John Lewis created plenty of headlines this morning after it admitted to potentially breaking minimum wage rules. The Financial Times writes that the department store has set aside £36m to rectify the breach linked to its ‘pay averaging’ system. The Guardian notes a payroll error at the Waitrose owner led to annual underpayment to thousands of staff, who may be due back pay for up to six years. John Lewis is working with HMRC to examine its practice of pay averaging, which aims to smooth out monthly pay over the year.
The Telegraph says the mistake is embarrassing for John Lewis as it has been “highly feted” by politicians for its employee-ownership model and its commitment to “happiness of all members”, who are known as partners within the company. Sky News has a cute line about the partnership insisting staff “were never knowingly underpaid”.
The Times notes John Lewis is the latest retailer to fall foul of minimum wage rules after a crackdown on employers. Tesco said in March that it was reimbursing workers £9.7m for payroll errors and both Argos and Debenhams have paid back wages this year. Alistair Osborne also goes with “never knowingly underpaid staff” as the headline for his business column in The Times in which he examines whether the breach is as bad as at other retailers.
Read the story on thegrocer.co.uk here.
Coca-Cola’s new chief executive James Quincey is to accelerate the company’s investments in start-ups, as the world’s largest soft drinks company seeks to diversify more quickly into healthier beverages and new trends (The Financial Times).
The latest BRC-KPMG retail sales statistics - which were picked up by most of the paper yesterday - gets more coverage, with The Mail leading on the line that a late Easter and inflation boosted spending levels in April.
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