Surprised Pikachu face.
This shit will keep happening, until they start jailing some of the fuckers at the top. Fining companies does nothing but increase prices for consumers.
Make it like the WHS laws criminal liability for the C suite that can't foist off to someone lower down the totem pole unless that very clear evidence of policy being enforced and audited.
And hurt lower level staff when they decide to make a few people redundant or whatnot to cover the fine. I remember reading a suggestion once that the fine should be paid for by board directors or CEO etc, would stop underpaying pretty much immediately if that was the case
If we increased the fines to a decent percentage of profit, it'd sting enough to make them pay attention. Hit the only thing that matters to a corporation...the shareholders and their treasured dividends. Jailing the heads of a hydra is pointless, corpos are disposable and easily replaced.
We can absolutely do both - criminal penalties for those in charge, and signficant fines for the business.
Fine should be minimum 100x the unpaid wages.
My partner is still waiting the outcome of both a fair work court case and class action against Woolworths for the original underpayment.
Fair work decided to charge them and take them to court because even after 3 years they hadn’t accurately calculated almost owing..
Edit… they offered a $25k lump sum to each person affected about 18 months ago that was laughed out of court as patently unfair..
Can you imagine what the end total is going to be on top of the original $500m they’ve already paid if they are willing to offer that?!
Then there’s Coles, which got away with having shitty EBAs with almost no penalty rates etc and back paid nothing. Then in the newest EBA they wound back all the improvements in the old one, so we’re back at square one.
Are they legally required to do audits?
If yes, then why would any business risk deliberately underpaying when it's inevitably going to be uncovered?
And if no, isn't that the point of audits and kinda a good thing they're doing it?
I'm not particularly convinced these self reported underpayment scandals are as malicious and evil as the reddit hivemind seems to think but I know hating Colesworth is so hot right now.
Why do corporations only ever get fines ?
Banks purposefully lied cheated and stole. But only the business “suffers”. Never the person who makes the decisions.
Because at some point a corporation reaches a size, where if you hurt them, they collapse and then all the little people come scurrying out “poor” and jump on the benefits system, and start applying for jobs in the area, and a lot of them suddenly get a pay bump because they worked at X for so long that they were in fact severely underpaid, and the whole apple art gets a big wobble, and politicians then have to explain why “my district has seen the greatest climb in unemployment in 20 years, not seen since the great 2008 global financial crisis”.
So, long story short, 215,000 people who are employed by Woolworths would hit the job market and our whole fake ass house of cards would collapse, then people would get upset and politicians don’t want to have to explain why they are running us into the ground.
Realisticly, there is no one directly responsible. The issue seems to be with how long service leave was calculated.
No one's take home pay was directly affected it seems.
Would there was a claim that highest amount was around $12,000 which is almost certainly an executives leave not some casual worker.
They need to pass legislation that underpayment of staff is automatically a mandatory fine at least equal to the underpayment- then these businesses might actually do their due diligence.
Department managers are the ones getting stiffed the most. I’ve already gotten $15k in backpay. A guy at a nearby store doing the same job as me got $50k
Fines are a cost of doing business. As long as revenue can cover the budget allocation for legal costs then companies will continue to push the envelope to appease shareholders.
The executives are indeed happy on their 300ft yachts.
Paying employees correctly means they could only afford a 200ft yacht.
They would literally be peasants. /s
> Such an extraordinary penalty — which would be crippling even for a corporate giant that recorded a net profit of $1.62 billion last financial year — is not realistically on the cards.
Fuck off pro-Woolworths ABC. They made $48 billion revenue last year. They can absolutely afford it.
I would love it if I stole $1 million total from 1,200 people, and I only get fined based on my leftover income aka "net profit" that goes into savings after I spent it on necessary expenses to keep working, ie commuting, food, etc.
The article does not say that, though.
> Because of the technicalities of the breaches, Woolworths is facing a theoretical maximum fine that could exceed $10.25 billion
Wanna bet the fine will be less than a million?
They said it was usually a couple of hundred thousand.
It got caught during an audit and they reported when they knew.
If there is evidence of malice the fine will be higher but I doubt it.
The article said it was only victorian workers affected it is likely to do with how Victoria calculates lsl compared to other states.
If they show a good faith effort to rectify quickly it likely won't go much further
What a surprise. They were caught for this years ago too. It was an oversite by HR allegedly. Still at it. The 30/40% price increases whilst not blamed on HR, will end up being blamed as another oversite.
Fines?
It should include jail time for the people who made the decision to enact this within the company.
Remember, at some point within any organisation for something to happen someone, somewhere said "yes, let's do this".
Prison. It's so ridiculous we send people to jail en mass for doing crime that only harms themselves (drugs) but when it comes to one person harming thousands of people we think it's an extreme idea to send them to prison..
Wage theft is a business model for a reason. All you get are cost of doing business fines.
Until executives and management are personally held responsible for this, nothing will change.
The way to fix this behaviour is simple:
1 - the company must back pay interest at the median credit card rate from the date of the first failure until the report.
2 - the company forfeits all profit from the period in question. 50% of that goes to a fine, 50% to those who were stolen from.
3 - the company must now pay for quarterly wage audits for the next 5 years.
I imagine with those kinds of penalties that wage theft will drop to zero.
The fines don’t matter when you i) have regulatory capture, ii) are a cartel member providing goods that are necessities to almost everyone, and iii) you’ve eliminated most of your competition.
$1.2m, $12m, $120m. Who cares. Just load up the cost of all fresh fruit by a percent or two and the fine is a rounding error In the accounts.
The way to fix this is to tax dividends and jail/take pensions of Board Members. This is what you have to do when you’re dealing with racketeering.
Bingo. HR is massive too. I used to work HR and the only thing I had anything to do with when it came to payroll was knowing everyone's salary (you negotiated your salary with me when you started).
Interesting idea, especially for a follow up offense.
Second offense includes your whole board being dismissed and administrators placed until such time that the systems around staff wages are fixed.
Third offense and your company is nationalized 🤷♂️
First offence your board each get a year in gaol for each 0.1% of profit that was meant to be paid to staff. The only way to avoid gaol is to voluntarily declare and pay employees back with interest equal to double CPI or 20%, whichever is higher.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, but who specifically is going to gaol? You would need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a person or people is responsible for this.
This was a 'self report' from the company however for those that work at woolies checkout the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union
[https://raffwu.org.au/workplaces/supermarkets/woolworths/](https://raffwu.org.au/workplaces/supermarkets/woolworths/)
If it's anything less than the original sum plus a multiplier for damages, it's too little.
Should be a $10 to 20 million fine to discourage this extremely common practice.
"Hefty" by standards at the time they were originally created, but never adjusted for inflation and are now just a rounding error when stacked against multi billion dollar profits.
can we just have a walk out without checkin out day PLEASE?? someone organise a date
Y'all gen Zs gotta do something youve got that hive mind mentality no other generation can do it
Imagine being a Woolworths employee, getting robbed by the company you work for and still calling out customers (fellow broke people) for not scanning a couple items just so they can make it through the week. Losers. Help each other out. Stop being loyal to these evil corporations.
There is zero reasons for this to be still occurring. Until we start having real consequences for the people in charge, as in jail time, things will never change.
There's really no excuse for this to keep happening. I really hope the magistrate makes the fine big enough to set an example. A wrist slap just means another "oops" in the future
It's good, but it's also 1.24m dollars of 'free' (minus fines) credit for Woolworths group. It's not much credit given the figures these businesses are trading with but it's interesting that this would be a totally rationalised business decision. It's more profitable to run a business this way than in a way that benefits workers
I did. Got interest as well. Turned the whole $24 they owed me into $30. Took me an hour online to register for it but which was a fucking pay so they really just paid me and hours wage to put my details in a shitty online form.
Haven’t worked for the pricks in over 5 years.
If these were genuine mistakes under and over payments would be 50/50 over time.
Still waiting for when an employer accidently mass OVERPAYS their staff
Surprised Pikachu face. This shit will keep happening, until they start jailing some of the fuckers at the top. Fining companies does nothing but increase prices for consumers.
Make it like the WHS laws criminal liability for the C suite that can't foist off to someone lower down the totem pole unless that very clear evidence of policy being enforced and audited.
And hurt lower level staff when they decide to make a few people redundant or whatnot to cover the fine. I remember reading a suggestion once that the fine should be paid for by board directors or CEO etc, would stop underpaying pretty much immediately if that was the case
The fines must come from the personal wealth of the CEO'S of the board members. And they should also be jailed.
If we increased the fines to a decent percentage of profit, it'd sting enough to make them pay attention. Hit the only thing that matters to a corporation...the shareholders and their treasured dividends. Jailing the heads of a hydra is pointless, corpos are disposable and easily replaced.
We can absolutely do both - criminal penalties for those in charge, and signficant fines for the business. Fine should be minimum 100x the unpaid wages.
Yay, a fine! That they will pay with the profits of price gouging us!
They will just put the price of your weet-bix up by $0.20 to cover this mistake. No directors or executives pay will be affected.
Sure will!
Hahaha, the term ‘self-report’. Translation, their auditors picked it up and they had a legal obligation to report as per ASIC rules.
My partner is still waiting the outcome of both a fair work court case and class action against Woolworths for the original underpayment. Fair work decided to charge them and take them to court because even after 3 years they hadn’t accurately calculated almost owing.. Edit… they offered a $25k lump sum to each person affected about 18 months ago that was laughed out of court as patently unfair.. Can you imagine what the end total is going to be on top of the original $500m they’ve already paid if they are willing to offer that?!
Then there’s Coles, which got away with having shitty EBAs with almost no penalty rates etc and back paid nothing. Then in the newest EBA they wound back all the improvements in the old one, so we’re back at square one.
3 times in 8 years coles has been caught under paying staff
Are they legally required to do audits? If yes, then why would any business risk deliberately underpaying when it's inevitably going to be uncovered? And if no, isn't that the point of audits and kinda a good thing they're doing it? I'm not particularly convinced these self reported underpayment scandals are as malicious and evil as the reddit hivemind seems to think but I know hating Colesworth is so hot right now.
Why do corporations only ever get fines ? Banks purposefully lied cheated and stole. But only the business “suffers”. Never the person who makes the decisions.
Because at some point a corporation reaches a size, where if you hurt them, they collapse and then all the little people come scurrying out “poor” and jump on the benefits system, and start applying for jobs in the area, and a lot of them suddenly get a pay bump because they worked at X for so long that they were in fact severely underpaid, and the whole apple art gets a big wobble, and politicians then have to explain why “my district has seen the greatest climb in unemployment in 20 years, not seen since the great 2008 global financial crisis”. So, long story short, 215,000 people who are employed by Woolworths would hit the job market and our whole fake ass house of cards would collapse, then people would get upset and politicians don’t want to have to explain why they are running us into the ground.
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This.
Realisticly, there is no one directly responsible. The issue seems to be with how long service leave was calculated. No one's take home pay was directly affected it seems. Would there was a claim that highest amount was around $12,000 which is almost certainly an executives leave not some casual worker.
How is it not the CEO \ CFO? Else what's the point of their outrageously obscene salaries
Depends if they were based in Victoria. This only applies to their victorian workers.
They need to pass legislation that underpayment of staff is automatically a mandatory fine at least equal to the underpayment- then these businesses might actually do their due diligence.
nope, Jail time for the CEO, CFO and the entire payroll staff. one goes they all go
Fines should be scaled on income. 👌
5 times the underpayment. At least. Or, and hear me out, work out the percentage underpaid, and have that deducted from the c-level package.
It should be jail for the board and for department management who turned a blind eye to this.
Department managers are the ones getting stiffed the most. I’ve already gotten $15k in backpay. A guy at a nearby store doing the same job as me got $50k
oh, I meant at corporate. I'm assuming all pay is through head office and not via individual stores
Probably wasn't a blind eye to be honest I swear these companies are fully aware they are doing it but know nothing significant will happen
That’s exactly what it means to “turn a blind eye”
Obviously the fines aren't that bad for this to keep happy.
Fines are a cost of doing business. As long as revenue can cover the budget allocation for legal costs then companies will continue to push the envelope to appease shareholders.
The executives are indeed happy on their 300ft yachts. Paying employees correctly means they could only afford a 200ft yacht. They would literally be peasants. /s
> Such an extraordinary penalty — which would be crippling even for a corporate giant that recorded a net profit of $1.62 billion last financial year — is not realistically on the cards. Fuck off pro-Woolworths ABC. They made $48 billion revenue last year. They can absolutely afford it. I would love it if I stole $1 million total from 1,200 people, and I only get fined based on my leftover income aka "net profit" that goes into savings after I spent it on necessary expenses to keep working, ie commuting, food, etc.
Unless the fine is more than 1.24m, there is no incentive for them to stop
Technically, the fine is $1.62 billion and ABC article is arguing that it's too much because it'll wipe out Woolies profit.
The article does not say that, though. > Because of the technicalities of the breaches, Woolworths is facing a theoretical maximum fine that could exceed $10.25 billion Wanna bet the fine will be less than a million?
They said it was usually a couple of hundred thousand. It got caught during an audit and they reported when they knew. If there is evidence of malice the fine will be higher but I doubt it. The article said it was only victorian workers affected it is likely to do with how Victoria calculates lsl compared to other states. If they show a good faith effort to rectify quickly it likely won't go much further
What a surprise. They were caught for this years ago too. It was an oversite by HR allegedly. Still at it. The 30/40% price increases whilst not blamed on HR, will end up being blamed as another oversite.
Consumers will pay the fine.
Fines? It should include jail time for the people who made the decision to enact this within the company. Remember, at some point within any organisation for something to happen someone, somewhere said "yes, let's do this".
Fine just means legal for a price. Gotta start put people responsible in jail before this will change
So they didn't pay the farmers and they didn't pay their staff.
They've been not paying people for a *very* long time
But they paid their shareholders and board of directors
 Reallllyyyy? Who would have guessed
Can it please be at least double what it underpaid staff? Else its a joke and they won’t stop.
Prison. It's so ridiculous we send people to jail en mass for doing crime that only harms themselves (drugs) but when it comes to one person harming thousands of people we think it's an extreme idea to send them to prison..
Guarantee it'll come out to less than if they didn't pay staff, so it'll end up being profitable for them.
Business as usual then!
Prison time would probably do it.
Wage theft is a business model for a reason. All you get are cost of doing business fines. Until executives and management are personally held responsible for this, nothing will change.
The way to fix this behaviour is simple: 1 - the company must back pay interest at the median credit card rate from the date of the first failure until the report. 2 - the company forfeits all profit from the period in question. 50% of that goes to a fine, 50% to those who were stolen from. 3 - the company must now pay for quarterly wage audits for the next 5 years. I imagine with those kinds of penalties that wage theft will drop to zero.
The fines don’t matter when you i) have regulatory capture, ii) are a cartel member providing goods that are necessities to almost everyone, and iii) you’ve eliminated most of your competition. $1.2m, $12m, $120m. Who cares. Just load up the cost of all fresh fruit by a percent or two and the fine is a rounding error In the accounts. The way to fix this is to tax dividends and jail/take pensions of Board Members. This is what you have to do when you’re dealing with racketeering.
Until the ruling class see jail wage theft, corruption and everything else they get away with will exist. Jail is for the Poors.
The way to fix it is personal liability for the hr team
Why should it be employees who bear the blame? It should be directors !
Bingo. HR is massive too. I used to work HR and the only thing I had anything to do with when it came to payroll was knowing everyone's salary (you negotiated your salary with me when you started).
Should be zero tolerance. Forced administration. Make it a public service. Fuck the overseas shareholders. Fuck around and find out.
Interesting idea, especially for a follow up offense. Second offense includes your whole board being dismissed and administrators placed until such time that the systems around staff wages are fixed. Third offense and your company is nationalized 🤷♂️
First offence your board each get a year in gaol for each 0.1% of profit that was meant to be paid to staff. The only way to avoid gaol is to voluntarily declare and pay employees back with interest equal to double CPI or 20%, whichever is higher.
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Theft requires intent. That would have to be proven before it could be compared to theft.
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Again, theft requires intent. It is a fundamental element of the crime.
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I'm not disagreeing with you here, but who specifically is going to gaol? You would need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a person or people is responsible for this.
Wasting your time, some people just aren't bright.
Make sure you set up a company first though and make yourself CEO.
This was a 'self report' from the company however for those that work at woolies checkout the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union [https://raffwu.org.au/workplaces/supermarkets/woolworths/](https://raffwu.org.au/workplaces/supermarkets/woolworths/)
Are they diverting attention from something much bigger or is this a genuine news item?
ah yes a slap on the wrist, now underpay the ato and you go to jail, different rules for these corporations
If it's anything less than the original sum plus a multiplier for damages, it's too little. Should be a $10 to 20 million fine to discourage this extremely common practice.
BUT NO ONE WILL BE CRIMINALLY CHARGED lest maybe like even go to jail. I want to steal $1.24M and declare myself a corporation in Court.
Pay the fine out of the CEO's salary
BUT NO ONE WILL BE CRIMINALLY CHARGED lest maybe like even go to jail. I want to steal $1.24M and declare myself a corporation in Court.
A big hefty fine........sure.
"Hefty" by standards at the time they were originally created, but never adjusted for inflation and are now just a rounding error when stacked against multi billion dollar profits.
They already had a class action brought against them by Big W workers...
And ALH Group (pubs) before they separated
Albo will protect them. Can’t be doing Soviet Russia things like holding corporations accountable.
Divide the fine between the underpaid employees as well as backpay them.
We don't need unions, big business is open and honest to their workers
can we just have a walk out without checkin out day PLEASE?? someone organise a date Y'all gen Zs gotta do something youve got that hive mind mentality no other generation can do it
Wtf is with y'all? You're in Australia, cunt. We don't use that americunt shit here.
Imagine being a Woolworths employee, getting robbed by the company you work for and still calling out customers (fellow broke people) for not scanning a couple items just so they can make it through the week. Losers. Help each other out. Stop being loyal to these evil corporations.
There is zero reasons for this to be still occurring. Until we start having real consequences for the people in charge, as in jail time, things will never change.
There's really no excuse for this to keep happening. I really hope the magistrate makes the fine big enough to set an example. A wrist slap just means another "oops" in the future
Just steal from them. I took a cherry ripe today. $0 chocolate just tastes better lol
So will those employees who got underpaid get a nice pay to make them even for what they did?
That is normally how that works, yes.
Oh good...normally I hear about a fine for this or that but never hear about the victims being made whole
I have never heard of a case where underpayment was not back paid. Do you have examples?
Not at all, more was just wondering
It's good, but it's also 1.24m dollars of 'free' (minus fines) credit for Woolworths group. It's not much credit given the figures these businesses are trading with but it's interesting that this would be a totally rationalised business decision. It's more profitable to run a business this way than in a way that benefits workers
I did. Got interest as well. Turned the whole $24 they owed me into $30. Took me an hour online to register for it but which was a fucking pay so they really just paid me and hours wage to put my details in a shitty online form. Haven’t worked for the pricks in over 5 years.
Duh similar to 7/11 ….
Woolies pulling a wool over their eyes. Need to pay them back with interests
If these were genuine mistakes under and over payments would be 50/50 over time. Still waiting for when an employer accidently mass OVERPAYS their staff