Sports Direct Transline workers still to receive back pay, claims union
MPs have been told workers at sportswear retailer Sports Direct’s Shirebrook site, found to have been paid under National Minimum Wage, are still to receive outstanding back pay for these shifts.
Providing evidence to the government’s Future of World of Work inquiry in Parliament this morning, Steve Turner, the assistant general secretary of the Unite union, told the business, energy and industrial strategy committee that labour procurer Transline, who along with The Best Connection (TBC) supply over 3,000 agency workers to work for Sports Direct in its Shirebrook warehouse, has refused to honour their part of an agreement made last August to award workers around £1m backpay after it emerged some Sports Direct workers had been paid less than the legal amount.
While Turner revealed both Best Connection and Sports Direct had honoured the agreement, he expressed concerns that Transline had been refusing to refund unpaid wages from the period before it took over contracts from blue collar recruiter Blue Arrow in 2014.
Last summer, Unite issued a statement in which it said it understood as many as 1,700 Transline agency workers at the site may only initially receive half the back pay they are owed because of what the union referred to as Transline’s “refusal to honour its commitments” from when it took over from Blue Arrow at Shirebrook.
Turner told MPs: “Transline has refused to pay the backpayment for the non-payment of NMW for the period of employment that employees had before Transline took over the contract. So they are refusing to honour the transfer of undertakings regulations.
“This is a huge issue. This is hundreds and hundreds of pounds for thousands of workers, where Best Connection, the other agency, has honoured the agreement and paid in full that a commitment that it had. Sports Direct has paid in full – the backpay commitment that it had for its employees. But one agency, Transline, has decided it’s not going to do that.”
Commenting on Turner’s claims, a Transline spokesperson told Recruiter: “All back payments have been made to Transline employees over the period in question. For those employees that worked for Blue Arrow and then transferred to Transline, we have been working with HMRC and are awaiting their guidance on how TUPE applies to the period that those employees worked for Blue Arrow. We will act according to their feedback as soon as this is received.”
Working practices at Sports Direct’s Shirebrook site came under scrutiny in October 2015 from the BBC's Inside Out programme, under which staff could be fired for accruing ‘strikes’ for spending too long in the toilet, excessive chatting or taking a day off sick, prompting subsequent investigations from Parliament and an internal one from Sports Direct, which resulted in the suspension of the six strikes policy.
Providing evidence in a subsequent session on how Transline has boosted compliance in the wake of Parliament’s investigation, Transline’s finance director Jennifer Hardy told the panel the agency had engaged with outside auditors to review their business and has ensured contracts have been rewritten to make them easier to understand to ensure workers better understand their terms and conditions of work.
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