SAINSBURY'S

Penny Beckett has been banned from Sainsbury's for life after taking a chocolate nut from a pick and mix display and eating it as she shopped at her local store. Ms Beckett popped the chocolate into her mouth before taking a selection of sweets which she paid for along with a £156 bill for the rest of her shopping. But when she went to leave she was stopped by three security guards. They showed her CCTV footage of how she ate the nut, and then handed her a letter telling her that she was banned from the supermarket's 727 UK stores for life.

Ms Becket said, "If they had just given me a quiet warning and explained that this sort of thing cost their company money I would have understood and apologised. Before now I have eaten a grape before buying a bunch, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, surely Sainsbury's must allow for this sort of thing when it prices up its goods?"

The official letter from the shop telling her of the ban said: "Should you enter any of our premises, you will be treated as a trespasser and the police will be called as necessary." Asda invited Penny to shop with them. Spokesman Nick Agarwal said, "This sounds nuts! She is welcome to visit her local Asda any time." (Source: Sunday Mirror)

Sainsbury's gave new boss Justin King £1.4million in shares - as it confirmed it was axing workers' £100 Christmas bonus. The store, which saw profits plunge £20million in 2003, will hand him another £500,000 in shares if he hits targets. Yet Sainsbury's claimed that ending staff's Christmas perk for the the first time in 25 years would let it improve other incentive schemes.

Now 100,000 full-time employees will instead have their 10% store discounts raised to 15%, but only between October and December. Joanne McGuinness of shopworkers' union Usdaw said, "Our members will look at this as the directors operating 'one rule for us, another rule for workers'."

Chief executive Mr King, is receiving almost 500,000 shares, which he can cash in from 2007. Mr King could be given an extra 184,700 shares in that period depending on his performance. It comes after chairman Sir Peter Davis was awarded shares worth £2.4million despite Sainsbury's miserable performance in the 12 months to March 2004. Profits were down 2.9% to £675million and like-for-like sales down 0.2% to £15.3billion.

The store has lost ground to main rivals Asda and Tesco amid stiff price competition and has suffered from its own restructuring drive. As well as the £100 Christmas payment, Sainsbury's is also withdrawing a profit-linked shares perk for employees and staff at its London head office have been told they will not be paid an earnings-related bonus. (Source: Daily Mirror)

In April 2004, staff at a Sainsbury's store in Derby were told they had to sign new contracts of employment if they wanted a 2.5% pay rise. But colleagues at the Eagle Centre branch who signed up to the new Rewarding Great Service contracts in 2003 were offered unconditional increases.

One angry shopworker condemned the offer as "divisive". In an anonymous letter to the Evening Telegraph, they said, "If you decline this new contract, you do not get a pay rise. If you sign the contract, you get a pay rise but lose your overtime premiums, so it's a no-win situation. This will lead to a division between work colleagues as they will be doing the same job for different rates of pay."

A spokesman for Sainsbury's said that staff pay was performance-related and those who had done well were offered rises while those who had not done so well were not. She said the new contracts had been introduced the previous year to improve working hours flexibility to meet the demands of customers whose shopping habits were changing.

Anyone signing the new contracts received holiday entitlement based on the number of hours they worked and a higher basic rate of pay but lost "premium" payments for overtime and Sundays. Those who did not sign kept their "premium" payments but were not given the enhanced basic rates of pay or the "improved" holiday entitlements.

Pensions contributions are based on basic-rate pay and do not include bonus, overtime or premium pay enhancements, so there were both long and short-term benefits to staff who signed, she said. She said no-one was forced to sign, although 85% of the 450 staff in Derby did and now only about 10% of employees remain on the old contracts.

But a spokesman for USDAW, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, which represents more Sainsbury's employees than any other union, said the current pay offer was "totally unacceptable". He said that Sainsbury's pay deals were not performance-related and said that staff who had signed the new contracts had been offered 2.5% while those who had not signed were being offered nothing.

"We've asked for a meeting with senior Sainsbury's staff to discuss the offer, but, so far, we haven't got a date for that meeting," he said. John Partridge, Midlands regional organiser for the TGWU (Transport and General Workers' Union), which represents about 15,000 Sainsbury's workers nationally, said, "The contracts were sold to us as 'entirely voluntary' with no later sanction. We believe everybody should have the 2.5% pay rise."

The price which farmers receive for their produce frequently fails to cover the cost of production, and consequently only farmers which produce on a very large scale and can therefore produce more cheaply can afford to carry on this way. For others, spiralling debt has become the norm and has forced many out of business.

Despite the general culture of isolation and despair in farming, several protests have taken place against supermarkets. It is difficult to be precise about the scale of the problems encountered by suppliers in their dealings with supermarkets because farmers are too afraid to lose their contracts to speak openly. John Breach of the Fruit Growers' Association described the risk of being de-listed for raising objections to terms and conditions as 'very real'.

Many of the criticisms levelled at supermarkets by suppliers do not specify which is involved, because of a fear of losing contracts. Supermarkets claim that they cannot set prices because they buy from processors not directly from farmers, and therefore pay market prices, which not allowed to be fixed. This, on one hand, is a result of World Trade Organisation policy, and shows how unfair these rules are towards small producers who are not allowed to systematically receive a fair price for their products.

On the other hand, Sainsbury's can take part in fairly trading tea and coffee, so there is no reason why it could not introduce lines of fairly traded farm products. As a company at the top of the supply chain, Sainsbury's could, if it believed in a fair price, instigate a fair trade system for farm products. Another favourite argument is that the price paid by retailers is not the most important issue, rather that farmers are suffering from the high rate of exchange of the pound, which gives them relatively less subsidy money.

This is also a favourite argument of the National Farmers Union, but it is really quite peripheral. The reason why farmers need so much subsidy money in the first place is because they have been paid less and less for their produce over the years. Consumers should pay an honest price which covers the costs of the producers, and then subsidies would not be needed, since subsidies are a symptom of processors and retailers offloading costs onto taxpayers.

It should be noted that so-called 'free' trade is not an answer to this because it is basically the same as we have now, except without the cushion of subsidies, and it results in a race to the bottom for standards and prices, which means only the largest can survive.

Sainsbury's cannot be the saviour of British farming because it cannot deal on a human scale. It can only achieve apparently cheap prices through dealing in bulk and this excludes small producers. Supermarkets do sometimes begin to deal with small producers, but only with a view to making them larger and more 'economical' to deal with.

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