More wage theft, this time it's Coles at maybe $20m... and Woolies at $300m+

[ferball]

It's a give and take relationship. Some things are time critical, some aren't. If I'm writing a report then it makes little difference if I do half it before lunch and half after or all of it after lunch so long as it's done. If you are manning a reception desk then it's pretty important you are there when the business is actually open. I used to do shelf stacking shifts as a uni student starting at 4, 5, 6 depending on what I could manage and we'd finish anywhere from 8 to 10pm. Some days you'd have enough work to keep people busy for maybe 3.5-4 hours, some days it was 4.5-5. How rigid do people want things to be?

Every job I've ever had there have been people who take the piss and people who are walked over. And there are people who are efficient with their time and people who aren't. And there are people who make a big song and dance about things and people who won't say boo. All these categories overlap.

It's pretty much all take no give at the moment.

And so what if workplaces have all categories of people in them. It's no excuse to not pay people properly.

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Sounds like we had similar experiences. Checkout staff were always the youngest and they cycled through the most of them. Anyone young and useful was there all the time. Having cheap staff that are useless isn't beneficial to any business, especially stores turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars on a weekly basis. If it's a small business then it's a bit different, but your average supermarket makes enough money from Coca Cola products alone to pay a bunch of adult staff. I know the fruit and veg section changed from a full time boss and a bunch of kids doing afternoon/weekend shifts to a couple of full timers balancing it between them over the course of a week because it was just easier that way. There would have been some definite underpayment going on at that time with full timers starting early/staying back to fix what the younglings didn't do properly.

Back in the day before Sunday trading in Victoria, I was a 15, 16, 17 year old working at Coles. Easter was by far the busiest time of the year and in particular Easter Saturday. Before they had scanning and suction tubes to put canisters of money into, I used to walk along pushing a little metal trolley with a couple of cement pavers in the bottom of it to weigh it down. We would clear $100,000 per hour out of the 19 registers, 18 regular and the cigarette kiosk. If the store was running low on change (coins) they would give me one of those little cloth money bags with $20,000 cash in it and I would walk around to the local State Bank with a shopping trolley and fill it with $20,000 worth of coins. If you picked a trolley that ending up having a bung wheel, that weight would certainly make you work to get back the 3 or 400 metres to the store.

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

The store didn't want casuals if they could avoid it. The weekly 4 hour deep clean shift? Gone. 5 people on the busiest trading day? Down to 4 and one of those being a full day down to a half day. Full timers afternoon shift pushed back from being a 10-7 or 9-6 to help in the back end of the morning to prep the store for the stock delivery at 1-2pm to being a 12-9 on some days to cut the casual shift from 4-8pm to close up. When I was half promoted in the back end of the time there we would be told to cut back more hours if we could, throw out less rubbish, be less strict about what stock you put on show even if it is damaged in some way. Have sections half empty even though the stock is selling and you'll have to put out another box in an hour instead of 2 and get more things done because of presentation.

And the comments from the customers? Was always "the shelves are empty and I can never find anyone to help me" whilst the person at front end would be asking for more staff to come help serve customers.

It was like they were so focused on trying not to lose money, they forgot how to make money.

I was working a job share roster in my current role last year, doing 2 weeks on and then having 4 weeks off. To supplement my wage, I thought I'd try and jag a few nightfill shifts at Coles which is 300m down the road. I hadn't done that sort of work since 1992. The daytime boss who organised the crew actually wasn't even born the last time I worked with Coles.

What an absolute s**t show. Back in the day, all the nightfill work was done after the store had closed. No customers, you could pull all the pallets out into the store, put them at the ends of the appropriate aisles and the workers would load their own trollies. Now they're working while the store is still open and full of customers and using trolleys that are like a cut down egg trolley. They're hard to work off and hard to manoeuvre. If they actually came up with a deliberate plan to work as inefficiently as possible then I think they've succeeded, it was an absolute joke. Anything to avoid paying penalties to people for going past midnight. I bet you it costs them a lot more than they think it's saved them and the end result? I walk in their at 7:30 - 8:00am to do some groceries and the place is a mess. I'd be embarrassed to be managing it, there's no pride in it.

 

[Scotland]

I worked there when they started the move from pallets to cages. They also moved to 'shelf friendly packaging', i.e. you put a cardboard tray of tins of tuna on the shelf rather than 12 individual cans of tuna out of a box/tray. Doesn't seem to have made them any more efficient. They try to outsource a lot of store functions so you see a lot more pre-packaged stuff coming in. There used to be deliveries of whole sides of beef, trays of whole chickens etc. that were butchered and wrapped. Then one day the Steggles truck rolled up with crates full of trays of pre-packaged thighs, wings etc.

 

[Scotland]

It's pretty much all take no give at the moment.

And so what if workplaces have all categories of people in them. It's no excuse to not pay people properly.

Some people have that attitude for life.

I agree there is no excuse for not paying people properly. Our IR laws are complicated but they're not impossible. I'll give a small business the benefit of the doubt if they make a mistake, but large organisations with tens of thousands of staff should be across this stuff. If clause 27a sub section iii in some retail award changes then Coles and Woolies should know about it immediately.

 

[HardcoreGeelongFan]

Is there any more compelling example that says capitalism doesn't work? If the most successful companies in the world "can't afford" staff due to their KPI's then perhaps we need to go back to taxing large companies 70%+ like in the 1950s for capitalism to actually work?