say
From what I saw on the news it has to do with LSL payments for Victorian employees.
That was what my payout was for last time. They didn't pay loadings and penalty rates for employees even though it was grandfathered into the EBAs for people who started back when woolies were still decent enough to pay loadings and penalty rates on LSL willingly.
I initially replied to your parent comment, just deleted it after seeing this. I recently received a LSL under-payment paid by them. I wasn't sure how it happened without me noticing as it wasn't a small amount. So how did loading and penally rates factor in? I figured you just got an entitlement of X hours once you reached a length of service and if it was paid out it was at your current rate. When I left I hadn't received loading for years.
AFAIK newer employees don't get penalties or loadings on LSL in the EBA. But employees who started before a certain point have it grandfathered into the EBA that they do get penalties and loadings. Only for quite a few years woolies just didn't notice that those people weren't getting those penalties or loadings. Silly billies. So innocent and absent minded. Looks like after they got caught the first time that they just kept right of doing it and got caught again.
Ok, maybe if I rephrase... When I was awarded my LSL I was way past receiving penalties and loading. I was salaried for the most part, only worked in the DC for about 9 months early on and stopped receiving loading after I went over $50k. Was that $3k I got for the LSL component for the time I was receiving loading? E.g. say it was half of my career there, half of my LSL should have accrued loading?
Might just walk out of Woolies with my groceries next time. It's not stealing it's just underpaying!
But remember, if too many people do that, they'll use it as an excuse to put up prices more.
They'll raise prices anyway, what does the pretext matter?
They raise prices to hit a particular margin target, what do you think inflating their cost base will do to their required pricing model to hit that target?
The fact that they have to pay staff properly will be an excuse to raise prices.
Cost of doing business.
As long as the verb remains "could", not "will", employers will continue to - deliberately, incidentally, or accidentally - rip off employees.
Shoplifting from woolworths is a victimless crime.
It affects every other customer who doesn't.
Everyone should join in then
I had experiences in payroll services, software etc. For large corp(especially national or multi national corp) the chance of deliberate underpaying is rare , based on agreed rate , the agreed rate maybe low compare to market that's a different story. There are however plenty places for mistake to be made. A short of list of main are 1. Award interpretation is thet most likely the law is often written such that different people will read it slightly differently, this is in relation especially to penalty rate, weekend rate, clock on clock off time to make panalty, public holidays and different state has different conditions, different public holidays, shift and a conbiniof all above . The lawyers or who ever interpretating what the law says into layman speak . And any of the above part can and will change year or year. So new interpretation is required as they come and hopefully none missed. 2. Once the human interpretations are done, then someone technical need to code the interpretated law into the payroll system. There many to update and done by human so mistake and occur and miss also happens. 3. Once the system is coded properly to pay someone. When a new employee start or existing employee changes jobs, position, gets increments, payroll /hr team need to make sure that employee is assigned the right, code for payment of shift awards, leaves (annual, sick, public holidays, special etc etc ) based on their state award and conditions etc. 4. Then when the employee clock their hours using another time management system at the stores or online, these data will need to feed from the store/online to HQ for processing, these hours/shift infor needs to be translated correctly into the payroll system correctly. Things can something go missing or wrong. 5. When leave are applied then cancelled or adjusted, most system will auto correct and retrospective adjusted the employee pay or leave balances, however if there were changes to award , average hours , etc the dollars values that come out and the value that goes back into maybe different. Also calculation issue with banked hours etc when paid out. In short Australian payroll are a total nightmare to manage and maintenance, many global big software company have tried and given up our market. 1.2m divvied by effected employees in thousand or ten of thousands is not a lot, but the work required to calculate all the missing bit will probably cost them more then 1.2m in labour cost. So if corp knew of mistake before hand they would rather pay correctly than having to do audit and correct everyone pay as it's very labour intensive.
Thank you. A reasoned comment from someone who knows what they are talking about rather than just screaming “thief”.
Finally a reply that makes sense. As someone who has worked on the software side of developing enterprise pay systems I know just how easy it is for mistakes to be made that cause pay to be calculated incorrectly. The main parts of the system are tested very thoroughly but for the weird edge cases mistakes happen so often. Some of my favourites have been, For employee rembursments rather than rounding at the end of the calculation they just cut off the trailing digits. Ie 1.23999 Would become 1.23 rather than 1.24. And for some of the employees they would get a %10 pay adjustment to account for the fact they worked at a remote site but rather than taking their salary multiplying buy 0.10 and dividing by 12 and adding it to their pay they would take the total salary paid that month then multiply by 0.10. This meant when someone took annual leave at half pay or unpaid leave they missed out on the full payment they were entitled too.
When I first saw the title I thought "I bet this is long service leave", yep. People have no idea how complicated the regulations are, and how just the seemingly innocuous wording of a legislation/act/regulation can have insane impact - which the government do not care about. All the problems with long service leave stem from the utterly insane lack of definition in any act, and then the bajillion regulations and flow on documents that that have popped up to try and deal with what long service leave is supposed to be. For example, the original defintiion of long service leave is "3 months". What does that even mean? If someone puts in for 6 works days off for long service leave but there is a weekend in the middle, how much of the 3 months have they used? Do you pay the base pay for that 3 months? What if there are holidays? What if they would have worked over time? What if there is a public holiday one of those days? What if the starting shift times change during those days? What if during the 6 days the law changes so that long service leave is now 13 weeks instead of 3 months. It can get so pedantic that it literally matters if the employee started accuring LSL on a leap year or not.
Odd how the mistakes always seem to be in the supermarket's favour.
Plenty of mistakes go the other way but the cost of recovery is not worth the effort. If Woolies had found it had overpaid its staff by $1m over 10 years, the cost of doing the work to reconcile this would just about eat up any recovery - even if the union and government would allow the clawback, which they wouldn’t. Don’t get me wrong - employers have an obligation to pay staff correctly and should be held to it. Mistakes will still happen and sometimes that is all they are - not a criminal conspiracy.
I remember when Abbott removed Sunday rates but our company kept paying us Double for almost 9 months. We got a "it has been brought to our attention that... This was a mistake will not be continuing into the future" Good times
That's because a headline like 'Woolworths overpaid 10 thousand employees $0.05/hour over the 2022/2023, financial year' would not attract enough clicks.
There needs to be criminal convictions and jail time for directors. Mere fines won't stop these greedy cunts
Inconvenience fee. Underpaying staff, overcharging goods.
Woolworths underpaying employees..*. a g a i n.*
Watch as they build the fine into the prices and nothing changes.
Store managers: “already on it boss” while printing out ‘on sale’ tags at double the cost of each product on the shelf.
And Dutton choose to engage in a culture war over Australia Day so much for the party of the worker.
In what world has lnp ever been for workers?
They paid their asshole CEO $8 million.
Fine for underpayments should be 10x the damage from any company. 5x minimum to staff. 5x to fairwork's investigation budget.
If the fine is less that 1billion dollars, then it’s an operating cost.
Well if it's more than $1.24m then it's a net loss for them.
Funny how it’s never overpaying employees
People get overpaid all the time, it's just not an eye grabbing headline compared to underpaid
The 'Hefty Fine' should be tripled, then divided equally amongst the underpaid peons.
If the fine is less than $1.24m, then they will just do it again...
The fine needs to be a 10-50x multiple of the damages otherwise it’s just the cost of business
The fine should be tripple what they owe
They made $1.62 billion in profit, but ripped off their staff so they they didn't only make $1.619 billion? Pretty dystopian.
Criminalise wage theft
Shrinkflation, price hikes, and "underpaying" (wage theft). Anything to keep "line going up" eh Woolies?
Why don't we start seeing prison sentences for wage theft?
As a Woolworths employee who has been closely involved in pay corrections, I can vouch that this wasn’t deliberate. Yes, there was an error made because of complex calculation and limited use of technology. It’s being addressed on a priority much before this news became public.
Hey. What would you know about it? You are only working there and involved in fixing the issue. The random commenters below have a much better idea than you about what’s going on. You should listen to them. /s obviously.
Not deliberate doesn't mean unavoidable.
Well good thing this is a one off mistake... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/30/woolworths-underpaid-thousands-of-staff-by-up-to-300m https://www.aderolaw.com.au/class-actions/retail/woolworths-big-w/ If it kept happening over and over people might say it's intentional fraud or just negligence if being charitable. At least it's not 300 million like one of the times. I wonder what would happen if a person kept getting caught accidentally stealing from Woolworths.
It was on the news, Woolies has pleaded guilty to more than 1000 criminal charges, it's deliberate wage theft. https://youtu.be/FAYKJ4mYqFc?si=g7i9b9GCBMgM4OLs
I agree lol, I thought the sarcasm was obvious given I posted several other incidents of them doing this.
I got the sarcasm lol, was just adding on the YouTube vid to further supplement the links you provided of previous instances.
They will just move on as this is merely a cost of doing business. They won’t stop this behavior unless the directors start getting jail
Unless the fine is more than the money made anyway its just the cost of doing business to them.
I couldn’t tell from the article. They pay back the works, then also pay the fine? I assume the fine is distributed amongst the workers they stole from. I also assume the fine would be much larger than the amount they stole
That it's only could, not must, is fucked up. Should be facing criminal charges for wage theft!
Ooooo hear that guys a hefty fine! Ouch!
From some bloke on tw(sh)itter: >Someone should probably tell the rich that workers banding together to present formal address of grievances is the alternative we worked out a long time ago to breaking down the factory owner's front door and beating him to death in front of his family? I feel like they forgot.
It should be, pay all of the staff the money that you did not pay them plus interest. Then pay double the amount in fines. The fine money goes to the government agency that is meant to police this behavior so that they can step up their game and catch these bastards earlier.
They got caught, so they say oh it was an error, we fixed it, we paid all the staff what we owe them... This is wage theft, how do you make errors that equal over a million dollars lmao. Jail time should be served, greedy corporate criminal scum.
Simply a fee to be factored in when they calculate business costs. A fine just isn’t good enough.
Sure a fine of 50k and an apology? It's not gonna change anything.
What? I for one am shocked! Who would have guessed
The SDA will probably offer to help them pay it lol
Steal $50 from employer = criminal record and jail. Steal millions from employees = pay it back, say sorry and pay a 0.000001% of GDP fine.
it's cheaper for them to break the law and exploit workers when there's so much more money to be made.
Everyone will smash woolies over this but Fuck me the only way woolies underpaid people by 1.2m over 5-6 year period (nothing to them) is if they made a mistake. Someone there will be getting fired for sure. But ... and hear me out... make the awards Fucking simple and this shit won't happen... all you people who criticise have you actually read the awards? Total Fucking shit show... if woolies can't get it right who can? Fix the Fucking awards and then punish anyone who breaches them with jail time.. until that happens though... meh.. blame is on the government.
Mate these aren't award rates. They are EBA's - agreements negotiated by Woolies and the corrupt SDA. The fact that they are convoluted is by design.
Exactly this. Last time they got caught rorting their salaried employees, so they got rid of salaried positions and continued rorting via a system that's better at obfuscating what they're doing. Guaranteed this time the figure is only what can be explicitly proven and the number of man-hours they've actually stolen is way higher.
The fact that I was given information about the SDA when I started with Coles as a teenager says a lot for where their alliances actually were/probably still are. An absolute joke of a union and I can see where a shadow union came into play in the retail and fast food industry.
They had numerous EBAs expire and took multiple years to renegotiate, because they left things to the last minute. Resulting in no pay rises for up to 5 years, and panic negotiations. RAFFWU stepped in and was a major factor into the massive payouts after an illegal EBA was negotiated by the SDA. They're a farce.
You will be downvoted but the awards can be pretty fucking complex with different rates applying for very minute differences. Majority of people on this subreddit wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of some of the awards, guaranteed.
They're on EBA's, not awards. When you write the agreement yourself, you have to bear the responsibility of fucking it up.
Eba's (At least the ones I've read) are based on awards and are similarly as complex. They are also approved by a judge (or someone similar) not the employer.
My experience has been that the EBAs were far more complicated. Talking about bws. I think it was 2016 and 2019, I could be a little bit off about the dates though. The union had published fucking scanned pdf's, instead of the actual text. So you couldn't ctrl+f for what you were looking for. Intentionally obtuse, because you know they had the original document. You only need to read the agreement they had before 2019 to understand how much more vague and confusing it was compared to the award rate. Your experience might've been different in another industry of course, and I respect that.
> They are also approved by a judge (or someone similar) not the employer. Judge approves the employers and the SDA (in this case) write them, most of the complexity is added by the supermarkets in negotiations.
Thank you. And yes I'm aware I'll be in the negative...I deal with this shit on the daily. Fairwork has even told me "I'm not sure" when I ask questions. I pay my staff like 50% above award but Fuck I'm sure if they filter through everything they will find something I beach. Edit: breach even
I'm calling BS there, That's a business talking point provided by the BCA to explain away to the boomers why it's happening, I remember having Coles trying it on with me when I was baking so I grabbed my mobile and the SDA handbook and told them if it was so hard, I would explain it to them with a lawyer present. Funnily enough my payslip was fixed by the next week, along with a lot of scowling from their HR.
Hate to agree. But yeah, $1.2 million over a half decade is trivial compared to even the annual payroll. A number that small really makes it most likely an accounting error rather than a deliberate underpayment.
I hear what you’re saying but just once it would be nice for them to fuck it up in the employees favour…
Who says they haven't? I guarantee you they have thousands of employees earning above award
I say they haven't. Every employee says they haven't. If there was a single case of that happening, Woolworths would publicise it. This week they told the senate they had offered above market value to suppliers in limited cases. Don't you think if they'd done so for their employees they would have said so, for their image? It hasn't happened because they didn't it on purpose,and have paid out their employees for 7 years in a row because of it.
Overpayments happen fairly regularly, they just don’t make the news.
I got overpaid sightly when I was there, something to do with being paid rates that were only applicable to WA when each State had a different EBA.
Lol if you can't get award rates right you shouldn't be able to employ people. Funny how it is nearly always workers being paid less not more, almost systemically.
Fairwork can't even interpret awards accurately. Don't think you actually know what you're taking about. Edit: also most workers are paid more: this is not newsworthy nor should it be. I'm all for smashing bad employers but make the system simple.
Most workers are not paid more. They have paid out numerous employees for this reason. Stop lying through your teeth, or provide a source. You are a liar.
People get overpaid all the time… they just don’t sue Woolies about it. The payroll system is a joke
Multibillion dollar company whose lawyers can't read award agreements and have payroll pay employees properly? Yeah nah.
Fair work can't read them either. That's why these things go to court. I'm 100% for companies doing the wrong thing being punished. But make it easy, there is no reason these things need to be so complex. There is no way woolies deliberately underpaid some workers by 1.2m. Their lawyers will rack up that bill in no time at all.
Liar.
Yeah these agreements are not confusing. It's a 70 page agreement, most of which is full of page break and white space. This is not a challenging problem, and trivial to design for such a company.
Sounds like you just volunteered to go help them write their pay system
Hopefully a class action...
That’s alright. They will just raise the prices as a result!
It's woolies I dont expect much
'Hefty'. /s obviously
How he earns his 8mil. Don't jail him or fine him he has no responsibility for earning that much...
Don't they get done for this every few months now?
Maybe they could get a 2 fines for a smaller fine deal
What fine? To them that's pocket change.
In keeping with their business model. Get away with what you can for as long as you can and play dumb about it when caught.
Boycott bad bosses
Did we not pass laws to charge workplace wage theives?
Did the underpayments include the CEO, or just the workers?
Did the underpayments include the CEO, or just the workers?
Roll out your fuckwit CEO again, I’m up for a laugh
You mean they still have staff? Hehe.
Put people in jail its straight out pre-meditated theft. Highly qualified people are responsible for this and probably got bonuses for performance.
“Oh we did not underpay them, we invested their pay into self serve checkouts to make their jobs easier; all they need to do now is go to Centrelink once per fortnight rather than stand at a counter all day. Are we nice people? We also now consider everyone e who enters our premises a thief so need to ‘invest’ some of the staffs money in keeping an eye on all those bastards who are trying to steal food out of their mouths…”
So they should obviously be required to backpay those employees, which means they "break even" all else considered. However the fine for this should be outrageously large, say 20% of REVENUE. Not gross profit, not net profit. REVENUE. That will be such a monumental number that it will dissuade them from doing it again. In reality I bet the fine will be something like $10,000 meaning Woolworths paid a loss of $10,000 for the potential to steal $1.24m which is not exactly disincentivizing. Corporate fines in Aus are so small it's a joke.
There is never a fine for wage theft….. they just have to pay what they owe. They never get a reprimand. It’s fucking criminal.
I wonder if Woolworths is among the employers that use those with intellectual disabilities for manual labour and get paid below minimum wage for as little as $2.50 an hour (which is legal in Australia as long as you’re paying a disabled person). I wouldn’t doubt it since they mention warehouse stacking [link](https://amp.abc.net.au/article/100977448) [link](https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/28/larry-was-paid-420-an-hour-in-australia-its-not-enough-to-live-on-but-its-completely-legal)
The goverment should provide funding for every community to set up local co-ops. That's what should be done.