The $50 million top-up announced by Woolworths on Friday pushes the total bill for its underpayments to staff to $420 million, a not inconsiderable amount.
The retailer announced on Friday that around 20,000 current and former salaried employees will receive payments of $2,500 plus superannuation before Christmas for historical underpayments.
The retailer estimated the expected bill will hit $50 million for underpayments which go back more than a decade.
Woolies claimed the payments announced on Friday goes beyond its legal obligations to cover staff employed between 2010 and 2013 as part of an underpayments case for its workers covered by the General Retail Industry Award.
CEO Brad Banducci said the supermarket chain had been committed to rectifying the underpayments since they were uncovered in 2019.
“We’ve worked through hundreds of millions of records as quickly as we can to ensure former and current team members have been paid what they were entitled to, plus interest and superannuation,” he said.
When Woolies first revealed it had discovered historical underpayments, it promised to go through its records back to 2010 to see which staff were affected, even though it said this went beyond its legal responsibilities.
Woolworths has been facing two court actions relating to the underpayments and whether its salaried workers have received the correct back pay – a class action of salaried workers and a lawsuit from the Fair Work Ombudsman.
On Friday, the retailer confirmed it has provisionally settled the employee class action on the basis that if the decision in the Fair Work court case decides these workers are entitled to a larger payout, they will receive it when that decision is made.
Woolworths says it will defend the Fair Work action and says it has paid out the correct amount in remediation.
Woolies’ underpayment is one example in a long list of companies and government entities to have confessed of been accused of underpaying staff at all levels.
The ABC is another, as is Super Retail, Coles Group, Merivale Group, Qantas, Lush, lawyers, Maurice Blackburn, jeweller, Michael Hill, Wesfarmers, Commonwealth Bank, AP Eagers, plus other smaller operators.
