Unpaid Work - Who Benefits?
Go Back- 19th May 2016
The SDA is prosecuting a number of major campaigns at the moment – Protect Penalty Rates, At What Cost? And 100% Pay at 18. These are all important campaigns and we will continue to fight the good fight. However, on the basis that we can both walk and chew gum, we have another important issue that demands our attention.
At the recent SDA National Executive, I raised with the other Branch Secretaries the issue of unpaid work – members working “off the clock”. It turns out that this is not just a Western Australian phenomenon, but is prevalent around the country. The National Executive took the view that we should direct our attention to this practice with a view to wiping it out.
It will not have escaped members’ attention that wage budgets, particularly cuts thereto, has been a focus on management attention in many major retail chains. Now I know the retailers claim to have sophisticated models that calculate exactly how many hours of labour they need at any particular time and they use these models to establish their wage spend. This is a lovely story and would have even more appeal if only it could be believed. While I accept that there needs to be some basis for setting budgets, establishing proper staffing levels is, in my view, more an art rather than a science. The customers, bless them, are notoriously recalcitrant with respect to adhering to the model. Sometimes they shop when you least expect it – and sometimes they don’t when you do. Some of them take longer at the checkout than others – I was recently in line behind an older gent at a supermarket who took longer to take his cash out of his wallet than it took the cashier to ring up his 20-odd items. Some of them want assistance in finding things. Some of them spill stuff on the floor that needs cleaning. In short, there are many variables and no model can be accurate most, let alone all of the time.
In any case, the overwhelming view of members is now, and has been for some time, that wages budgets are inadequate to effectively staff stores. And yet cuts continue to be made. Something has to give – and it appears that many members are relieving the tension by working off the clock. In some cases, the member works past their rostered finishing time but does not claim overtime. Other cases that have come to my attention involve members clocking off and then returning to work. Neither of these scenarios is legal or sensible.
I understand the motivation of members – in many cases they are simply helping out their manager who, let’s face it, is probably under a wee bit of pressure themselves and likely to be working 65+ hour weeks. Some members do it out of a sense of responsibility to the company and pride in their work. It may be, in some cases, that subtle (or indeed unsubtle) pressure is applied by the less scrupulous of managers. Irrespective of where the motivation comes from, the practice must be stopped.
Leaving aside the ethical and legal issues for the companies, there are two main problems that I can see with allowing it to continue. The first is simply an issue of fairness, the second an issue of strategy. Firstly to fairness. Take a typical supermarket. Suppose the employees of that supermarket give a total (between them) of 50 hours of free work a week. That is probably less than half an hour per person and so, if anything, an understated figure. If we assume that the unpaid hours are worked by adults, that supermarket will save itself somewhere in the region of $71,500 per year. But let’s start aggregating. Based on the number of stores in the major chains, that means in the case of a supermarket chain a saving of over $6 Million per year in WA alone. Nationally, the figure will be in excess of $60 million. $60 million on the company’s already very healthy bottom line that legally belongs in the pockets of SDA members. That is simply unfair. Our members should not be subsidising the profits of major companies by providing free labour.
The second issue is one of strategy. Long term members will have noticed a trend – wages budgets seem to regularly go down, rather than up. The people who make the decisions on the size of those budgets (people typically sitting in offices in Sydney and Melbourne) do not face the customers. Their workload does not change if budgets are cut. However, and this is the point I want to make as firmly as I can, if we continue to provide free labour, and maintain service and presentation standards, how likely is it that those people will reinstate the old budget levels? The answer is clear – they will not: why would they? Further, there may be a temptation to make further cuts and this is the last thing members want or need.
Working off the clock may seem necessary, or inevitable, or a favour to your manager, or whatever. But it should be seen for what it is: free labour for companies. The old maxim of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”, much beloved by the Union movement, seems to be rapidly falling out of favour. We must not let it.
Peter O'Keeffe,
Secretary
