Nursery World - Worst employer excuses for not paying the minimum wage revealed

Only making the tea, not being British, and it doesn’t apply to me, are all reasons that employers have given for not paying the statutory minimum wage, the Government has revealed.

The list of what the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy calls the worst excuses given by bosses found to have underpaid their workers has been published to coincide with a new £1.7m advertising campaign, starting next month, to encourage people to check their pay ahead of rises to the national minimum wage and the national living wage from April.

HMRC investigators revealed that reasons given by underpaying bosses include: that it was part of UK culture not to pay young workers for the first three months; ‘She doesn’t deserve the national minimum wage because she only makes the tea and sweeps the floors’; ‘I thought it was ok to pay foreign workers below the national minimum wage as they aren’t British’; and ‘My workers are often just on standby when there are no customers in the shop – I only pay for them when they are actually serving someone.’

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