Pay Increase 2021

[barafear]

Unfortunately, rather predictably, the trading update today was not accompanied by any "good news" for staff - I had a look at the early comments on OurT@sco, and it appears they all mentioned this lack of "thank you or a bonus" - I do agree with the race to the bottom - but it does seem hard to understand. Hey ho.

[General Thorn]

A manager in Lidl gets about £12 an hour.  Retail has historically been a poor paid sector.  What do people expect.  Inflation is not 6% either.

We are NOT Lidl and Tesco used to be about £1 over the minimum wage when I started.

 Retail may be a poorly paid sector but Tesco wages have been going backwards in real terms for a long time. Tesco have made vast profits because of our combined efforts and also because of the pandemic but still they plead poverty when it comes to paying us appropriately. I'm sure you'll notice that senior management and above do not have any problems trousering their enormous payrises every year but grudgingly offer us crumbs that we are meant to be grateful for.

As for inflation not being 6%, well it's not far off that. Maybe your bills are not going up by much but I would say everybody elses' are. Prices in store are going up by an awful lot more than 6%, mortgages/rents are rising and don't start me on electricity!

I live in a very cold part of the country which is all electric. When I read about the increases coming for the 'average' household I'm actually quite envious as I'm already paying that and more. Goodness only knows what kind of increase I'm going to face.

[Prince of Darkness]

Market supplements for skills and Team Supports have stood still for three years. The 2021 pay review announcement stated that they would be reviewed jointly with USDAW to be concluded by the end of 2021.

News on this?

[General Thorn]

When they brought in the skills payments you could see what they were thinking. The wage per hour has to go up if only to keep up with the living wage but skills payments do not. All these shift leaders coming in on what they think are decent wages are now finding out how poorly paid they really are.
 They have to do all the openings and closings and a lot of the work managers used to do. Managers leaving at 6pm latest, hand them a list of jobs that they want done by tomorrow, even though they've not got around to doing them. AM appears and picks out totally petty things to complain about (apparantly doesn't notice how understaffed we are) and these get added to the lists.
Shift leaders have to pick up overtime and have their shifts rearranged at short notice and all for a couple of £s extra an hour (£1.81?)

[NightAndDay]

The pay differentials for hourly paid roles have been decreasing year on year, whenever they do their pay reviews, the last few have been static pay increases to hourly paid roles regardless of skill level.

There was a massive Express Shift Leader retention problem years ago, it seems today nothings changed, the hourly pay has gotten worse when factoring in inflation, without shift leaders, Express stores can't run, they'll have to get SMs to run shifts which takes them away from their SM duties.

They really need to recognize Express Shift Leaders as salaried managers for the level of responsibility they have, compared to their competitors, at the moment they are the 2nd from bottom when compared with equivalent roles.

[penguin]

Totally agree on the express shift leader pay, and I speak as someone who has done the job, but then wages in retail in general are on a race to the bottom, the days when Tesco paid a fair rate to those below management level has long gone, in fact those days went about ten or more years ago, now you can earn more working in the local Amazon warehouse and so on.

[NightAndDay]

I know 4 Express SMs that in the past 5 months, about 70% of their shifts were running the early or late, one of them was baking for 1 month straight it's that bad, the Area Managers are acutely aware of the Express Shift Leader retention problem, so much so that the KPIs they have for SM performance around staff turnover and coaching shift leaders is currently embargoed (as far as I'm aware, specifically in London and Brighton stores where the cost of living are the highest in the country and as such, where recruitment and retention is currently most challenged) as all SMs in the group bar 1 or 2 exceptions would fail.

[Prince of Darkness]

The pay differentials for hourly paid roles have been decreasing year on year, whenever they do their pay reviews, the last few have been static pay increases to hourly paid roles regardless of skill level.

There was a massive Express Shift Leader retention problem years ago, it seems today nothings changed, the hourly pay has gotten worse when factoring in inflation, without shift leaders, Express stores can't run, they'll have to get SMs to run shifts which takes them away from their SM duties.

They really need to recognize Express Shift Leaders as salaried managers for the level of responsibility they have, compared to their competitors, at the moment they are the 2nd from bottom when compared with equivalent roles.

You mean like the Deputy Managers that each Express had until 6 or so years ago?   

[NightAndDay]

DSM's were made redundant as a cost cutting measure, to Dave's credit though, that was one of his better decisions, you do not need 3 layers of management in an express store, each DSM was replaced with 1 shift leader and 1 part time shift leader, the mistake came from not increasing Shift Leaders pay in light of their "5%" increase in responsibility.

For what a Shift Leader does in Express, they are easily equivalent (in some cases more so) than TMs in superstore, especially now that they have SL's in the structure, the main key difference is SL in Express and SL in SS is that the Express SL is the highest authority present 80% of the time when the SM isn't there, they also have responsibility for the premises and S&L while in SS there's someone more senior who manages that present.

SL in Express should have always been a salaried role at around just above base TM salary (in todays money about £24k a year.)

[Prince of Darkness]

I know a bit too much about Express having spent 3+ years as a TL. The SL role is very varied in demand. A well-staffed shift and you can get a lot done without too much stress, but find that you have only one CA past 19.30 and a late grocery delivery and life can be quite unpleasant. I'm doing my best to avoid going back.

Howver, back on topic, I'll be interested to see how much of a rise on the skills payment is offered and whether they fudge it further by offering extra in London for example.

[Alvor the grear]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60279019  interesting interview with Tesco chairman John Allan on the bbc in particular the last paragraph. Basically saying they are in current negotiations, distribution colleagues were giving a 5/6 % increase and it will be similar for store colleagues.

[NightAndDay]

My pay review is on-going. I do know I got a 28% pay rise to my on-call rate, previously it was a bit below night premium and now it's 55p per hour more (£1.95 more on bank holidays). For my base salary though I reckon I'm getting a 10% pay rise.

With inflation hitting 7.25% in April, there will be a strong justification for at least a 5% raise, especially for the night premium rate.

This is Tesco we're talking about though, my educated guess is that they will headline a 5.5% increase to wages, while in reality, night premium will be stuck at £2.25 an hour, CA's will get the 5.5% increase and all other hourly roles will get the same nominal value increase as the CA, so if we say a CA's hourly goes up 5.5% from £9.55 to £10.08 an hour (a 53p increase) the 53p will be what all the higher more skilled roles will get as well, this will also serve to diminish the the pay differentials between CA and Shift Leader yet again. If this does happen Shift Leaders may as well leave Tesco to become either a bin man or if female, an Onlyfans girl.

[Prince of Darkness]

The Team Support/Shift Leader skills payment was supposedly under review with that due to complete by Christmas 2021. I asked my rep 10 days ago if she knew when the review was due to be published. Unsurprisingly I'm still waiting for an answer.

[StinkyPoo]

Night premium went up from £2.21 to £2.30 last pay rise. Hope you're right about over £10 an hour!

[NightAndDay]

Could be where this talk of Shift Leaders becoming salaried is stemming from, the role packs have been updated (in Express anyway) for Shift Leaders, they've added more responsibility to the role. The role was severely underpaid and notoriously difficult to recruit for before they added these new responsibilities, now that they have added these new responsibilities, I'm guessing they can no longer justify Shift Leaders being paid less than £2 an hour more than a CA.

[NightAndDay]

Night premium went up from £2.21 to £2.30 last pay rise. Hope you're right about over £10 an hour!

Yes, the first raise in 5 years (I was working nights when they did the last increase it was that long ago.) Thanks for the correction though, I knew it had increased last year but I thought from £2.21 to £2.25, not £2.30, my mistake, my on-call rate increased from £2.20 to £2.80 (£4.20 on bank holidays), but to be fair, that was the first rate increase we've had on it for 22 years apparently.

[fatlad]

I also think that dotcom driver skills payment will increase. Quite a while ago now there was a new skills payment bracket introduced for dotcom drivers only.

[Kieth_Lemon]

They can increase night pay to whatever they like. In 12 months time probably not gonna be many colleagues working nights to claim it.

out of interest what's the extra responsibilities they've put on SLs? Didn't think their was any they could without the role essentially becoming a TM/DM role

[NightAndDay]

One of the new responsibilities is to deal with shop lifters, not too sure on the others but an Express SM should be aware.

Also there are Express stores that are 24/7 esso express sites and those that are too busy to not have a night team, structure change can't get rid of them considering how bare bones Express is already (even more so now they've got rid of the part time shift leader role.)

The esso express fuel site I used to work in would take 30-40k a week for the hours between 10pm-7am, Tesco would lose too much money reducing those opening hours.

[leedslad]

We are going to £10hr but not till September union rep told some staff today but why September ages away

[Kieth_Lemon]

What's that about 4.5% increase? not great in the current climate really and I will be amazed if Sunday and bank holiday premiums are untouched.

Also Morrisons  have been at £10 ph for 12 months already so I wound imagine they have a pay increase imminant too.

[NightAndDay]

When taking into account the staggered increase and calculated in light of it (as Tesco does their increase 6-8 months after their competitors, their 45p increase is adjusted to 22p), I believe that puts them lowest or 2nd lowest in terms of base pay, (Icelands will probably go up to £9.80 around April in light of then being below minimum wage, Coop £9.90 an hour in March, Tesco £9.77 when adjusted for delay, but take into acount Sunday premo and they're about level with the Coop).

Considering Tesco has the largest market share, they pay their staff like some of the councils pay their bin men.

[BUY TESLA STOCK]

Bin men are better paid especially when they find some stolen art and a few 1000£ of blues.

[fatlad]

Don't know where Leeds lad got his info from as the negotiations between Tesco & Usdaw are still ongoing for this year's pay increase. Nothing has yet been agreed.

[leedslad]

Sure I just said we're i got my info from union rep told some staff today we are going to £10 a hour in September something about a 2 year paydeal