Sainsbury's chief Mike Coupe 'to make concessions' on employees' pay plan

The boss of supermarket chain Sainsbury’s was forced to drop some of his plans to overhaul employees’ contracts after a backlash from staff, the Standard can reveal.

Chief executive Mike Coupe, who pledged £100 million in March to improve pay, wrote a letter to thousands of campaigners to say he has made “significant changes” to his proposals.

The move follows weeks of campaigning from Sainsbury’s lifers who claim they will be worse off once the new contracts will be introduced in September.

Coupe said in the letter that some employees working in London, outside zones one and two, will receive a 25p increase an hour. But this is just because they were initially excluded from the original plan.

He also promised to pay online delivery drivers 75p an hour – or 25p more – as well as increase the hourly rate for night shifts from £1.55 to £2.45 an hour. However, the way staff will get paid for night shifts will change.

Coupe added: “We have proposed top-up payments for an 18 month period to make sure that no colleague earns less than they do today. And at the end of those 18 months – in March 2020, we will review the hourly rate again.”

Sainsbury’s said the changes, including the scrapping of paid lunch breaks, are in line with industry standards and the majority of its staff will get a pay rise.

In a letter to Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Modren, and seen by the Standard, Sainsbury’s retail and operations director Simon Roberts said: “Despite the £100 million investment, the number of legacy contracts we have in our system means that this is still not enough to ensure that every colleague is better off because of the existing variability in our contracts. We fully understand that some colleagues will be impacted by the proposals.”

McDonagh first wrote a letter to Coupe to complain about the proposal in March.