Sports Direct will give £1 million to thousands of workers denied minimum wage

Last Updated: August 16, 2016By
Shoppers leaving a Sports Direct store [Image: Martin Pettitt/photopin cc].

Shoppers leaving a Sports Direct store [Image: Martin Pettitt/photopin cc].

It seems Mike Ashley, owner of Sports Direct, has been shamed into doing the right thing.

That’s great, but an issue with a company called Deliveroo has arisen since the Sports Direct saga started. Is anybody else wondering whether we have to tackle these companies one at a time in order to make any impact?

That would take years!

Deliveroo – a takeaway delivery firm – had been trying to impose a pilot scheme to pay £3.75 per delivery, instead of the present rates of £7 an hour plus £1 a delivery.

The company has since relented, and workers can opt out of the scheme.

It seems Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has a plan for businesses, as spokesman Jon Trickett outlined briefly in his comment on Deliveroo:

160816 Trickett on Deliveroo

Hopefully This Blog will have more on Workplace 2020 later.

Thousands of workers employed at the Sports Direct’s Shirebrook warehouse in Derbyshire can soon expect to receive a share of an estimated £1 million for non-payment of the minimum wage, one of the UK’s largest unions has announced.

The deal, secured by Unite and backed by 96% of its members employed by Sports Direct at Shirebrook, follows an admission by billionaire entrepreneur Mike Ashley of non-payment of the minimum wage at a recent hearing of the House of Commons Business Committee.

Thousands of direct employees and agency workers will now receive backdated wages for unpaid searches at the end of shifts, estimated to be worth £1,000 for some employees.

Workers employed at the warehouse in Shirebrook were required to go through unpaid searches at the end of each shift, meaning they were effectively denied the legal minimum wage. Others were hit by draconian deductions to their wages for being as little as a minute late for a shift.

[Unite assistent general secretary] Steve Turner added: “Mike Ashley and the Sports Direct board should be under no illusions. The charge of ‘Victorian’ work practices will continue to weigh heavily on Sports Direct until it moves long standing agency workers onto direct, permanent contracts and weans itself off its reliance upon zero hours contracts.”

Source: Sports Direct to hand over £1 million to thousands of workers denied minimum wage

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