18/08/2017

With an £800,000 fine, the retailer, Argos, paid a lion’s share of the record £1.9m penalties imposed on 233 employers in the latest iteration of the government scheme to ‘name and shame’ businesses that pay their workers less than the statutory National Minimum/National Living Wage.

The retail, hospitality and hairdressing sectors feature most frequently on ‘Employers named for NMW underpayment’ (Excel). In addition to the fines, the named businesses will have to pay more than 13,000 employees about £2m in back pay.

Argos, which was bought by Sainsbury’s a year ago, admitted failing to pay employees who had been required to attend briefings before their shifts started and to undergo security searches after their shifts ended.

37,000 staff were underpaid an average of £64 each. Only about 1/3 of them were included in the latest figures, however, as the others were no longer working for the company.

Other common employers’ errors included deducting money from paypackets to pay for uniforms, failure to account for overtime hours and wrongly paying apprentice rates to workers.