Time and time again wage theft pops up and it’s treated like a civil matter. And sure enough execs say sorry, cop a slap on the wrist and move on.
This would have to be one of the biggest corporate thefts in Australian history. Imagine what would happen if woollies failed to pay the tax office $300 million
Is it time wage thieves are jailed?
Off topic but for everyone asking about being overpaid, it has happened to me a few times and it was demanded back within a week or two.
I wonder what would happen if you didn't pay them back. Would that count as actual theft? or Wage theft.
It's hard to say, they gave me a form to fill out that would allow them to take the money back from my bank account. The option was given to pay it back in installments or in a lump sum.
I wonder what they'd say if you offered to pay it back $1/week.. :D
@Levathian: Haha that would have been awesome, but they had set amounts you could choose from (all a lot higher than $1 per week)
I have been in many situations where someone was overpaid. I actually had one employee resign — the more apt word might be 'smoke bomb' — when we asked for him to pay it back. It's a civil matter, not worth chasing down.
I too got overpaid once, about $300. They were on to me to pay it back before I even got the payslip. Sent me a form that had 2 options, have entire overpayment deducted from next pay or over two pays.
It didn't used to be. It used to be a civil matter so it would be up to a judge to decide and from memory, it usually sided with the employee. Not sure where it currently stands.
Do not work for wesfarmers if you can avoid it. They are scumbags. They keep purposely buying up small business, running them into the ground to get away with the non competition law. If You do work for a non major sector of wesfarmers. Do the bare minimum. They won't fire you. They are pieces of shit.
Ok, but this is about Woolworths (their competition).
They buy small businesses so that you can have a job.
Do you complain about the small business owners who sell to them too?
ABC have admitted they underpaid casuals for 6 years! Jail Ita!😂
I’ve worked some HR staff, I hear of incorrect payments all the time, when that organisation had a book for their bargaining agreement.
Incorrect payments were both over and under payment.
I think where it cna be proven that someone has deliberately underpaid employees, for personal gain, it’s no different to stealing. It’s a crime.
But to jail is a high bar of punishment and therefore needs a high bar to prove, given how complex most agreements are, it’ll be a very difficult job prove.
It’s also unfair to have people in jail for not doing their job properly, I dare say nearly everyone would be in jail at some point in life if that was the criteria.
The fair outcome is simply repay, with (generous) interest.
It’s also unfair to have people in jail for not doing their job properly, I dare say nearly everyone would be in jail at some point in life if that was the criteria.
This +1
“ The manager was back paid following months of pushback and legal threats from the retailer, but by that time the company had realised the issue stretched much further than just one employee, and began a company-wide audit through PwC to identify the scope of the problem.”
Via @smh to give some context for this post. The issue that concerns me is the initial legal threats to deny wrongdoing
Theft has a specific legal meaning and it is not "theft" to underpay someone.
"Wage theft" would be if you paid someone and then stole that money back out of their wallet.
Like 7/11?
Link to where 7/11 paid employees and then stole it?
My manager at a fastfood restaurant literally did this to me when I was a teenager.
Paid me, I signed, then my pay went missing. Months later I found out that she went into my bag and stole the $70 out of it.
Yea, I would think 7/11 wage theft is close enough to the definition of any theft.
Also, there was a article of Crust pizza in Hobart, where the owners paid Australians the correct wage, but internationals a lower rate.
This shows it’s deliberate manner to pay less, also, the person/people involved clearly know what was happening and what they are doing. Theft.
Appropriate punishment is required, what that is, I dunno.
But I should add, if someone stole from a bank with a gun and all, that is more harmful than wage theft, in my opinion. Just saying a gun to head is scarier than boss saying with the money back out for me.
Copyright infringement is also not theft. Regardless some people still call it theft.
Some people are wrong there too.
Congratulations, you have correctly understood the current debate, which is whether wage theft should be treated as analagous to regular theft.
IMHO intentional underpayment of workers should absolutely be criminalised and is morally no different to other ways of stealing/embezzling/defrauding money from people. In fact, it's probably worse because (a) employees are typically financially dependent on those funds, and (b) employers have power over the funds and thus employees are entirely at their mercy.
Can anyone comment on how this situation is like at Aldi?
My understanding is both the pay and training is very good.
They do seem to get a lot done with minimal workers - however they all seem to be very busy people.
I'm asking because this model seems to be the one winning out (globally) and I hope it's not due to Amazon style work conditions…
Because they get people to work hard. Aldi only suits hard working people.
Whereas other employers give it more chill to their employees and are less efficient.
The Germans have better processes and management vs American based systems.
The law is way to soft on any sort of theft not just wage theft - even people who dont pay there debts need to start facing harsher penalises but we have a soft system so shit like this happens
Been working for ALH for 6 years, and let me just say, I will take Woolies over a private hotel any day. When I worked for a Club we had to constantly chase the owner for Super and leave payout entitlements. With ALH I know I will be paid the same time, of the same day, each week, every time (public holidays pushing it back a day excluded).
Does it suck that Woolies underpaid the staff, absolutely. Did Woolies get told there was a problem and then work to resolve it, also yes. I imagine that HR is kind of a stressful job in a company the size of Woolworths with many different rates, awards, EAs, and job descriptions.
This just sounds like a blah blah, big company stealing all out money/babies, beat up.
The OP doesn't have a link. What happened?
Thanks
I used to work for liquorland and my manager used to intentionally underpay me. I was mostly put on the closing shift and was given a certain amount of time to finish the post close tasks, clean the store, count the registers, etc. I would always have to stay extra time no matter what happened. Very often upto 30 minutes extra. That extra time was never paid, even when I clocked off at that time.
When I confronted him about it he just whinged that 'it's not in the budget' or 'I gave you enough time to complete all the tasks'. If I did leave the moment he stopped paying me, the next shift he would scream at my saying you did not finish this thing or that thing and would try to make me feel like it was my fault. When I brought this up to the area manager he took 66 days to look into it and tried to fight me about the amount of backpay I was going to get.Eventually they did pay me but like I mentioned, it took 66 days to do it. Oh, and when I did complain to the area manager, the store manager cut my shifts to 0 hours. Had to work at other stores which were offering to survive.
So (profanity) coles, and after reading this article (profanity) woolworths. Me being able to pay my rent and going home on time is far more important than a few dollars in your (profanity) pockets (it's literally a rounding error for you assholes, and I EARNED that money). And that store manager? Still at the company, infact that (profanity) got a promotion.
It's a shame. I guess with the big increase in the supply of workers for these types of jobs the more this will happen.
It's not that, it's the very intentional rolling back of our perfectly good industrial system. Started in earnest under Howard with WorkChoices, and then Labor only partially rolled it back, and then the Libs since returning to power have aggressively continued to try to erode workers' rights and bargaining power.
There are some pretty compelling economic analyses that show that profits have risen directly at the expense of wage growth, which strongly indicates a shift in bargaining power between employers and employees.
So, let's just say the number of workers in Australia was reduced to half.
Wouldn't this drop in the supply of workers lead to an increase in pay and conditions? Of course it would.
It's this underlying supply/demand change that makes this happen - the law changes are just a final administrative step.
You can look at the pay and conditions of Australian jobs where there are a very low supply of workers - such as skilled, niche IT roles. They'll pay to relocate people, $50k sign on bonuses, allow remote work, huge pay, etc.
The shift in power you are talking about is caused by changes in the supply and demand of workers and jobs (stagnant number of jobs, huge low skilled worker population increases).
The whole point of industrial relations laws is that you are not purely at the mercy of market forces. They establish both minimum standards for employment (pay, conditions, etc) and also ensure that workers have the ability to collectivise in order to counter the power imbalance that naturally favours employers.
In the last decade or so, minimum pay levels have been reduced both via the minimum wage not rising fast enough and enterprise bargaining (the other primary mechanism for setting this) being undermined by changes to the law. Correspondingly, the relentless attacks on unions and pushes to move to things like Australian Workplace Agreements have gradually undermined the power of workers as a group.
Australia does not have a massive under or over supply of workers. It has a fairly stable, low, unemployment level, although underemployment is a problem.
This graph shows the effect fairly clearly:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-07/wages-versus-profits-…
See also here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-28/why-workers-are-getti…
"In part, low wages growth is a symptom of systematic action by business to cut labour costs.
It is also the outcome of deliberate policies aimed at curtailing employee bargaining power and stopping the wage inflation problems of the past."
@caitsith01: The laws can protect you from the market forces… to an extent… after which point corporations (with their highly paid, highly intelligent army of people looking to get around these laws) will simply find a way (as they have done here).
Low wages ARE a symptom of action by business to cut labour costs… BUT, they wouldn't be able to cut labour costs IF there wasn't someone else putting their hand up to work and accept that lower wage or worse condition like unpaid overtime.
Businesses wanting to reduce labour costs shouldn't be discussed like it's something new, all businesses since the dawn of time have (and should) look to lower all costs. This is their nature. What we can discuss is how they haven't been able to do it so much in the past given the smaller worker pool (think Australia in the 50's - 70's, 'Ten Pound Poms', etc).
Market forces > Industrial relations law.
The underemployment of workers is due to high worker supply. You couldn't write a law to get out of that problem.
Our population has exploded over the last 10 years (triple the normal/projected rate), and (unfortunately) we have seen a huge increases in low skill workers, gig-economy and 'servant class' jobs (Uber eats, etc).
Anyone that's ever worked with payroll software knows exactly how this happens.
When I new award comes in its given to someone to 'interpret' into rules for the software. These are Devilishly complicated & the slightest error mounts so fast, there are so many awards that errors happen. Big companies often have 100's of these awards to work with & with new ones coming in fast these teams rarely look back at ones that are in place.
Mistakes happen, shouldn't, but I can easily see why
Sunglass Hut underpaid hundreds of staff $2.3 million collectively. Its punishment is a paltry $50,000 legal donation. - Business Insider 24 September 2019
This is not suprising. Theft is the essence of Capitalism: employers/sahreholders/board members/CEOs stealing the profits generate by the workers, marketers manipulating people into purchasing goods they don't need, products designed to break within a few years and be impossible to repair so consumers have to constantly fork out for replacements (planned obsolenence). It is explotation of ones' fellow humans, other animal species, the very planet itself.
300m is such a big number to us. But one does it represent to Woolies in so as much as total worker payments? If it's an error of 1% or such is this such a huge thing? Is it a genuine mistake of accounting or a systematic regime to rip off lowly paid workers? Let's think a little deeper about this.
Im sure $6000 for a worker is a lot. You’re right, let’s put it in perspective.
@cunningdrew; It's such a big deal (if the printed articles are correct) as it features Australia's largest employer totally dropping the ball. If they spent money on ensuring compliance with workplace laws this wouldn't have happened. I think public expectation is that Woolies should have the capacity to get it right. This isn't some simple accounting error.
If you pay someone a salary it needs to be above the relevant award or agreement minimum (if one would have applied). It's not difficult to calculate whether the salary offered will be cutting it fine once overtime is taken into account. A business should always know where the limit is as to when an employee will be worse off under a salary. Regular compliance checks would pick this up. The thing is that it costs money to do regular compliance checks.
I hate it when people say “big companies should get it right”. More often than not big companies get it wrong, so many hands making the cake, all pointing the finger at the person next to them saying I thought you checked. No one taking real responsibility.
Add in the fact these agreements now are so thick, nutteded out by high paying lawyers, the employees who receive the pay usually are not sure if they are correctly paid (due to complexity), the HR employees also are on average wages find it so complex it relies on the IT systems to be correct. IT project teams who implement the system relied on the HR subject matter experts, it’s just a joke.
End of the day, if it was all much simpler, everyone would be able to easily check if what is paid is correct this wouldn’t be a problem.
It's not particularly hard or complicated; it just costs money.
@Hardlyworkin: you work in the field?
I used to work closely with the HR payroll team and the EA bargaining teams, its not simple stuff for a large organisation.
Most people would need help reading their payslips, that you can't argue with.
@cloudy: Yes I do. I'll have to agree to disagree with you in that one. Maybe I'm just annoyed Woolies didn't engage me to audit them. PWC must be making a killing of them now.
@Hardlyworkin: Lol, if it was that easy to read the payslip to check if it’s correct why has it taken 9 years and thousands of affected employees before this came to light? No one checks their payslips anymore?
@cloudy: Mine never did, just 160 hours @ fixed hourly rate. Nothing else outside of AL/SL/LSL entitlements and super(Coles salary)
I don't see what else they could say? You don't get OT/Sunday rates/weekend rates or anything. If you did it's not really a fixed salary which these are
how u do that