Poetic justice for Poundland?
If any of you remember Cait Reilly, you may think this is poetic justice for Poundland.
The discount chain fell into some disrepute back in 2012 when it was revealed that Ms Reilly had been forced to give up volunteering at the Pen Room museum in Birmingham (she was hoping it would lead to a curatorship further down the line) in order to work for nothing at Poundland, sweeping the floors on a government scheme.
She was told she would lose her £53-a-week Jobseeker’s Allowance if she did not submit to the “forced labour” of stacking shelves for the discount retailer, which did not have to pay her.
I crunched the numbers at the time and came up with the following:
Poundland’s annual profit in 2010 was £21,500,000. Split among its 390-odd stores, that’s more than £54,000 – or enough to pay three extra employees, per store, on minimum wage, with cash to spare. That’s up from the previous year, when it could have paid two extra employees on minimum wage, with cash to spare.
Ms Reilly said in a Telegraph article: “There were five of us sent there. I was the only graduate. We were doing exactly the same work as the paid staff. It makes no sense.
“If the Government subsidises high street chains with free labour, they don’t have to recruit. It causes unemployment rather than solves it.”
She took the government of the day (the ConDem Coalition) to court for breaching her human rights and won on appeal – but the government was told that in future the scheme must be entirely voluntary.
As for Poundland, I wrote:
It is not the taxpayers’ responsibility to pay the wages of people employed by a private company. If Poundland wants people to stack its shelves, it should hire them at a living wage, rather than ask the government to provide workers and pay them only in state benefits.
It could be argued that Poundland has been providing a public service for the government by taking on Workfare jobseekers when it didn’t need any more employees. If this is the case, we must ask why Cait Reilly was promised a job interview at the end of it. The fact that the promised interview never happened, I think, also provides our answer: Poundland has been taking advantage of the scheme to get cheap labour.
After the ruling, Poundland distanced itself from the scheme – but the damage to its reputation had already been done.
Now, Poundland’s Polish owner Pepco has said it is considering putting the chain up for sale after warning tax changes coming in April will put the firm under pressure.
It now has 825 UK stores but sales dropped in January and February and rises in National Insurance and the minimum wage set to be imposed in April are likely to impact on Poundland’s costs.
Considering its past treatment of people working there, I can well understand why Poundland would not want to pay a well-earned increase in wages and NI contributions.
Apparently Pepco’s chains in Europe continue to be profitable so the firm wants to separate them from a brand it now considers to be a liability, rather than absorb reduced profits in the UK across all its businesses.
This would indicate that the philosophy that exploited people like Cait Reilly in order to profit from free work is still thriving in a firm that would abandon all its UK employees at the first sign of difficulty.
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it’s not only Poundland it’s charities and local businesses who take unemployed sick disabled and mentally ill
Of course this exploitation has gone on for years mostly under Labour but also Tories/Lib Dem.
I have an “anecdote” (as the Government would call it) from the 90’s whilst working nights at United Carriers (now TNT).
Written on the wall of a trailer was something that seemed amusing on the face of it but demonstrated the Exploitation of Workers as well as Casual Racism…
“WANTED YTS Worker – Must be Flexible, Strong and Willing to Work in All Weathers, Preferably Black – I need a new Mudflap”.