Small business retailers including small business newsagents could leverage the negative press about Coles having underpaid its workers and the 7-Eleven scandal of employee underpayment.
These recent scandals are examples of big businesses behaving badly for they represent institutionalised behaviour designed to treat employees unfairly.
While not all big businesses are the same, Coles and 7-Eleven have high profiles, they would be considered respected brands by Australians. The scandals ought to negatively affect the performance of their retail outlets. However, their size and ad spend enables them to trade on without impact.
I think we in small business have an opportunity to speak about the systematic poor treatment of employees by any big business caught. We should say shame on them and remind our community that in small business it is more personal with employees closer to the boss and more empowered and able to address any pay anomaly.
When someone buys a magazine from a newsagent rather than a 7-Eleven the customer can have more certainty about the employee terms, the fairness of pay and that the newsagent is not engaged in a roster con that sees employees paid half or less than the law requires.
Sure any campaign or comment would neb negative. that is because 7-Eleven and Coles have acted negatively, unfairly, to their employees as the media and other reports have revealed. Their actions ought to have a significant cost to their businesses. We can help share our stories, comparing these stories to what it would have been like at Coles and 7-Eleven. We can do this to uphold small business retailers as good employers.
While it is possible there are unethical small business employers out there, their size means they can do less damage than a big business with a work force in the thousands or tens of thousands.
7-Eleven promotes their $1 barista coffee and Coles promotes that their prices are down. One way to cut prices is costs. Labour represents the first or second highest operating cost in a business. Underpay your staff and you can offer cheaper prices. It stands to reason.
In my opinion small business retailers should talk about the issues more, making the most of the bad behaviour of Coles and 7-Eleven.
These cossie deals between unions and big business when negotiating EBA’s on pay rates and penalty rates have been a problem for a long time and its good to see the FWA finally using the no disadvantage test. The deal between Coles and the SDA was particularly dodgy with the SDA rebating $6M to Coles a year to administer the deduction of union fees from their payrole, I suppose rebates a better word than Kickback.
To be honest if nothing is going to happen on reducing penalty rates I think the Greens policy of enshrining penalty rates in law has some merit. At least if there enshrined in law no one can negotiate them away and big business wont have a labour cost advantage over small business. It would also be fun watching the union movement tying itself in knots over a proposal they can’t really oppose but is going to severely affect there power in negotiations with the likes of Coles.