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I'll head with the big question.......can I now claim for the shirt and tie I wear to work?
You beat me to it kestrepo...My employer required that we wear business attires ( so not uniform as such) and it is in our contract of employment. I get paid above the NLW, but some of my colleges are just above the NLW, namely apprentices...does that mean that we are all going to receive an additional payment to cover our business attires? somehow, I doubt it very much.
This is going to far and where does it stop?
Does this mean that if you impose any sort of dress code, such as you have to wear shoes/boots and you can't wear trainers, you will get caught by this ruling?
That has interesting implications for other industries where for example a licence or annual certification is required.
I worked in a security company many years ago and it became a requirement to have an SIA registration, so I guess this would be treated in the same way unless employees are paid an amount above the NMW enough to cover that cost and so on.
For me this is typical of how the HMRC choose to enforce rules which where brought in for a totally different reason.
For me this is merely nit picking, this is a very fine line and no staff will have raised a grievance that they were working in breach of NWL guide lines. The £50 they get back is neither here nor there. All big chains work with similar terms for staff, so by cracking one with 100's of branches they can roll it out to others to grab the head lines.
For me the NLW was brought in to to stop the exploitation of low paid staff, the people who work in kitchens or picking fruit who get paid cash at lower than NLW rates of which I am sure there are many.
You hear very little of this type of activity as I imagine its hard to do and its easier just going for a few high profile targets to give the impression that they are doing something about it.
The wagamama staff took the jobs knowing that they had to wear black pants, they did that with an open mind so where is the exploitation, many will all earn significant tips which will take them will above the NLW, which they will be happy to receive as part of their employment, but that will be excluded from pay calculations as not classed as earned income.
Put some resources into those actually break the law and stop using the fine print to profile a few easy targets.
The knock on effects of this ultimately impact the staff as the fines will be funded by a reduction in staff benefits, loss of enhanced rates for bank holidays etc now that the company has to provide free uniforms. So who actually wins?