Comments on: Ten years on: the urgent need to enforce the national minimum wage

By: saen

saen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:42:26 +0000

NMW is a bit of a joke really. I understand you have to have a minimum, but at least make it fair. Your comment above also highlight the money motivated dierctors.

By: Krisnah

Krisnah — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:53:39 +0000

Thanks for your comment and well done for blowing the whistle on your company. Sadly, the government relies upon whisteblowers like yourself rather than actively investigating abuses of the National Minimum Wage. As you can imagine, those who are exploited in this manner are also very unlikely to report the abuse for fearing of losing their job – especially at a time when unemployment has risen to its highest point in ten years. Your story just goes to show the need for more effective enforcement as there is no limit on who would be willing to break the law.

By: Witheld

Witheld — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:10:00 +0000

I have just blown the whistle on my employer for failing to pay sales staff the NMW. The directors got paid a percentage of the profit from the company. Some of the sales staff were effectively earning �3.28 before tax, the difference between this and the NMW was ploughed into the company as ‘profit’, therefore the directors were using our wages to bump up their salaries! I hope this means that the staff who have worked there since the NMW was introduced will benefit from a nice fat cheque courtesy of the compliance officers and it will help future staff from being unlawfully exploited. The company is a Newspaper group, amazing isnt it in this day and age, you would expect behaviour such as this from a sweat shop not a company with a media profile!