A Woolworths' internal review has found the retailer underpaid approximately 5,700 employees in its supermarket and Metro stores by $200-$300m over nine years.
The supermarket giant, which is worth $47.49bn, began the review after the implementation of a new enterprise agreement earlier this year. Though it has only analysed two years of data, the error may go all the way back to the implementation of the modern General Retail Industry Award (GRIA) in July 2010.
According to a statement by Woolworths Group, its review found an inconsistency in pay for a number of salaried store staff when compared to employees paid under the new agreement.
“Annual salaries for store team members are set to cover ordinary working hours and reasonable overtime. However, team members are entitled to be paid the higher of their contractual salary entitlements, or what they otherwise would have earned for actual hours worked under the GRIA.
“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.
Assuming the $300m figure is correct, this means that the affected workers could have each been underpaid by around $5850 per year, or $112 per week, for nine years (assuming they had worked at Woolworths for that entire time). Brad Banducci, CEO of Woolworths Group, has apologised for the error.
“As a business we pride ourselves on putting our team first, and in this case we have let them down,” he said. “The highest priority for Woolworths Group right now is to address this issue, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
The company has pledged to pay affected members their full entitlements, including payments with interest and superannuation contributions, as soon as possible; the first back payments for the years 2017-19 will be paid before Christmas.
Woolworths is extending the review across all of its businesses, and says that there is no evidence that the underpayments were deliberate. Affected employees can find out more at team.woolworths.com.au.
