Tran Nguyen
20 May 2024
Under the Long Service Leave Act 2018, employees are entitled to long service leave after 7 continuous years of service with an employer. These years of service include all full-time, part-time, casual, seasonal and fixed-term work.
Everyone knows who Woolworths is. And everyone has probably bought some groceries from there. We all know how large of a corporation Woolworths is and presumably they are generating sky-rocketing amounts of revenue each year.
How is it possible that a corporation this large can have flaws in their payroll systems such that they can go undetected for numerous years?
Woolworths has recently been the subject of vast allegations of underpayment to their employees incurred between November 2018 and January 2023.
The CEO, Brad Banducci was questioned by the Senate during an inquiry to which he was refusing to answer simple inquiries posed to him. Senator McKim had warned Mr Banducci that 6 months imprisonment could be a reality if he was held in contempt by the Senate Committee.
Woolworths was fined over $1.2 million for underpayments to hundreds of staff members, accumulating to more than $1 million in long service leave entitlements. The individual underpayment to eac staff member ranged from a few hundred dollars to a whopping $12,000 which was occurring over multiple years.
But how could this have happened? And how did it go undetected for so long? Seemingly, there was an error in the payroll system which was undetected for all these years, although it would have been reasonable for such a large corporation to have thorough and efficient payroll systems in place to prevent matters such as the present.
The Wage Inspectorate Victoria, Robert Hortle expressed that “Victorians expect these large businesses to get this stuff right”.
Given Woolworths initiative to self-report these payroll errors, Magistrate Nahrain Warba had reduced the fine imposed on Woolworths Group to $1,227,000 and its subsidiary Woolstar $36,000.
Additionally, pursuant to the orders, Woolworths had to pay the regulator’s legal costs which was a sum of $15,000.
Mr Hortle said that this sentencing and case should serve as a warning to other corporations and businesses.
“Each of these workers had been with Woolworths for at least seven years to qualify for long service leave, so it’s loyal, long-serving staff who have been affected,” he said in a statement.
Purely Dicta 