Underpaid Woolworths staff to wait for months for back pay

It will take at least eight months for 5700 employees to receive full entitlements as Woolworths probes underpayments.

Ripped off Woolworths staff will not get their full back pay for at least eight months after the supermarket giant said it would take until next June to finish its probe into how 5700 staff were underpaid up to $300 million, the nation’s biggest underpayment on record.

Interim back payments will be made to staff before Christmas to rectify two years of underpayments between September 2017 and August this year.

But the underpayments to annualised salaried staff have been occurring since 2010, and seven years of employee pay records are yet to be analysed.

Woolworths said more than 1.1 million individual employee records per year would be reviewed.

“Retrieving and reviewing individual rostering, time and attendance, and payroll data across all businesses is expected to take at least until the end of the financial year to complete,’’ the company said.

READ MORE: Woolworths apologises for underpaying 5700 staff | Fair Work to tackle ‘disturbing’ underpayments

Further interim payments beyond the pre-Christmas payment will be made to employees as each respective year of the review was completed.

The underpaid supermarket employees were paid an average annualised salary of $73,000 but the yearly pay was not enough to cover the overtime, penalty rates and allowances they were legally entitled to receive under the retail award.

Most of these workers are department managers at a store level who are on non-union annualised salary arrangements.

The company said a further 145,000 employees on an union-negotiated enterprise agreement were not affected.

Woolworths said the underpayments came to light when managers found out they were getting paid less than staff who reported to them.

The underpayments apply to workers at Big W, Dan Murphy’s and BWS as well as Woolworths’ supermarket business.

Initial analysis of two years of wage records show 5700 out of 11,000 supermarket employees have been underpaid.

Analysis is yet to be done of the pay of 8000 workers at Big W, Dan Murphy’s and BWS but their anticipated underpayment is included in the $200 million to $300 million estimate.

The Shop, Distributive, and Allied Employees Association said the union had been concerned about salary settings for salaried staff in the retail industry for some time.

“Whilst Woolworths has committed to rectifying these salary staff underpayments back to 2010, the SDA now calls on all retailers to audit their payroll settings especially for salary staff,’’ it said.

“Salaried staff are not ‘award free’ and their salary must exceed what they would have been paid if they were working under the award.”