Woolworths has admitted to a court in Victoria that it underpaid more than a thousand of its staff members by a total of $1.24 million. It’s not even Friday yet and the grocery giant has already had one of its worst weeks of publicity ever, slow down Woolies!
First the week started with Woolworths’ outgoing CEO Brad “Imma Head Out Of This Interview” Banducci managing to break from his stereotype and actually stay in an interview with the Senate, who wanted to inquire about business practices and price gouging.
Problem was, though his endurance has improved, Brad still hasn’t got the hang of answering questions, as Greens Senator Nick McKim threatened Brad with jail time over his piss weak answers.
And now on Thursday, the green member of Australia’s supermarket duopoly admitted to a court in Melbourne that 1,235 ex-employees have been underpaid in the state of Victoria.
The company told the court that the issue had happened between November 2018 and January 2023, and occurred because it had been incorrectly paying its team members their long service leave entitlements.
The total amount of unpaid long service leave racked up to $1.24 million.
For perspective: at a Woolworths store that would be enough to buy 47,692 watermelons, and 196,825 packs of chips, or pay about a seventh of what CEO Brad Banducci admitted to making last year ($8.4 million).
@jemimawilliamsonwong In this economy?! Ps. Thats 172k a fortnight x #woolies #salary #groceries #fyp #auspol #australia ♬ original sound – Jemima
Woolworths shared with the court that in some cases workers were only owed a few hundred dollars.
However, others were owed as much as $12,000 from the company (AKA 461 watermelons, or one seven-hundredth of what Brad got paid).
And what was the reason that the company — whose annual profit last year was $1.62 billion BTW — gave for the short-changing error?
If you guessed “tech problems” then you’d be correct!
To the company’s credit, once it realised the error had occurred it made the effort of self-reporting the error and has made efforts to pay back its workers.
Which you could say is because it’s “the right thing to do” as Woolies barrister Saul Holt KC said.
Or, you could say it’s because the company shat itself when it discovered the maximum potential fine for this fault was a whopping $10.25 BILLION.
That’s the cost equivalent of — yes, I’m doing the watermelon bit again, deal with it — 394,230,769 watermelons from Woolworths, or 1,220 times the annual pay of Brad Banducci.
Unfortunately for fans of big numbers and big fines, that massive amount is unlikely to be asked of Woolworths. The more likely outcome is that it receives the maximum Victorian magistrate court fine of $480K.
Which (one last time) is the equivalent of 18,461 watermelons at a Woolworths, or about what Brad Banducci made every four weeks.
