Woolworths underpays workers by up to $300 million

Dominic Powell
October 30, 2019

The Age

Supermarket giant and one of Australia’s largest employers Woolworths has underpaid nearly 6000 of its employees as much as $300 million dollars due to non-compliance with the industry award.

In a statement released this morning, the retailer revealed it had failed to pay approximately 5700 of its salaried workers across its supermarkets and metro stores in compliance with the General Retail Industry Award.

The underpayment was identified after the company reviewed its workers’ salaries prior to implementing the company’s newest enterprise bargaining agreement.

Inconsistencies were identified between the workers’ contractual salary obligations and what they were entitled to be paid under the award.

“The review has found the number of hours worked, and when they were worked, were not adequately factored into the individual salary settings for some salaried store team members,” the company said.

Underpayments could track back as far as 2010, and the company estimates the total cost of remediation to be between $200 milllion and $300 million.

The company is currently undertaking a review of its entire workforces’ pay and will make the first backpayments to the affected workers before Christmas.

“As a business we pride ourselves on putting our team first, and in this case we have let them down. We unreservedly apologise,” chief executive Brad Banducci said in a statement.

“The highest priority for Woolworths Group right now is to address this issue, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

More to come