Martin Walsh wrote: ↑Yesterday, 08:11
The additional 1.75% for new entrants with the 3% will mean they are 7.1% away from parity of pay with old contracts on the national basic and 13.2% away from parity with the supplement.
7.1% lower flat hourly, 13.2% lower when you include delivery supplement. That doesn't sound too bad, but what about paid meal relief? This isn't mentioned much in talks about equalisation.
Remember that when you compare a 37 hour week from contract to contract, the old contract works 34 hours of 37 as 3 hours are paid breaks. The new contract works 37 of 37 hours, takes 3 hours of unpaid breaks. This is a 3 hour difference in time spent at work and a 3 hour difference in amount of actual work done.
That's a difference of just under 9% in pay per hour worked. Add that to your 13.2% and the real difference if both contracts do 34 hours of actual paid work per week, spending 37 hours at work taking 3 hours of breaks is 22%.
Not only that, but national minimum wage has increased by 11% in two years. In 2024 it was £11.44/h. Two years later it's £12.71. If it increases at this rate over the next two years NMW will be ~£14.10/h and the new hourly of £13.68 for new contracts is only 7.6% above the current NWM.
Doesn't this mean as minimum wage catches up, the 1.75% increase to base will eventually get eaten up as RM will have to increase their rates anyway to comply with NMW laws? This 1.75% is only temporary wheras the 1.25x rate over 40 hours worked was a permenant benefit of the contract, even if not everyone benefitted from it. No matter what NMW increases to, that 1.25x would always be a plus.
Martin Walsh wrote: ↑Yesterday, 08:11
If you include Christmas then out of 28575 new entrants only 998 new entrants per week ever worked above 40 hours. If you removed the 4 weeks of Christmas this reduced to 566 new entrants working above 40 hours.
What are these numbers based on? Who gave them and what data did they use to back it up? I find this absolutely baffling as I'd estimate at least 80% of new entrants in my office have done at least one week over 43 hours, even if they average around 31 throughout the year.
Remember, 28575 new entrants, but only 14,000 or so have been in the business more than a year. I started on a 25h contract and it took almost a year to get consistent overtime above 40 hours per week.
The real number I'd like to see is out of every single person who has been employed on the new contract, how many of them ever did more than 43 hours in a week? How likely is it that a lot of those 40+ hour workers have just left to work elsewhere and 14,000 people with under a year in the business are still learning?
As one of the "3.5%" doing 43+ hours a week on the new contracts what reason do I have to vote yes to this change? If there were clear incremental steps then sure, but all we've been given is undefined promises that we'll get more later. But we've already been told... first step in September, full path in December and that was almost a year ago. I simply don't believe a word the CWU says about equalisation anymore because I don't believe they have any leverage at all and I can't see a single reason why RM would increase their wage bill unless they had absolutely atrocious retention rates.
Daniel Kretinsky himself said at the B&T committee RM doesn't have a retention crisis, they get 15 applicants for every position! It's only a matter of time before new contracts out number old contracts. If we reach that point without any real progress on equalisation then it won't be us new entrants getting better terms, it'll be the old contracts getting ours.
