Tesco has said it will reimburse 140,000 current and former staff, because it failed to pay them the national living wage.
The mistake is expected to cost the supermarket giant £9.7million after errors saw them miss out on money they were due.
“As
soon as our own review identified this issue we took immediate action
to resolve it and establish which colleagues are affected," UK chief
executive Matt Davies said.
“We’ve apologised to our colleagues
and our priority now is to talk to them about how this affects them
individually, and make any necessary payments."
(Photo: Getty) Tesco spotted the mistake after introducing a new payroll
system. All UK staff's pay was checked for the past six years as part of
their review.
It noticed that staff who had made voluntary
contributions for things such as childcare vouchers, pensions and cycle
to work schemes, might have missed out.
As as result, their pay didn't reach the level of the national living wage.
Next steps
Some staff missed out on money they were due (Photo: Getty) Tesco said it was is in the process of contacting affected
staff and that they will all receive their reimbursement payments by the
end of March.
It added it would be contacting former colleagues to arrange payments too.
"We expect payments to be up to £40 for the majority of affected colleagues,” Davies said.
The minimum wage: Your rights
Tesco fessed up as soon as it noticed, your employer might not (Photo: Getty Images) Bosses are currently legally required to pay workers the
following rates: £7.20 (£7.50 from 6 April 2017) if you're over 25,
£6.95 if you're over 21, £5.55 if you're 18-21 and £4 if you're under
18. You can find out the full wage rules here .
If
you’re working in a low-paid job, you can sometimes feel like your
rights only exist on paper. But there are ways you can make sure your
boss doesn’t wriggle out of his or her obligations.
“It is
completely unacceptable for any worker to be underpaid and everybody
should check their pay ahead of the national minimum and living wages
rising on 1 April," said Business Minister Margot James.
"Any worker who believes they may have been short-changed should contact Acas, the independent employment advice service."
I think I'm being unfairly paid - what should I do?
(Photo: Getty) If you believe you're being underpaid, you should seek
advice on the matter as soon as possible. You can find out what your
entitlement is using the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service's [Acas] Helpline Online tool.
Acas is a free body that provides information and advice to employers and employees on employment law.
If you find you are being unfairly paid, it is advised that you talk to your employer first, and try to resolve the issue.
If this doesn't work, you are within your rights to make a formal grievance to your employer.
Alternatively, Acas says a worker can make a complaint to HMRC who will investigate the complaint.
Gordon
Douglas Chalmers, 42, has been exploiting children online for more than
a decade by posing as the singer, police have said
Queensland University of Technology law lecturer Gordon Douglas Chalmers (Photo: QUT)
Police
in Australia say a university law professor who posed as Justin Bieber
online has been charged with almost 1,000 child sex offences.
Gordon Douglas Chalmers, 42, posed as the pop singer to exploit children online for more than a decade, police said.
The detective leading the case described the breadth of offences committed as "frankly horrendous".
Chalmers,
who worked at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, was
first detained by Australian police after a tip off from their
counterparts in Germany and the US.
Chalmers is said to have been impersonating pop singer Justin Bieber online (Photo: Getty) He was charged last November with offences including possessing child exploitation material and grooming persons under 16.
Opposing
bail for Chalmers at the time, police said he had "refused" to give
them access to his social media accounts and cloud servers.
But since then, further examination of his laptop has uncovered the full scale of his shocking offending, police said.
Since 2007, Chalmers has been posing as Justin Bieber on platforms including Facebook and Skype to groom victims, it is claimed.
Police said "a large amount" of child exploitation material was discovered.
Police say Chalmers used platforms including Facebook and Skype to groom his victims (Photo: Reuters) It is not known what countries the man targeted, but police
said the case demonstrated "the global reach and skill" that child sex
offenders possess.
The man has now been charged with a further
931 offences including, rape, indecent treatment of children and making
child exploitation material.
Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said:
"This investigation demonstrates both the vulnerability of children that
are utilising social media and communication applications and the
global reach and skill that child sex offenders have to groom and seduce
victims.
"The
fact that so many children could believe that they were communicating
with this particular celebrity highlights the need for a serious rethink
about the way that we as a society educate our children about online
safety.
"The breadth of offences committed in this instance are
frankly horrendous and I want to recognise the efforts and commitment of
the investigative team at Taskforce Argos to keeping children safe."
Chalmers is due back in court in Brisbane on April 6.
Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Tuesday published what it said were
thousands of pages of internal CIA discussions about hacking techniques
used over several years, renewing concerns about the security of
consumer electronics and embarrassing yet another U.S. intelligence
agency.The
discussion transcripts showed that CIA hackers could get into Apple Inc
iPhones, Google Inc Android devices and other gadgets in order to
capture text and voice messages before they were encrypted with
sophisticated software.
Cyber
security experts disagreed about the extent of the fallout from the
data dump, but said a lot would depend on whether WikiLeaks followed
through on a threat to publish the actual hacking tools that could do
damage.
Reuters could not
immediately verify the contents of the published documents, but several
contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated
between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.
A
longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools
told Reuters the documents included correct "cover" terms describing
active cyber programs.
Among
the most noteworthy WikiLeaks claims is that the Central Intelligence
Agency, in partnership with other U.S. and foreign agencies, has been
able to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
The files did not indicate the actual encryption of Signal or other secure messaging apps had been compromised.
The
information in what WikiLeaks said were 7,818 web pages with 943
attachments appears to represent the latest breach in recent years of
classified material from U.S. intelligence agencies.
Security
experts differed over how much the disclosures could damage U.S. cyber
espionage. Many said that, while harmful, they do not compare to former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013
of mass NSA data collection.
"This
is a big dump about extremely sophisticated tools that can be used to
target individual user devices ... I haven’t yet come across the mass
exploiting of mobile devices," said Tarah Wheeler, senior director of
engineering and principal security advocate for Symantec.
Stuart
McClure, CEO of Cylance, an Irvine, California, cyber security firm,
said that one of the most significant disclosures shows how CIA hackers
cover their tracks by leaving electronic trails suggesting they are from
Russia, China and Iran rather than the United States.
Other revelations show how the CIA took advantage of vulnerabilities that are known, if not widely publicized.
In
one case, the documents say, U.S. and British personnel, under a
program known as Weeping Angel, developed ways to take over a Samsung
smart television, making it appear it was off when in fact it was
recording conversations in the room.
FILE PHOTO: People are silhouetted as
they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with binary code
and a Central Inteligence Agency (CIA) emblem, in this picture
illustration taken in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina October 29, 2014.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo/Illustration
The
CIA and White House declined comment. "We do not comment on the
authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents," CIA
spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement.
Google declined to comment on the purported hacking of its Android platform, but said it was investigating the matter.
Snowden
on Twitter said the files amount to the first public evidence that the
U.S. government secretly buys software to exploit technology, referring
to a table published by WikiLeaks that appeared to list various Apple
iOS flaws purchased by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Apple Inc did not respond to a request for comment.
The
documents refer to means for accessing phones directly in order to
catch messages before they are protected by end-to-end encryption tools
like Signal.
Signal
inventor Moxie Marlinspike said he took that as "confirmation that what
we’re doing is working." Signal and the like are "pushing intelligence
agencies from a world of undetectable mass surveillance to a world where
they have to use expensive, high-risk, extremely targeted attacks." CIA CYBER PROGRAMS The CIA in recent
years underwent a restructuring to focus more on cyber warfare to keep
pace with the increasing digital sophistication of foreign adversaries.
The spy agency is prohibited by law from collecting intelligence that
details domestic activities of Americans and is generally restricted in
how it may gather any U.S. data for counterintelligence purposes.
The
documents published Tuesday appeared to supply specific details to what
has been long-known in the abstract: U.S. intelligence agencies, like
their allies and adversaries, are constantly working to discover and
exploit flaws in any manner of technology products.
Unlike
the Snowden leaks, which revealed the NSA was secretly collecting
details of telephone calls by ordinary Americans, the new WikiLeaks
material did not appear to contain material that would fundamentally
change what is publicly known about cyber espionage.
WikiLeaks,
led by Julian Assange, said its publication of the documents on the
hacking tools was the first in a series of releases drawing from a data
set that includes several hundred million lines of code and includes the
CIA's "entire hacking capacity."
The documents only include snippets of computer code, not the full programs that would be needed to conduct cyber exploits.
WikiLeaks
said it was refraining from disclosing usable code from CIA's cyber
arsenal "until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature
of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed,
disarmed and published."
U.S.
intelligence agencies have said that Wikileaks has ties to Russia's
security services. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Wikileaks
published internal emails of top Democratic Party officials, which the
agencies said were hacked by Moscow as part of a coordinated influence
campaign to help Republican Donald Trump win the presidency.
WikiLeaks has denied ties to Russian spy agencies.
Trump
praised WikiLeaks during the campaign, often citing hacked emails it
published to bolster his attacks on Democratic Party candidate Hillary
Clinton.
WikiLeaks said
on Tuesday that the documents showed that the CIA hoarded serious
security vulnerabilities rather than share them with the public, as
called for under a process established by President Barack Obama.
Rob
Knake, a former official who dealt with the issue under Obama, said he
had not seen evidence in what was published to support that conclusion.
The
process "is not a policy of unilateral disarmament in cyberspace. The
mere fact that the CIA may have exploited zero-day [previously
undisclosed] vulnerabilities should not surprise anyone," said Knake,
now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they did not know where WikiLeaks might have obtained the material.
In
a press release, the group said, "The archive appears to have been
circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an
unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of
the archive."
U.S. intelligence agencies have suffered a series of security breaches, including Snowden's.
In
2010, U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided more
than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield
accounts to Wikileaks.
Last
month, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin was indicted on
charges of taking highly sensitive government materials over a course of
20 years, storing the secrets in his home.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz and Warren Strobel; additional reporting by
Joseph Menn, Mark Hosenball, Jonathan Landay and Jim Finkle; Editing by
Grant McCool)
Are you aiming to move your career forward? Are you in the
running for a new job? Know that it will take more than smarts to get
ahead. Anyone can do a job. At the end of the day, what it really comes
down to is how you do your job. Employers are looking for employees who do more than just clock in and out each day. It’s
important to perform your job with the goal of not only doing your best
work but also being the best employee. Who you are matters just as much
as what you do.
It makes a big difference when you fulfill your job requirements
while also being mindful of how your actions affect those you work with.
Who you are as a person, and your habits (whether good or bad) can
determine how far you get in your career or even if you get hired for a
new job. Roughly 77% of employers say
soft skills (attributes that are associated with your personality) are
as important as hard skills (these are the skills you need to perform a
specific job function) when it comes to job candidate evaluations.
While there are certainly exceptions (there are plenty of mean people who get far in life), it often pays to work in a way that honors both you and your teammates.
If you’re looking to get ahead at work, there are certain key
personality traits that can help you attain career success. Here are
five attributes that will make any employer want you on their team.
1. Motivation
Motivated man | iStock.com
If you’ve lost your get-up-and-go, find it. No one should have to
hold your hand and closely supervise you just so that you can get your
basic tasks done. A lack of desire to do your best work is not only
frustrating for your employer but also a morale killer for your
co-workers. Get excited about your job and see how your work improves.
Learn a new skill, join an employee network,
or find ways to help your teammates. If you just can’t seem to get
passionate about your job, maybe it’s time for a change. Either consider
taking on a new role at the company, changing jobs, or doing a total career overhaul. It’s possible your chosen career just isn’t right for you.
A motivated employee, on the other hand, is one who has an infectious
passion for the job. He or she doesn’t have to be told twice to do
their work. This the type of worker who can jump in to help with a
project, lead a team, and who genuinely cares about the work he or she
produces. Motivated employees are more productive and tend to have a
better chance at getting promoted.
2. Adaptability
Working from home | iStock.com/g-stockstudio
Employers must grow and change to keep up with the competition. Are
you willing to grow and change with them? Employees who are resistant to
change and insistent on doing things the old way will get left behind.
If you want to move forward in your career, you’ll need to be willing to
support your employer during times of transition. Instead of resisting
new ideas and methods of getting things done, aim to be flexible and
open to ideas that differ from yours. Change could prove to be good for
your career. You may find yourself in a new role that catapults you to a
higher rung on the ladder.
3. Integrity
Man working at a desk | iStock.com
Do you steal pens from the office? Do you leave work early when no
one’s watching? You might think no one notices, but there’s always
someone who has an eye on you. Whether you think someone is watching or
not, behave as if the CEO is sitting right next to you. Choose to do the
right thing even when you’re tempted to fulfill your selfish desires.
Hiring managers employ those they both like and trust. You never know
who is watching you, so behave.
4. Discipline
Businessman | iStock.com/shironosov
If you hope to be a boss one day, you’ll need to develop
self-discipline. If you can’t manage yourself, how can your boss expect
you to manage others? This involves being on time for work and resisting
the temptation to skip those boring meetings that have nothing to do
with you. Also remember that discipline is more than checking off boxes
on your to-do list.
Your attitude counts. An employee who does a good job with a bad
attitude won’t get very far at work or in life. You’ll also be miserable
to work with.
5. Kindness
Meeting | iStock.com
You don’t have to step on people to get ahead at work. It’s not
always the nasty employees who win in the end (a lot of the time they
do, but we’ll talk about that later). It’s OK to pursue your career
goals, but it’s also important to have others’ best interests in mind.
Don’t become so focused on advancement that you ignore the feelings and
needs of those around you. Work may be the last place you want to be
kind, but being likeable can get you far. Likeable people tend to have
an easier time finding employment
and generally get more co-worker support. So think twice before you
steal your colleague’s idea or reach into the office refrigerator and
take a bite out of someone’s sandwich and then put it back. (You know
that was you.)
The
triple effect of lower salary, career breaks and lower contribution
rates cannot be ignored any longer - it's time to fight back
It's time to fight back (Photo: 2016 Getty Images)
Women
are still getting a duff pensions deal, with research revealing they
face a pension funding shortfall of £47,000 in employer contributions.
This time it’s the turn of younger women to be hit with a huge dose of unfairness.
A
study from insurer Zurich shows that last year men under the age of 35
received an average £217 more in employer pension contributions than
females of the same age.
And between 2013 and 2016, men received pension contributions of 7.8% of their salary each year while women got 7%.
This
difference comes on top of the gender pay gap and means men got a
£3,495 boost to pension savings from their employers, compared to £2,489
for women over the four-year period.
If this continues it would amount to a £46,689 shortfall in employer contributions for a woman over her working life.
Time to fight back
(Photo: Getty) It seems ridiculous that in this day and age women are
still getting a raw deal with their pension savings and, despite working
full-time, they continue to head towards lower incomes in retirement.
Despite
supposed equality in the workplace, women still earn less than men. It
is illegal for a man to earn more than a woman who is doing the same job
but many still do.
According to the Fawcett Society the current pay gap for full-time workers is 13.9%.
Earning
lower salaries means women get less towards their pension from
employers as contributions are based on a percentage of pay.
And because they earn less, women have less spare cash to put into retirement savings themselves.
Caring responsibilities are a major cause of the inequality.
Women typically take on the lion’s share of caring, taking career
breaks to look after children and parents. This can mean they have to
stop saving for retirement or never get started on it.
And many
women have little choice than to accept lower paid work as that’s the
only option that offers more flexible hours to fit around the needs of
the family.
On top of this, the Government is equalising men and
women’s state pension age so women must wait longer to access their
state pension.
Rose
St Louis, of Zurich Insurance, said: “The impact of the gender pay gap
on women’s pension pots is no secret, but this difference in the
contributions that they receive from their employer presents a serious,
and growing, problem.
“The triple effect of smaller salaries,
career breaks and lower contribution rates needs to be addressed. We
can’t ignore a £47,000 shortfall.
“Workplace engagement and
guidance has a central role to play in helping women make the most of
their saving potential while they are working full time. But it is
crucial that greater focus is placed on ensuring that this gap is not
allowed to grow any further.”
Women and pension savings
It’s
vital women take control of their financial future to ensure they get
the best state pension and have private/workplace savings to fall back
on too.
Start saving as soon as you can – when you
start working is the ideal time. The younger you start saving into a
pension, the less you will need to put away each month. Pensions are a
slow burn and putting money away each month over a lifetime of work will
help you to build up a decent retirement pot.
Save the most you can afford. Remember you are putting something away while you earn to give you an income during retirement.
If
you and your boss are just putting in the minimum legal amount via auto
enrolment each month, ask if your employer will match or at least up
their contribution if you raise yours.
If you take a career break to look after children, try and keep up your pension savings, even at a reduced amount.
Keep an eye on pension savings and check to ensure they are on track to provide the income you want for your retirement.
Use your ISA allowance. A mix of pension savings and ISAs will give you flexibility. ISAs also help to keep tax issues simple.
Zurich has launched a series of tools to help people plan and manage their financial wellbeing at zurich.co.uk/futureyou/pensions
