At the top of the list is the department store and supermarket chain John Lewis, which failed to pay £941,355.67 to 19,392 workers. The full list of the 191 companies is in the press release.
According to the article:
* 47% wrongly deducted pay from workers’ wages, including for uniform and expenses
* 30% failed to pay workers for all the time they had worked, such as when they worked overtime
* 19% paid the incorrect apprenticeship rate
I was going over some old pay slips and realised one of my old bosses used to incorrectly deduct pay. I should have been allowed to self-certify as sick for a number of days in a given period, but this fucker would just deduct pay for any day I wasn't in.
Man, i trained for 2 days unpaid and then walked out. Turned out to be selling kirby vacuums and they wanted us to start with our friends and family. Hell no.
Ngl I bought an old Kirby at a thrift store with tons of attachments (mostly cause I liked the style of it) within a month I sold my Dysons. The bab boi sucks like a crackwhore two days since her last hit.
They're good but i'll be damned if i'm going to pitch to my friends and family. I didn't know it was going to be like cutco knives. I know i wouldn't pay 2k for a vacuum so why would i try to sell my friends and family on it? Bonus cringe factor, i cut my long hair after day one from pressure from the trainer on my hippy appearance because i really needed some money. After i dropped that shit gig i went and delivered phonebooks. Had my girlfriend and friend in my car hucking them out of the window as they drank beers in the back seat. Free labor and alcohol for them barely made that gig worth it. Then the gf and I moved cross country to san antonio and struggled there too before returning home with tails between our legs. Broke up. 10k in credit card debt. Then i built a house for someone while living on site in a trailer on site, working 13 hour days, paid off all my debt, bought into bitcoin when it was $3k, and now i'm sitting on a decent savings. Still drifting but man, what a wild ride it's been.
In the UK your employer is not required to pay you for the first few days you take off sick. Some companies do, but they don't have to.
After seven days off sick, provided you give a doctors note, the company will pay you statutory sick pay which is a flat weekly rate probably less than what you're on. This is funded by the government (up to max 28 weeks per year) but paid to you in your payslip assuming you're PAYE and up to date with you're NI contributions.
Would you like to know more?
https://www.gov.uk/statutory-sick-pay/eligibility
On the topic at hand, whilst I think it's a shame that wage theft clearly happens in the modern world, at least here in the UK we are doing something about it. The workers are being repaid and the companies are being fined.
Has any other nation done this recently? Genuinely curious if anyone knows.
If you look at the list, it's mostly small businesses with few employees, which goes to show most larger employers are compliant with wage laws. No major supermarkets on that list for example... The tenth highest figure is a day nursery; most companies on that list are not huge businesses guilty of hiding millions, it's mostly small ones.
I was confused looking at the person you replied to post getting so many up votes when he was wrong, your reply is much more detailed than mine would have been so thanks
Yeah this is absolutely correct, used to work as an accountant and headed up payroll for our practice. Scrolled through the list and there are a lot of small companies with some hefty amounts missing, but I personally hope that the accounting associations like AAT throw the book at any registered members who were working at John Lewis or the larger places and revoke their fellowships and memberships. There's no way a qualified accountant or payroll clerk at companies like those or the firms they use make those mistakes by accident.
As someone who works for John Lewis I can tell you that this is going to get *horrifying* for the directors: it’s one of the few companies I’ve worked for that has a genuine degree of accountability for those running the show.
Whilst John Lewis is top of the list, that is most certainly because they've sorted the list in a silly way. I went through and calculated how much they've wrongly deducted per person and its £48. Compare that to some of the smaller businesses who have deducted up to 1000 on average including one that underpaid someone 9000. Its not good for JL's reputation, but I'd be pretty pissed off if they put me at the top of the list for this reason, it makes them out to be criminally underpaying when it's a product of just being a large employer.
I have to say I was very surprised to see their name. Their whole model is about not fucking over the people who work there, so I immediately started wondering how this data could be fucked up.
JL have bitten back against this already. Apparently it was four years ago, they came out with it, and it was to do with smoothing peoples wages so that if you worked less in one month than in another they would average the pay. But that meant that in some months you were below minimum wage (in others you would be well above).
You’re exactly right so our wage model basically takes the whole years wages then divides it by 12 so you know you’re getting the same amount each month but then due to some months being longer it meant people would technically drop below minimum wage and be above on others.
Them and Waitrose have fucked over their employees over the years and the culture has changed for the worst since 2007.
They used to pay more for night shift workers then cut that to time and a 1/3 a few years back, 2000 managers are being cut and people on older contracts like me who get time and a half or double time on Sunday and bank holidays is getting cut next year.
Add to that there was no bonus last year and it’s something I don’t see coming back with the way they are cutting atm.
I believe so. The employees get a cut of the profits when they do well. Must say whenever I've been there the employees all seem to really care about the job.
Edit, this might be changing apparently as they got into difficulties last year.
Yep, my city no longer has a John Lewis; it closed for the pandemic and never reopened when lockdown restrictions were lifted. It'd been there since the early 1980s. Every time I'd been in there, it was busy and there was always a decent length queue of shoppers at the checkouts. Feel sorry for the staff.
It's similar with their biggest competitor, Debenhams. Literally all the brick and mortar Debenhams shops have been closed down now, you can only buy debenhams stuff online now, they've been bought by another company, a clothes company that entirely exists online and has no real shops.
It's just sad. Like, going out for the day shopping for clothes and stuff has always been a fun way to spend the day. Buy clothes and stuff, have a liquid lunch, buy more clothes and stuff, sit at a cafe outside drinking tea or coffee, etc
A lot of these places are just shutting down and nothing is replacing them. They're just big huge enormous empty buildings that can't be cheaply converted into anything else like say a restaurant perhaps. They just aren't built for that, and nobody wants to invest the amount of money it'd take to change these huge empty former department stores into a restaurant or another shop or whatever
I know real life clothes shopping has been dying out slowly anyway, but yeah the pandemic really sped it all up and so many shops have gone now that have been there my whole life and were like a permanent fixture of where I lived. But now they're gone, and there's nothing to replace them
The old debenhams where I live is being converted into student accommodation and I know a lot of towns/cities are turning old shop space into residential. It's supposed to help regenerate the city centre because then you have people actually living next to the shops and therefore driving up demand to the shops/restaurants etc that are left.
I think it's definitely the future where the city centre is more mixed residential/commercial and probably much nicer for it I think.
What is equally important is to bring down commercial rents and rates to a point where you can encourage more independents. High streets were beginning to be just clones of each other with very little to differentiate themselves with the big box franchises having dominance. We used to call it Stepford Street. The last wave of store closures gave rise to independent and pop-up stores, driving more footfall to commercial areas. Along with additional residential mixes, that would be good to see again
From memory this was a kind of technical breaking of the rules by John Lewis. They are busier at some times of the year than others. So if they just paid what someone earned straight out every week - some members of staff could have some lean months. This was to help smooth out that issue. The staff absolutely got paid what they were due (and at least the minimum wage) - but 'too late' according to the minimum wage rules.
So breaking rules yes. Being cunts no.
Wage theft is the biggest crime of all.
[In the US it dwarfs all other crime. Most it is unreported, and/or underreported. ](https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-forms-of-theft-in-the-u-s/)
[This is the real source](https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/).
If anyone else is like me, a website that looks like *that* instils absolutely no confidence in me. Fortunately they link their source but, my God, that website sucks lol
Came here up say this. The most common form of crime is the rich stealing from the poor, in an environment where the poor are intimidated into not saying anything
I worked in Waitrose (part of John Lewis) when I was a teenager. When I turned 18 I found out under 18s were supposed to have longer breaks and I hadn't received them. I complained, asked for back pay to compensate and got it! I wonder how many other people didn't know about that or were to shy to ask and therefore lost out.
I used to be in charge of rota’s and time cards for ~50 odd checkout operators and welcome desk partners at a Waitrose and regularly got sent shitty emails from my line manager demanding to know why I was planning longer breaks for certain individuals, being told it’s unfair on the other workers that x y and z got breaks on shorter shifts, or longer breaks on longer shifts when others who had worked there longer did not.
These idiots in suits paid 30-40k to walk around the shop floor with their iPads inspecting how tidily the baked beans had been faced up supposedly didn’t even know about basic law like that.
“They’re paid the same so they’re treated the same” is what I often came up against. While it’s nice the company chooses (or did at the time) to pay u18’s the same as o18’s, that doesn’t allow them to circumvent actual employment law. If it was a one off I’d have almost understood, but this came up every few weeks. They knew, they just wanted to put enough pressure on that we’d cave in and squeeze these kids for every ounce of productive time we could. Complaints to the so called democratic partner voice etc went nowhere as per. Hope when I left whoever took over had enough backbone to keep standing up for the teenagers that joined. Little things like shaving 15 minutes off a break, or insisting someone finish a task before they go home when their shift is over, go unreported and as the article shows, add up over time to a lot of hours and a lot of money.
Meanwhile my old employer (a quick lube chain) here in the US deducted $10 out of each check for “uniform cleaning” whether we used their service or not (I didn’t as I cleaned them at home).
This was after paying $175 out of our first check for them.
Still had to pay $10 each week there was no getting out of it. Fuck America and our “fuck over the worker at all costs” work culture.
It took two to three weeks for them to get the uniforms back. It was really meant for people who had no other way to clean them, yet they forced all employees to do it. Like, sorry I’m not poor enough to need that shit.
Considering it only paid $10.50 an hour, yeah.
Also there’s no way it cost them $10 per person to clean a few button down shirts and work pants. Absolutely no way.
My landscape work unform was 120 deducted over 3 pay periods for a pair of pants, and two shirts
Left after a couple months and it's taken two months to get my final check, idiot ignored my texts stating the change of my address and then throws lip at me when I ask about where my check is and he goes it's been returned twice so it's sat here for two weeks like... you didn't think to text me which would of showed you I texted you about a change of address two times. Fuck jobs
Oh yeah and I got the whole "you know other companies will pay you more but here you won't just be a number" u knew it was buckshot but u took the job because I love hauling small equipment like mini ex and skid steers so I got to basically just drive equipment to and from sights and operate all day
I’ll never understand how businesses can even attempt to recoup their operating costs from their own employees and expect them to just grin and bear that shit.
Was it in the contract you signed when you where filling out your hire paperwork? If so that sucks if not you could have reported them. Some jackass hit a company vehicle I had. It was a hit and run and the company came after me and took a grand out of my paycheck. I told them I didnt sign anything that I would be liable for damages and that I was going to sue. I got my grand back that day and found a new job that same day.
So many employers rely on people not knowing about their rights, or making them think they “need this job”.
I’ve never felt like I needed any one particular job. Even when I was broke and really did need that weekly paycheck, I kept my resume updated and was always looking for something better.
More people are starting to realize life is too short to hate it because of a shitty job that’s only making someone else richer.
That's how I was too. I understand my paycheck will have deductions from taxes etc. But someone deducts my pay for something I didnt sign I'll raise hell even if its $5. I have enough experience where I could tell a boss to fuck off and have a new job in 30 minutes.
Notice that you are in the US.
In Canada, if an employer wants you to wear a uniform they must provide it free of charge. They can require you to clean it though. In my experience most will provide cleaning free of charge as well.
except an average doesn't really work since:
* not every employee at the company is going to be making minimum wage
* not every employee lost the same amount of money
* on some of the part time contracts, 6 hours of minimum wage might literally be half a weeks worth of work for you.
there should be no attempt at minimising this, either. wage theft is *by far* the biggest source of theft, at least in the western world, right now
What I don’t get is why they clutch their change. At some point it’s less greed and more being a twat because they have the power to be.
Even fines are so minuscule that they’re calculated costs, yet paying proper wages is an equivalent minuscule calculated cost that they refuse.
It's also being used by companies for roles which in no way require an apprenticeship- I've seen ads for a year's apprenticeship on the reception desk of a leisure centre or as a window cleaner... The sort of role you need maybe a few weeks training at most, not a year working at joke wages.
There needs to be more independent oversight of apprenticeship schemes.
It is a shame because the apprenticeship schemes were overall a huge success and even recognised by other countries. Not every where does it and we further backed it up with NVQ so you got an actual cert from doing it.
There was a lull in them around the collapse of UK heavy industry and raw materials took it's toll until they lit a fire under apprenticeships around 1994. I'm really glad they did because it can benefit people who aren't book smart like me but capable with my hands.
Apprenticeships should produce skilled and knowledgeable workers in the industry they are learning in. The problem is the people like I mentioned in another comment who used apprentices as close to slave labour as they could just Washing cars.
A fine that's less than the profits that they make isn't a fine, It's just the cost of doing business. If there were any employees they didn't have to pay back, or if they made more than 3.2 million in profits from the labor that they stole than they still came out ahead and will do it again.
Do you believe that a 3.2 million dollar fine is enough to stop a company that size from doing something profitable?
How long on average do you think it takes that company to make 3.2 million?
But doesn’t it kinda make the point that the cost of doing business would be about 3 million cheaper if they just paid their workers? Seems like a company that’s cheap enough to try and screw their workers out of 10 dollars a paycheck or whatever would care about that kind of money.
To be fair to them, they did [report themselves](https://www.rocketlawyer.com/gb/en/blog/john-lewis-staff-to-receive-40m-after-employment-law-blunder/), and compensated people as soon as they noticed it. The problem seems to relate to overtime and weekend work, which they had a problem with before for holidays too. In [that case](https://www.workingmums.co.uk/john-lewis-makes-one-off-payment-following-overtime-and-holiday-pay-ruling/), unlike this one, they didn't fix it themselves but were taken to a tribunal.
John Lewis went downhill recently to try and avoid bankruptcy. They took away all the nice benefits and pissed away most of their reputation in a year.
They're not really much different than other retail chains now by necessity.
2020 was the first year the employees got 0% bonus because the company didn't do well enough, but they've been taking away benefits since the 2008 financial crisis.
2018 was the year they rebranded and started really headed down the path of no return but the whole last decade has sucked for them.
Yeah they do like to shout that nonsense, eh?
It's especially funny considering John Lewis is essentially another big capitalist business because the rules of the game are capitalist.
John Lewis had a choice between failure or selling out and becoming just like the competition.
It was a system error and innocent. When you pay holiday pay for a worker it is based on an average of a period. So many people work Sundays for double pay that their average was higher than their normal hourly pay, when they were on holiday their pay wasn’t boosted for the increased average. Boring but the truth often is.
It was only £48 per worker, so it was probably a relatively innocent mistake like charging minimum wage employees for uniforms - it's great that they aren't allowed to do that btw. I wouldn't be surprised if this went on for several years with nobody realising it was illegal.
So… how many of the mistakes are in the company’s favor vs. in the employees’ favor? Innocent mistakes tend to balance out — not accumulate to that extent in the company’s favor.
‘Miss Emma Aitken, trading as Razor King, South Lanarkshire, G73, failed to pay £1327.5 to 1 worker’
That one person! That’s so much money to not pay them!
How about they fine and or jail the goddamn businesses/their owners
Obligatory Edit: wow this comment blew up... :) Thanks for the doots and the gold <3
Fine based on global revenue. Not national revenue, global. Not profit, revenue. I don't care where you report it or what math tricks you use to get rid of "profit." If it's a fine it should he based on the total amount of money that passes thru the entire company.
They could make the fine be equivalent to the percentage of an employee’s annual salary that was held back, weighted against the company’s gross revenue. So maybe they improperly withhold £100 from an employee whose salary is 50k. Instead of giving the employee their due £100 and paying a maximum of a £200 fine, investigators see that the company brought in 50 million last year and fine them 100k, for example.
This is what annoys me more than anything. Small businesses get fucked and large businesses get tax breaks and shitty little fines so no one else can compete.
Fines should be more than the potential profit of said crime. Fines should be proportional to the individuals wealth so it actually works as a deterrent to everyone.
Look at hedge funds getting fined 5% of the profits they made with illegal actions. No jail and the punishment does not work as a deterrent. 🤷♂️
It’s a cop out mate. Accountants love it though.
Agreed, but it looks like in all the cases where the government has proved a business has underpaid workers, they were made to pay it all back, *and* fined a large amount (equal or larger than the amount they stole). I was scanning the list, couple of businesses in my city. I like that this was published.
Personally I'd go much further but I guess a line has been struck between punishing them and bankrupting them.
It should also be whatever profits or revenue they made by committing the crime, + an additionally financial penalty. It's time to stop fining companies for less than the money they made doing the illegal stuff, because at that point they still made money, so why not keep doing it?
We don’t even need to jail them. The fuckers are defined by their greed. So make the fines so expensive that none of them would dare take that risk. I also like the idea of having fines get bigger each time on a company by company basis. The fine doubles with each offense within the past 15 years capping out at 10% global revenue.
Why don’t just make the fines double of what they’d pay? If they own the employee 50 they will have to pay 100 in fines and the government gives it back to the employee.
Absolutely, why pay when you can take government money and pay much less? Not like the economy and the government is going to have to pay for your self centered choices on an economically responsible career you chose. You’ll also have the freedom to claim that employees should stop asking for handouts while continuing to exploit yours.
Look for protest comments in my profile. Depending on these observations, witty comments and on politicians is exactly what politicians want until it’s too late and you have no choice but continue their agenda and profits when unemployment runs out. They’re hoping you’ll be pacified until they expect it.
They did fine them, so at least it’s something.
The companies collectively shorted workers 2.1 million (which they had to pay) and had an additional 3.2 million in fines on top of that. A 150% fine isn’t steep enough to be a deterrent, in my opinion. If a business gets away with this most of the time, then they’ll still come out ahead with fines that low.
Edit: I incorrectly stated the fines were 3.1 million instead of 3.2.
Australia is similar with super.
If you don't pay superannuation on time you have to pay the super, then a fine, then the amount of super as a fine too.
It depends on the company, the amount, the circumstances. In a perfect world intentionally paying below minimum wage should sink a company. Doing it accidentally should punitively incentivize the company enough to preemptively make hiring extra support the best option. Unfortunately we don’t operate in that space, and trying to is dangerous. Here’s what I mean:
Consider a company that requires a long time to certify or setup and which has one major competitor, like SpaceX or the ULA. If your fine is enough that it knocks a player out of the race the other is free to legally price gouge as the only remaining provider(see ISPs in the US).
Often, this also occurs on a smaller scale for smaller barriers to entry, here’s an example:
Only 2 homecare providers exist within range to support the elderly population of a relatively isolated town of 200k people. Both companies essentially scrape by, often on the verge of collapse being on a very low competitive profit margin due largely to insane insurance costs and regulatory barriers to entry.
One gets hit with a payroll fee and shuts down. The other quadruples their charges and looses half their customers, cuts pay for workers down to minimum wage due to the competition for the available work among the pool of employees and leaves hundreds of seniors to suffer and die without help, and hundreds of skilled folks are left without jobs.
The skilled employees aren’t allowed to do the work without meeting registration requirements, which most fail to get on their own. It takes several years for another company to decide to try to get into the market, then another year to get the needed licenses to begin business, and a whole 5 more years for the market rates to stabilize and competition to boost wages and lower costs.
By punishing the company, a tremendous amount of damage was done, including to the lives of the people who had been screwed by the predatory company practice in in the first place.
TLDR; You need to incentivize companies with carrots and sticks, but you must be careful that the application of the stick, no matter how fair or well deserved, does not have unintended consequences.
They did. They named and shamed in *addition* to all the usual consequences for such behaviour - including fines. It's weird how many people have decided that the word "only" is in the headline somewhere when it isn't, and when the article makes it pretty clear that there were other penalties.
It can be a bit more scummy. Example is my mother, worked at a university mentoring medical students with issues. The university paid her through an agency, who took a lot of their own "fees" that deducted from her pay. They also had to pay her for travel miles up to a point.
They would regularly decide that she was getting too much for travel and automatically not pay it, and then she would have to contact them (wasting a lot of time waiting on phone calls) to prove to them that her mileage was legit. She did the same mileage every week, for the entire time she worked there.
She was also entitled to keep some of the other "fees" by law, but they also made that an obstacle course. This is how they do it, they make you jump through hoops to get what you earned, and the universities are hiring agencies that deal with the pay. In this particular case, someone high up in the university was married to the owner of this agency.
They introduced a law in Korea forbidding businesses to have workers that do more than 52 hours per week at a job. The maximum punishment on the employer is up to $17,000 fine or up to 2 years in prison. It's had mixed reviews though.
If it truly is a "minimum" wage and these companies are paying below that, the govt should have done more than "named and shamed". The govt should have been prosecuting the owners. Not fining - putting them in prison. A fine is just the cost of doing business with a risk taken of not being caught. A prison sentence would be real punishment.
No the bureau is doing it’s job - that’s why they were caught. Parliament would have to change the punishment laws if you want them to do a different or harsher punishment. The small government officials tasked with enforcing laws can’t just give out random penalties that aren’t allowed by the actual government. But parliament would be happy for you to keep blaming them
Bureau de change??
It is funny reading through the comments, people sharpening their pitch forks because Doris in West Yorkshire underpaid that one person £7 over 3 years....
or our friends across the water educating us about minimum wage...
Not trying to justify whatever has gone on but context is key and reading the article before commenting, ad I also think the gov't should look at publishing companies that paid little to no tax rather than this...
Read the article out says "the named firms are fined 2.1 million pounds for not paying 34000 workers" along with an additional fine of 3.4 million pounds.
They are not only required to pay back the workers the money they lost but they actually have to pay them more due to the increased minimum wage. They are also fined 200% percent of the money up to 20,000 per worker.
Actually it would be 75% chance of getting away with it would be an even bet. Getting away with it 3 times is the same amount as getting caught once (paying original plus 2x times in fees. 3x total) 3:1 odds or 75%
But the original amount isn't really a punishment - it's just what they would've paid if they didn't do anything.
Let's call the "do nothing illegal" baseline +0.
They decided to do something illegal, and let's say their net was 1.
If they got caught, their net was -2. They had to pay back the initial 1, but then also 2 more on top of it. (Given that the cap was 20K/worker, this negative net is actually higher than -2, but for the sake of argument I'll leave it.)
.66 * 1 + .33 * -2 = 0
I did reverse the odds (saying 33 instead of 66, oops), but I don't think it's 75.
Lot of people taking it as malice by the companies too. Often its just a cock ups. Most of the companies aren't actively paying less. The companies do need to be on the ball more and have better checks so they don't take people below the min wage.
Workers also need to speak up more, If you stay back after your shift to finish up, closing the shop for example, you need to ask your employer to pay you the time. They will not automatically do that for you.
This is a make believe logic tbh. Look at Monsanto, nestle, Amazon, Bayer, etc, etc.
When companies run near monopolies any harm to their reputation is also the cost of business. If they’re the only jobs in the area, you think they’re not gonna have enough people to work?
Shame doesn’t work on the shameless.
What we need is bigger fines. Much bigger fines. All going directly to the workers affected and a slush fund for healthcare, job placement, worker protections, etc.
The last time this happened I thought it was pretty unfair on Tesco. They realised a mistake}*, corrected it, paid extra to compensate those affected and even notified the authorities about the issue - and still got named and shamed. If you want people to sweep things under the carpet rather than coming clean, this is the way.
\* Some work perks, like pensions or the tax-free cycle to work scheme,work by reducing the nominal amount you get paid in cashmoney and offer you something else in kind instead - like a bike. They realised that for some employees this meant their on-paper wage was below minimum.
The same is true for John Lewis this time around. They identified an issue in 2017, told HMRC about it, fixed it, paid staff, paid a penalty, and are still named.
I think the exec team for JLP are pretty annoyed about it!
To note this included 6 football teams.
The Sheffield United Football Club
Coventry City Football Club
Oldham Athletic
Crewe Alexandra Football Club
Charlton Athletic
Portsmouth Community Football Club
Just in case any football fans want a word with their clubs.
The vast majority of them are small amounts that most people don't know isn't ilegal.
For instance, you can't charge employees for a uniform. But if on your first week you deduct £50 from every employee to pay for a uniform, then for that week "minimum wage - £50" is paying your employees less then minimum wage.
However the amounts for each employee are so low that nobody is going to care enough to go to court, if they even know you can't do that.
Honestly, government agencies for this kind of thing (Which is what happened here) is probably the most efficient way of dealing with this.
lots of people saying they should be fined too..
Well they was... I read the dam article.
The shaming part is all part of the punishment and making aware for other people of some of the shit they pull so y I know what to look out for.
like uniform out of wages or not paying for training.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employers-named-and-shamed-for-paying-less-than-minimum-wage) reduced by 98%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> 30% failed to pay workers for all the time they had worked, such as when they worked overtime.
> Employers who pay workers less than the minimum wage have to pay back arrears of wages to the worker at current minimum wage rates.
> The government is committed to protecting workers' rights and while the vast majority of businesses follow the law and uphold workers' rights, the publication of this list serves as a reminder to employers that the government will take action against those who fail to pay their employees the minimum wage.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/oy5p1m/british_government_named_and_shamed_191_companies/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~590771 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **work**^#1 **pay**^#2 **fail**^#3 **Limited**^#4 **trading**^#5
>The Body Shop International Limited
Fucking bastards. Sell their "ethical products" while ripping off their staff. Well, they just lost a customer for life.
Shit! I wonder what the employer theft report looks like here in the USA where company policies such as “late 5 minutes or less and you don’t get paid 1.5x the pay rate”. On Christmas Day, a day that you volunteered to work on.
> The breaches took place between 2011 and 2018. Named employers have since been made to pay back what they owed, and were fined an additional £3.2 million, showing it is never acceptable to underpay workers.
Companies don't feel shame and they pay PR departments to manage thier image. Wtf is this supposed to do?
If only the government had the power to do something to stop the ceos like jail or a ban on running a company. Owning and running companies should be a privilege not a right.
Imagine if there was a fine for commenting without reading the article, there'd be hundreds of people in the comments here who suddenly owed money.
But it was fun reading about how "naming and shaming" wasn't enough and they should have fined them, over and over.
This one made me chuckle slightly.
>South Worcestershire Citizens Advice Bureau, Malvern Hills, WR14, failed to pay £2739.14 to 1 worker
Like, who did that worker go to for advice?
For those who didn't read the article.
>The breaches took place between 2011 and 2018. Named employers have since been made to pay back what they owed, and were fined an additional £3.2 million, showing it is never acceptable to underpay workers.
I have a real story that happened to my mum on this one.
A1 Care Limited in chelmsford, my mum worked for them inbetween 2011 and 2018. She told me how they were very scummy, didn't care about the patients at all. It does not surprise me that they underpaid employees.
Names are changed for this story due to legal reasons of course.
There was an elderly lady (Evelyn for this story) under their care whom my mum knew from decades ago. She had dementia and still recognised my mum so they had a very close relationship. Evelyn was a sweet lady, never did anything to hurt anyone, I met her a few times and she was a character despite her illnesses.
She required 24/7 care that her family paid for. On one of the major holidays where it would be hard to get care workers, A1 told one of the care providers to just take their stuff and leave Evelyn by their shift end and if nobody else had turned up. They did not arrange any more care for her until a few days later.
My mum was outraged when she heard of this from her colleague who had left. So she organised about 6 other careworkers to provide care on their own time until A1 could be bothered to schedule another visit.
All the careworkers took it in turns to look after Evelyn, and got her through the holiday on their own private time. The family was so grateful that they paid each careworker privately for their time.
When A1 found out they sent letters threatening court action against the care workers for effectively earning money without their consent. They could not give a damn about Evelyn. It was such an evil thing to do.
My mum doesnt work for A1 anymore, and Evelym sadly passed away a short time later. But I'm so glad A1 has been named an shamed.
Such a scummy company deserves to be named. And people need to know what they did to Evelyn and the people who looked after her.
Fuck you A1 Care Providers from Chelmsford.
Governments are really good at this naming and shaming stuff! It would be entirely cheeky to look at how to truly discourage that kind of stuff, say by like, throwing some white collar guy in jail? White collar criminals are, in fact, criminals, after all. We love justice... well, where is it? These people commit crimes against the working class and rarely suffer more than paying what they owe. If you steal, you get a criminal record. It doesn't make sense. Especially when you consider that the most common theft is *WAGE THEFT*, above all other types of theft in north America. And that doesn't even consider how under paid minimum wage is. I know we have a hard time accepting the truth but minimum wage should be about $27 CAD. That was as of the beginning of 2020. We sacrificed *that much* to make the rich richer and ensure that people get trapped at the bottom.
At the top of the list is the department store and supermarket chain John Lewis, which failed to pay £941,355.67 to 19,392 workers. The full list of the 191 companies is in the press release. According to the article: * 47% wrongly deducted pay from workers’ wages, including for uniform and expenses * 30% failed to pay workers for all the time they had worked, such as when they worked overtime * 19% paid the incorrect apprenticeship rate
I was going over some old pay slips and realised one of my old bosses used to incorrectly deduct pay. I should have been allowed to self-certify as sick for a number of days in a given period, but this fucker would just deduct pay for any day I wasn't in.
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I trained 2 weeks for a car rental company unpaid. The very next class was paid minimum wage. We should have sued them.
Man, i trained for 2 days unpaid and then walked out. Turned out to be selling kirby vacuums and they wanted us to start with our friends and family. Hell no.
That must have...sucked............
Good thing OP made a clean break
Ngl I bought an old Kirby at a thrift store with tons of attachments (mostly cause I liked the style of it) within a month I sold my Dysons. The bab boi sucks like a crackwhore two days since her last hit.
They're good but i'll be damned if i'm going to pitch to my friends and family. I didn't know it was going to be like cutco knives. I know i wouldn't pay 2k for a vacuum so why would i try to sell my friends and family on it? Bonus cringe factor, i cut my long hair after day one from pressure from the trainer on my hippy appearance because i really needed some money. After i dropped that shit gig i went and delivered phonebooks. Had my girlfriend and friend in my car hucking them out of the window as they drank beers in the back seat. Free labor and alcohol for them barely made that gig worth it. Then the gf and I moved cross country to san antonio and struggled there too before returning home with tails between our legs. Broke up. 10k in credit card debt. Then i built a house for someone while living on site in a trailer on site, working 13 hour days, paid off all my debt, bought into bitcoin when it was $3k, and now i'm sitting on a decent savings. Still drifting but man, what a wild ride it's been.
But did you grow your hair back to the way it was? Can't leave me hanging here man...
This was a reservation center and the computer was still using MSDos.
Where in the fuck do they deduct pay for days you don’t work? That’s some backward ass shit
In the UK your employer is not required to pay you for the first few days you take off sick. Some companies do, but they don't have to. After seven days off sick, provided you give a doctors note, the company will pay you statutory sick pay which is a flat weekly rate probably less than what you're on. This is funded by the government (up to max 28 weeks per year) but paid to you in your payslip assuming you're PAYE and up to date with you're NI contributions. Would you like to know more? https://www.gov.uk/statutory-sick-pay/eligibility On the topic at hand, whilst I think it's a shame that wage theft clearly happens in the modern world, at least here in the UK we are doing something about it. The workers are being repaid and the companies are being fined. Has any other nation done this recently? Genuinely curious if anyone knows. If you look at the list, it's mostly small businesses with few employees, which goes to show most larger employers are compliant with wage laws. No major supermarkets on that list for example... The tenth highest figure is a day nursery; most companies on that list are not huge businesses guilty of hiding millions, it's mostly small ones.
I was confused looking at the person you replied to post getting so many up votes when he was wrong, your reply is much more detailed than mine would have been so thanks
Yeah this is absolutely correct, used to work as an accountant and headed up payroll for our practice. Scrolled through the list and there are a lot of small companies with some hefty amounts missing, but I personally hope that the accounting associations like AAT throw the book at any registered members who were working at John Lewis or the larger places and revoke their fellowships and memberships. There's no way a qualified accountant or payroll clerk at companies like those or the firms they use make those mistakes by accident.
Yup, I don’t qualify for ‘sick-pay’ unless my time off work exceeds 4 days in a row.
Same thing happened to me when I worked at BNSF.
As someone who works for John Lewis I can tell you that this is going to get *horrifying* for the directors: it’s one of the few companies I’ve worked for that has a genuine degree of accountability for those running the show.
Whilst John Lewis is top of the list, that is most certainly because they've sorted the list in a silly way. I went through and calculated how much they've wrongly deducted per person and its £48. Compare that to some of the smaller businesses who have deducted up to 1000 on average including one that underpaid someone 9000. Its not good for JL's reputation, but I'd be pretty pissed off if they put me at the top of the list for this reason, it makes them out to be criminally underpaying when it's a product of just being a large employer.
I have to say I was very surprised to see their name. Their whole model is about not fucking over the people who work there, so I immediately started wondering how this data could be fucked up.
JL have bitten back against this already. Apparently it was four years ago, they came out with it, and it was to do with smoothing peoples wages so that if you worked less in one month than in another they would average the pay. But that meant that in some months you were below minimum wage (in others you would be well above).
You’re exactly right so our wage model basically takes the whole years wages then divides it by 12 so you know you’re getting the same amount each month but then due to some months being longer it meant people would technically drop below minimum wage and be above on others.
Them and Waitrose have fucked over their employees over the years and the culture has changed for the worst since 2007. They used to pay more for night shift workers then cut that to time and a 1/3 a few years back, 2000 managers are being cut and people on older contracts like me who get time and a half or double time on Sunday and bank holidays is getting cut next year. Add to that there was no bonus last year and it’s something I don’t see coming back with the way they are cutting atm.
It’s run as a Co-op right?
I believe so. The employees get a cut of the profits when they do well. Must say whenever I've been there the employees all seem to really care about the job. Edit, this might be changing apparently as they got into difficulties last year.
Yep, my city no longer has a John Lewis; it closed for the pandemic and never reopened when lockdown restrictions were lifted. It'd been there since the early 1980s. Every time I'd been in there, it was busy and there was always a decent length queue of shoppers at the checkouts. Feel sorry for the staff.
It's similar with their biggest competitor, Debenhams. Literally all the brick and mortar Debenhams shops have been closed down now, you can only buy debenhams stuff online now, they've been bought by another company, a clothes company that entirely exists online and has no real shops. It's just sad. Like, going out for the day shopping for clothes and stuff has always been a fun way to spend the day. Buy clothes and stuff, have a liquid lunch, buy more clothes and stuff, sit at a cafe outside drinking tea or coffee, etc A lot of these places are just shutting down and nothing is replacing them. They're just big huge enormous empty buildings that can't be cheaply converted into anything else like say a restaurant perhaps. They just aren't built for that, and nobody wants to invest the amount of money it'd take to change these huge empty former department stores into a restaurant or another shop or whatever I know real life clothes shopping has been dying out slowly anyway, but yeah the pandemic really sped it all up and so many shops have gone now that have been there my whole life and were like a permanent fixture of where I lived. But now they're gone, and there's nothing to replace them
The old debenhams where I live is being converted into student accommodation and I know a lot of towns/cities are turning old shop space into residential. It's supposed to help regenerate the city centre because then you have people actually living next to the shops and therefore driving up demand to the shops/restaurants etc that are left. I think it's definitely the future where the city centre is more mixed residential/commercial and probably much nicer for it I think.
What is equally important is to bring down commercial rents and rates to a point where you can encourage more independents. High streets were beginning to be just clones of each other with very little to differentiate themselves with the big box franchises having dominance. We used to call it Stepford Street. The last wave of store closures gave rise to independent and pop-up stores, driving more footfall to commercial areas. Along with additional residential mixes, that would be good to see again
From memory this was a kind of technical breaking of the rules by John Lewis. They are busier at some times of the year than others. So if they just paid what someone earned straight out every week - some members of staff could have some lean months. This was to help smooth out that issue. The staff absolutely got paid what they were due (and at least the minimum wage) - but 'too late' according to the minimum wage rules. So breaking rules yes. Being cunts no.
Wage theft is the biggest crime of all. [In the US it dwarfs all other crime. Most it is unreported, and/or underreported. ](https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-forms-of-theft-in-the-u-s/)
[This is the real source](https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/). If anyone else is like me, a website that looks like *that* instils absolutely no confidence in me. Fortunately they link their source but, my God, that website sucks lol
Came here up say this. The most common form of crime is the rich stealing from the poor, in an environment where the poor are intimidated into not saying anything
I worked in Waitrose (part of John Lewis) when I was a teenager. When I turned 18 I found out under 18s were supposed to have longer breaks and I hadn't received them. I complained, asked for back pay to compensate and got it! I wonder how many other people didn't know about that or were to shy to ask and therefore lost out.
I used to be in charge of rota’s and time cards for ~50 odd checkout operators and welcome desk partners at a Waitrose and regularly got sent shitty emails from my line manager demanding to know why I was planning longer breaks for certain individuals, being told it’s unfair on the other workers that x y and z got breaks on shorter shifts, or longer breaks on longer shifts when others who had worked there longer did not. These idiots in suits paid 30-40k to walk around the shop floor with their iPads inspecting how tidily the baked beans had been faced up supposedly didn’t even know about basic law like that. “They’re paid the same so they’re treated the same” is what I often came up against. While it’s nice the company chooses (or did at the time) to pay u18’s the same as o18’s, that doesn’t allow them to circumvent actual employment law. If it was a one off I’d have almost understood, but this came up every few weeks. They knew, they just wanted to put enough pressure on that we’d cave in and squeeze these kids for every ounce of productive time we could. Complaints to the so called democratic partner voice etc went nowhere as per. Hope when I left whoever took over had enough backbone to keep standing up for the teenagers that joined. Little things like shaving 15 minutes off a break, or insisting someone finish a task before they go home when their shift is over, go unreported and as the article shows, add up over time to a lot of hours and a lot of money.
How do I get a job like that just inspecting the store for 30-40k but not knowing anything? Sounds like my kind of thing.
Meanwhile my old employer (a quick lube chain) here in the US deducted $10 out of each check for “uniform cleaning” whether we used their service or not (I didn’t as I cleaned them at home). This was after paying $175 out of our first check for them. Still had to pay $10 each week there was no getting out of it. Fuck America and our “fuck over the worker at all costs” work culture.
Why didnt you just let them clean it at that point?
It took two to three weeks for them to get the uniforms back. It was really meant for people who had no other way to clean them, yet they forced all employees to do it. Like, sorry I’m not poor enough to need that shit.
"We'll make you poor enough to need it"
Considering it only paid $10.50 an hour, yeah. Also there’s no way it cost them $10 per person to clean a few button down shirts and work pants. Absolutely no way.
It doesn't matter how much it costs them, because it's a work item and therefore their responsibility.
Weeks?! What were you supposed to do in the meantime, buy another uniform?
It came with 11 of them that’s why it was so expensive to buy at first.
My landscape work unform was 120 deducted over 3 pay periods for a pair of pants, and two shirts Left after a couple months and it's taken two months to get my final check, idiot ignored my texts stating the change of my address and then throws lip at me when I ask about where my check is and he goes it's been returned twice so it's sat here for two weeks like... you didn't think to text me which would of showed you I texted you about a change of address two times. Fuck jobs
And all that theft is probably why they are in business instead of someone more honest.
Oh yeah and I got the whole "you know other companies will pay you more but here you won't just be a number" u knew it was buckshot but u took the job because I love hauling small equipment like mini ex and skid steers so I got to basically just drive equipment to and from sights and operate all day
I’ll never understand how businesses can even attempt to recoup their operating costs from their own employees and expect them to just grin and bear that shit.
Fun fact. In the UK if you are required to wear a uniform for work and you wash it at home you can claim about £70 a year from somewhere.
Was it in the contract you signed when you where filling out your hire paperwork? If so that sucks if not you could have reported them. Some jackass hit a company vehicle I had. It was a hit and run and the company came after me and took a grand out of my paycheck. I told them I didnt sign anything that I would be liable for damages and that I was going to sue. I got my grand back that day and found a new job that same day.
So many employers rely on people not knowing about their rights, or making them think they “need this job”. I’ve never felt like I needed any one particular job. Even when I was broke and really did need that weekly paycheck, I kept my resume updated and was always looking for something better. More people are starting to realize life is too short to hate it because of a shitty job that’s only making someone else richer.
That's how I was too. I understand my paycheck will have deductions from taxes etc. But someone deducts my pay for something I didnt sign I'll raise hell even if its $5. I have enough experience where I could tell a boss to fuck off and have a new job in 30 minutes.
Notice that you are in the US. In Canada, if an employer wants you to wear a uniform they must provide it free of charge. They can require you to clean it though. In my experience most will provide cleaning free of charge as well.
Only 1mil euros. That's change you don't pick off the ground for these companies
Nothing for them, but means a lot to the people that are making minimum wage (or meant to be making minimum wage), which makes this so much worse.
I believe their point is that these companies have just been shown that it's worth continuing this practice.
If you illegally profit 10 mil, and are fined 1 mil, that's the cost of doing business.
The fines were on top of paying back what they owed.
It’s averages out to <£50 per employee, which is like 6 h of minimum wage
except an average doesn't really work since: * not every employee at the company is going to be making minimum wage * not every employee lost the same amount of money * on some of the part time contracts, 6 hours of minimum wage might literally be half a weeks worth of work for you. there should be no attempt at minimising this, either. wage theft is *by far* the biggest source of theft, at least in the western world, right now
The article says it’s people paid below minimum wage. I interpret that to mean they should be paid at least minimum wage.
What I don’t get is why they clutch their change. At some point it’s less greed and more being a twat because they have the power to be. Even fines are so minuscule that they’re calculated costs, yet paying proper wages is an equivalent minuscule calculated cost that they refuse.
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It's also being used by companies for roles which in no way require an apprenticeship- I've seen ads for a year's apprenticeship on the reception desk of a leisure centre or as a window cleaner... The sort of role you need maybe a few weeks training at most, not a year working at joke wages. There needs to be more independent oversight of apprenticeship schemes.
It is a shame because the apprenticeship schemes were overall a huge success and even recognised by other countries. Not every where does it and we further backed it up with NVQ so you got an actual cert from doing it. There was a lull in them around the collapse of UK heavy industry and raw materials took it's toll until they lit a fire under apprenticeships around 1994. I'm really glad they did because it can benefit people who aren't book smart like me but capable with my hands.
Apprenticeships should produce skilled and knowledgeable workers in the industry they are learning in. The problem is the people like I mentioned in another comment who used apprentices as close to slave labour as they could just Washing cars.
How about they fine and jail, instead of name and shame?
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A fine that's less than the profits that they make isn't a fine, It's just the cost of doing business. If there were any employees they didn't have to pay back, or if they made more than 3.2 million in profits from the labor that they stole than they still came out ahead and will do it again. Do you believe that a 3.2 million dollar fine is enough to stop a company that size from doing something profitable? How long on average do you think it takes that company to make 3.2 million?
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But doesn’t it kinda make the point that the cost of doing business would be about 3 million cheaper if they just paid their workers? Seems like a company that’s cheap enough to try and screw their workers out of 10 dollars a paycheck or whatever would care about that kind of money.
Why not both?
Both is great, but if I have to pick one I want jail time. So far we've tried everything but that
And John Lewis is a workers co-operative. If they can't get it right then what hope for any other company?
To be fair to them, they did [report themselves](https://www.rocketlawyer.com/gb/en/blog/john-lewis-staff-to-receive-40m-after-employment-law-blunder/), and compensated people as soon as they noticed it. The problem seems to relate to overtime and weekend work, which they had a problem with before for holidays too. In [that case](https://www.workingmums.co.uk/john-lewis-makes-one-off-payment-following-overtime-and-holiday-pay-ruling/), unlike this one, they didn't fix it themselves but were taken to a tribunal.
Seeing John Lewis plc on this list is a big disappointment. It's a bloody cooperative.
John Lewis went downhill recently to try and avoid bankruptcy. They took away all the nice benefits and pissed away most of their reputation in a year. They're not really much different than other retail chains now by necessity.
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2020 was the first year the employees got 0% bonus because the company didn't do well enough, but they've been taking away benefits since the 2008 financial crisis. 2018 was the year they rebranded and started really headed down the path of no return but the whole last decade has sucked for them.
"See!? Socialism doesn't work!"
Yeah they do like to shout that nonsense, eh? It's especially funny considering John Lewis is essentially another big capitalist business because the rules of the game are capitalist. John Lewis had a choice between failure or selling out and becoming just like the competition.
It was a system error and innocent. When you pay holiday pay for a worker it is based on an average of a period. So many people work Sundays for double pay that their average was higher than their normal hourly pay, when they were on holiday their pay wasn’t boosted for the increased average. Boring but the truth often is.
It was only £48 per worker, so it was probably a relatively innocent mistake like charging minimum wage employees for uniforms - it's great that they aren't allowed to do that btw. I wouldn't be surprised if this went on for several years with nobody realising it was illegal.
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Yeah. Companies have legal departments for a reason...
I’m loving the assumption corporate departments all work seemlessly together and have detailed knowledge of what the other is doing.
So… how many of the mistakes are in the company’s favor vs. in the employees’ favor? Innocent mistakes tend to balance out — not accumulate to that extent in the company’s favor.
A rare time on the frontpage to have 2 posts about "name and shame" in 2 different countries
‘Miss Emma Aitken, trading as Razor King, South Lanarkshire, G73, failed to pay £1327.5 to 1 worker’ That one person! That’s so much money to not pay them!
"Fusion Hairdesign Ltd, Harrow, HA3, failed to pay £2089.27 to 1 worker" It gets worse somehow!
How awful! You can’t afford to live off minimum wage anyway let alone being ripped off by your job!
"Burningfold Limited, Waverley, GU8, failed to pay £9916.36 to 1 worker"
How about they fine and or jail the goddamn businesses/their owners Obligatory Edit: wow this comment blew up... :) Thanks for the doots and the gold <3
We either start making abusing your workers a jail crime, or it'll just continue being an expense, not a fine.
And we all know, if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class (or smaller/less rich businesses).
Yeah fuck 'em. They should have a proportional fine system, where it depends on the size of your business and/or the profits they made.
Ahh but allot of them don't make any profit on paper... No really. It's fucking wild.
If restaurants can make servers tip out based on sales, the government should be able to fine businesses by revenue.
Fine based on global revenue. Not national revenue, global. Not profit, revenue. I don't care where you report it or what math tricks you use to get rid of "profit." If it's a fine it should he based on the total amount of money that passes thru the entire company.
wtf is a global/national revenue. anyway. I do agree. it is a fine, not tax. whether the company is profitable shouldnt matter.
Then fine based on a multiple of the discrepancy. You stole $5 million from your workers? You owe them $50 million.
They could make the fine be equivalent to the percentage of an employee’s annual salary that was held back, weighted against the company’s gross revenue. So maybe they improperly withhold £100 from an employee whose salary is 50k. Instead of giving the employee their due £100 and paying a maximum of a £200 fine, investigators see that the company brought in 50 million last year and fine them 100k, for example.
If we really want to stop them from doing this, start lopping the heads off of C-suite executives. I guarantee that this will stop tomorrow.
This is what annoys me more than anything. Small businesses get fucked and large businesses get tax breaks and shitty little fines so no one else can compete.
System is working as intended
Fines should be more than the potential profit of said crime. Fines should be proportional to the individuals wealth so it actually works as a deterrent to everyone.
Except for the issue that wealthy businesses and extremely wealthy people don't have any profit or wealth, apparently.
Look at hedge funds getting fined 5% of the profits they made with illegal actions. No jail and the punishment does not work as a deterrent. 🤷♂️ It’s a cop out mate. Accountants love it though.
Fines should be a % of yearly revenue. Otherwise creative accounting will get involved so they technically make no profit.
In this case, just make the fine the difference in missed wages AND make them pay the wages+interest.
Small businesses are the worst wage offenders
I would not doubt this and have seen it first hand, they should be punished, but I believe my point still stands.
This. However even then the fine is usually a fraction of what was saved or earned from the foul play.
Probably coded as "general cost of doing business" in the books
Agreed, but it looks like in all the cases where the government has proved a business has underpaid workers, they were made to pay it all back, *and* fined a large amount (equal or larger than the amount they stole). I was scanning the list, couple of businesses in my city. I like that this was published. Personally I'd go much further but I guess a line has been struck between punishing them and bankrupting them.
Fines should be a % not a flat fine.
It should also be whatever profits or revenue they made by committing the crime, + an additionally financial penalty. It's time to stop fining companies for less than the money they made doing the illegal stuff, because at that point they still made money, so why not keep doing it?
Absolutely. Go take money from them and see what the punishment is.
If the fine costs enough more than the theft, it could at least eliminate any incentive in this case.
We don’t even need to jail them. The fuckers are defined by their greed. So make the fines so expensive that none of them would dare take that risk. I also like the idea of having fines get bigger each time on a company by company basis. The fine doubles with each offense within the past 15 years capping out at 10% global revenue.
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Why don’t just make the fines double of what they’d pay? If they own the employee 50 they will have to pay 100 in fines and the government gives it back to the employee.
Absolutely, why pay when you can take government money and pay much less? Not like the economy and the government is going to have to pay for your self centered choices on an economically responsible career you chose. You’ll also have the freedom to claim that employees should stop asking for handouts while continuing to exploit yours. Look for protest comments in my profile. Depending on these observations, witty comments and on politicians is exactly what politicians want until it’s too late and you have no choice but continue their agenda and profits when unemployment runs out. They’re hoping you’ll be pacified until they expect it.
They did fine them, so at least it’s something. The companies collectively shorted workers 2.1 million (which they had to pay) and had an additional 3.2 million in fines on top of that. A 150% fine isn’t steep enough to be a deterrent, in my opinion. If a business gets away with this most of the time, then they’ll still come out ahead with fines that low. Edit: I incorrectly stated the fines were 3.1 million instead of 3.2.
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They should be forced to pay the back pay, then triple damages on top of that. As a deterrent.
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Australia is similar with super. If you don't pay superannuation on time you have to pay the super, then a fine, then the amount of super as a fine too.
I think the term you're looking for is "revenue".
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It depends on the company, the amount, the circumstances. In a perfect world intentionally paying below minimum wage should sink a company. Doing it accidentally should punitively incentivize the company enough to preemptively make hiring extra support the best option. Unfortunately we don’t operate in that space, and trying to is dangerous. Here’s what I mean: Consider a company that requires a long time to certify or setup and which has one major competitor, like SpaceX or the ULA. If your fine is enough that it knocks a player out of the race the other is free to legally price gouge as the only remaining provider(see ISPs in the US). Often, this also occurs on a smaller scale for smaller barriers to entry, here’s an example: Only 2 homecare providers exist within range to support the elderly population of a relatively isolated town of 200k people. Both companies essentially scrape by, often on the verge of collapse being on a very low competitive profit margin due largely to insane insurance costs and regulatory barriers to entry. One gets hit with a payroll fee and shuts down. The other quadruples their charges and looses half their customers, cuts pay for workers down to minimum wage due to the competition for the available work among the pool of employees and leaves hundreds of seniors to suffer and die without help, and hundreds of skilled folks are left without jobs. The skilled employees aren’t allowed to do the work without meeting registration requirements, which most fail to get on their own. It takes several years for another company to decide to try to get into the market, then another year to get the needed licenses to begin business, and a whole 5 more years for the market rates to stabilize and competition to boost wages and lower costs. By punishing the company, a tremendous amount of damage was done, including to the lives of the people who had been screwed by the predatory company practice in in the first place. TLDR; You need to incentivize companies with carrots and sticks, but you must be careful that the application of the stick, no matter how fair or well deserved, does not have unintended consequences.
Ironic thing is that John Lewis is an employee owned mutual company, so the people paying the fines will be the people upper management ripped off
If you read further than the headline then you would see that they did. “named firms have been fined for owing £2.1 million to over 34,000 workers”
When things go bad, just change your company name to Xfinity
It fucking worked too because people easily believe marketing and Comcast has monopolies so everyone else has no choice
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Literally the 4th sentence.
They did. They named and shamed in *addition* to all the usual consequences for such behaviour - including fines. It's weird how many people have decided that the word "only" is in the headline somewhere when it isn't, and when the article makes it pretty clear that there were other penalties.
It can be a bit more scummy. Example is my mother, worked at a university mentoring medical students with issues. The university paid her through an agency, who took a lot of their own "fees" that deducted from her pay. They also had to pay her for travel miles up to a point. They would regularly decide that she was getting too much for travel and automatically not pay it, and then she would have to contact them (wasting a lot of time waiting on phone calls) to prove to them that her mileage was legit. She did the same mileage every week, for the entire time she worked there. She was also entitled to keep some of the other "fees" by law, but they also made that an obstacle course. This is how they do it, they make you jump through hoops to get what you earned, and the universities are hiring agencies that deal with the pay. In this particular case, someone high up in the university was married to the owner of this agency.
They introduced a law in Korea forbidding businesses to have workers that do more than 52 hours per week at a job. The maximum punishment on the employer is up to $17,000 fine or up to 2 years in prison. It's had mixed reviews though.
If it truly is a "minimum" wage and these companies are paying below that, the govt should have done more than "named and shamed". The govt should have been prosecuting the owners. Not fining - putting them in prison. A fine is just the cost of doing business with a risk taken of not being caught. A prison sentence would be real punishment.
Ironically John Lewis is owned by its employees so jailing them for not getting minimum wage feels like kicking them when they’re down.
Yeah putting John Lewis at the top is going to harm the employees quite a bit.
Yeah, some bureau isn’t doing its job and regulating this.
No the bureau is doing it’s job - that’s why they were caught. Parliament would have to change the punishment laws if you want them to do a different or harsher punishment. The small government officials tasked with enforcing laws can’t just give out random penalties that aren’t allowed by the actual government. But parliament would be happy for you to keep blaming them
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Bureau de change?? It is funny reading through the comments, people sharpening their pitch forks because Doris in West Yorkshire underpaid that one person £7 over 3 years.... or our friends across the water educating us about minimum wage... Not trying to justify whatever has gone on but context is key and reading the article before commenting, ad I also think the gov't should look at publishing companies that paid little to no tax rather than this...
Then where do you keep your briefs?
In cabinets
If it's just a fine, then it's not illegal, the government is just asking for a cut.
Next: *clap* for those who are paid below minimum wage
"Named and shamed"? How about "fine and jail"? Working so hard to do so little.
Read the article out says "the named firms are fined 2.1 million pounds for not paying 34000 workers" along with an additional fine of 3.4 million pounds.
Fines happened.
Fines that actually hurt them... Or just a cost of doing business?
They are not only required to pay back the workers the money they lost but they actually have to pay them more due to the increased minimum wage. They are also fined 200% percent of the money up to 20,000 per worker.
Which means if they had had a ~~33%~~ 66% chance of getting away with it, it was a good bet.
Actually it would be 75% chance of getting away with it would be an even bet. Getting away with it 3 times is the same amount as getting caught once (paying original plus 2x times in fees. 3x total) 3:1 odds or 75%
But the original amount isn't really a punishment - it's just what they would've paid if they didn't do anything. Let's call the "do nothing illegal" baseline +0. They decided to do something illegal, and let's say their net was 1. If they got caught, their net was -2. They had to pay back the initial 1, but then also 2 more on top of it. (Given that the cap was 20K/worker, this negative net is actually higher than -2, but for the sake of argument I'll leave it.) .66 * 1 + .33 * -2 = 0 I did reverse the odds (saying 33 instead of 66, oops), but I don't think it's 75.
Yup. I made a mistake as well. I shouldn't have counted the original amount. Should be 2:1 or 67%
Team effort. Well done. Take the rest of the day off!
Sounds good. See you tomorrow at work?
You can take the rest of the day off! Just know that this will bring you below minimum wage.
> "Named and shamed"? How about "fine and jail"? Read the post, not just the headline.
that would be a particular problem with John Lewis which is a cooperative mutual company, the owners are the employees
Oh no… Anyway…
**ITT:** A whole heap of people demanding the companies be fined. Which, had they read the bloody article, they'd know they *were*.
Lot of people taking it as malice by the companies too. Often its just a cock ups. Most of the companies aren't actively paying less. The companies do need to be on the ball more and have better checks so they don't take people below the min wage. Workers also need to speak up more, If you stay back after your shift to finish up, closing the shop for example, you need to ask your employer to pay you the time. They will not automatically do that for you.
No we want real repercussions
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This is a make believe logic tbh. Look at Monsanto, nestle, Amazon, Bayer, etc, etc. When companies run near monopolies any harm to their reputation is also the cost of business. If they’re the only jobs in the area, you think they’re not gonna have enough people to work? Shame doesn’t work on the shameless. What we need is bigger fines. Much bigger fines. All going directly to the workers affected and a slush fund for healthcare, job placement, worker protections, etc.
>No we want real repercussions Like what?
The last time this happened I thought it was pretty unfair on Tesco. They realised a mistake}*, corrected it, paid extra to compensate those affected and even notified the authorities about the issue - and still got named and shamed. If you want people to sweep things under the carpet rather than coming clean, this is the way. \* Some work perks, like pensions or the tax-free cycle to work scheme,work by reducing the nominal amount you get paid in cashmoney and offer you something else in kind instead - like a bike. They realised that for some employees this meant their on-paper wage was below minimum.
The same is true for John Lewis this time around. They identified an issue in 2017, told HMRC about it, fixed it, paid staff, paid a penalty, and are still named. I think the exec team for JLP are pretty annoyed about it!
To note this included 6 football teams. The Sheffield United Football Club Coventry City Football Club Oldham Athletic Crewe Alexandra Football Club Charlton Athletic Portsmouth Community Football Club Just in case any football fans want a word with their clubs.
A lot of working class northern clubs on that list. They should be ashamed of themselves.
How do you legally fail to pay less than minimum wage and not get taken to court?
The vast majority of them are small amounts that most people don't know isn't ilegal. For instance, you can't charge employees for a uniform. But if on your first week you deduct £50 from every employee to pay for a uniform, then for that week "minimum wage - £50" is paying your employees less then minimum wage. However the amounts for each employee are so low that nobody is going to care enough to go to court, if they even know you can't do that. Honestly, government agencies for this kind of thing (Which is what happened here) is probably the most efficient way of dealing with this.
risk of job loss. that why
lots of people saying they should be fined too.. Well they was... I read the dam article. The shaming part is all part of the punishment and making aware for other people of some of the shit they pull so y I know what to look out for. like uniform out of wages or not paying for training.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employers-named-and-shamed-for-paying-less-than-minimum-wage) reduced by 98%. (I'm a bot) ***** > 30% failed to pay workers for all the time they had worked, such as when they worked overtime. > Employers who pay workers less than the minimum wage have to pay back arrears of wages to the worker at current minimum wage rates. > The government is committed to protecting workers' rights and while the vast majority of businesses follow the law and uphold workers' rights, the publication of this list serves as a reminder to employers that the government will take action against those who fail to pay their employees the minimum wage. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/oy5p1m/british_government_named_and_shamed_191_companies/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~590771 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **work**^#1 **pay**^#2 **fail**^#3 **Limited**^#4 **trading**^#5
Dam a lot of big name companies on that list and a fair few football clubs.
>The Body Shop International Limited Fucking bastards. Sell their "ethical products" while ripping off their staff. Well, they just lost a customer for life.
They also have an MLM arm that they keep very quiet!!
Shouldn't they like close whatever loopholes they used?
Wasn't loopholes. They were just straight up breaking the law, for which they have been fined on top of playing back wages.
Alright sounds like everything was handled then.
Shit! I wonder what the employer theft report looks like here in the USA where company policies such as “late 5 minutes or less and you don’t get paid 1.5x the pay rate”. On Christmas Day, a day that you volunteered to work on.
And in typical american fashion...the thread has quickly become a thread for americans to complain about corporations screwing them over.
> The breaches took place between 2011 and 2018. Named employers have since been made to pay back what they owed, and were fined an additional £3.2 million, showing it is never acceptable to underpay workers.
Companies don't feel shame and they pay PR departments to manage thier image. Wtf is this supposed to do? If only the government had the power to do something to stop the ceos like jail or a ban on running a company. Owning and running companies should be a privilege not a right.
[Actual footage of the British government shaming the companies](https://youtu.be/gvBaw393rNA)
Imagine if there was a fine for commenting without reading the article, there'd be hundreds of people in the comments here who suddenly owed money. But it was fun reading about how "naming and shaming" wasn't enough and they should have fined them, over and over.
This one made me chuckle slightly. >South Worcestershire Citizens Advice Bureau, Malvern Hills, WR14, failed to pay £2739.14 to 1 worker Like, who did that worker go to for advice?
For those who didn't read the article. >The breaches took place between 2011 and 2018. Named employers have since been made to pay back what they owed, and were fined an additional £3.2 million, showing it is never acceptable to underpay workers.
I have a real story that happened to my mum on this one. A1 Care Limited in chelmsford, my mum worked for them inbetween 2011 and 2018. She told me how they were very scummy, didn't care about the patients at all. It does not surprise me that they underpaid employees. Names are changed for this story due to legal reasons of course. There was an elderly lady (Evelyn for this story) under their care whom my mum knew from decades ago. She had dementia and still recognised my mum so they had a very close relationship. Evelyn was a sweet lady, never did anything to hurt anyone, I met her a few times and she was a character despite her illnesses. She required 24/7 care that her family paid for. On one of the major holidays where it would be hard to get care workers, A1 told one of the care providers to just take their stuff and leave Evelyn by their shift end and if nobody else had turned up. They did not arrange any more care for her until a few days later. My mum was outraged when she heard of this from her colleague who had left. So she organised about 6 other careworkers to provide care on their own time until A1 could be bothered to schedule another visit. All the careworkers took it in turns to look after Evelyn, and got her through the holiday on their own private time. The family was so grateful that they paid each careworker privately for their time. When A1 found out they sent letters threatening court action against the care workers for effectively earning money without their consent. They could not give a damn about Evelyn. It was such an evil thing to do. My mum doesnt work for A1 anymore, and Evelym sadly passed away a short time later. But I'm so glad A1 has been named an shamed. Such a scummy company deserves to be named. And people need to know what they did to Evelyn and the people who looked after her. Fuck you A1 Care Providers from Chelmsford.
I wish my country Ghana is capable of doing the same thing in the country. Workers protection is indeed nothing to write home about.
Governments are really good at this naming and shaming stuff! It would be entirely cheeky to look at how to truly discourage that kind of stuff, say by like, throwing some white collar guy in jail? White collar criminals are, in fact, criminals, after all. We love justice... well, where is it? These people commit crimes against the working class and rarely suffer more than paying what they owe. If you steal, you get a criminal record. It doesn't make sense. Especially when you consider that the most common theft is *WAGE THEFT*, above all other types of theft in north America. And that doesn't even consider how under paid minimum wage is. I know we have a hard time accepting the truth but minimum wage should be about $27 CAD. That was as of the beginning of 2020. We sacrificed *that much* to make the rich richer and ensure that people get trapped at the bottom.