Sadie Simmonds was just 18 years old when she was attacked at work while conducting a bag check.<\/p>\n
She was working at Aldi in West Footscray and asked a woman at the check-out if she could inspect her bag.<\/p>\n
The customer threw a carton of milk at her face, Ms Simmonds said, and shoved her so forcefully she fell backwards out of her seat, and on to her back on the floor.<\/p>\n
She said what happened to her was not out of the ordinary.<\/p>\n
“I have seen a co-worker have to get stitches because he was so brutally bashed,” she said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Former Aldi worker Sadie Simmonds says she always felt an “impending sense of doom” that she might be attacked. (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)<\/p>\n
It made going to work a weekly struggle.<\/p>\n
“There was always this impending sense of doom that at any moment you could be attacked.”<\/p>\n
Ms Simmonds, now 20, said it was the moment she decided to join the retail workers union.<\/p>\n
About 18 months later, working as the health and safety representative at a different Aldi in Keilor Downs, Ms Simmonds handed out a trades hall safety survey to try and gather evidence for her employer that staff did not feel safe at work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ms Simmonds was fired for allegedly breaching company policy. (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)<\/p>\n
When she went back to the staff with the results, she was fired for allegedly breaching company policy.<\/p>\n
“I just wanted to draw attention to the issues retail workers face. We have been seeing heightened levels of aggression and violence in stores,” she said.<\/p>\n
The union filed an unfair dismissal case in the Federal Court on Ms Simmonds’s behalf on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“I want retail workers to know they’re not alone in this … They don’t actually deserve to be treated like this and legally they should not be treated like this.”<\/p>\n
Ms Simmonds hopes her case will lead Aldi to stop mandatory bag checks by staff.<\/p>\n
On Friday, a worker from Woolworths at Werribee Plaza in Melbourne’s west lodged a case backed by the union in the Fair Work Commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They claimed bag checks and new security gates at self-serve check-outs had created “specific and significant risks of customer and offender aggression” by “locking abusive \u2026 and violent offenders into a confined space with employees and customers”.<\/p>\n
The worker and the union want Woolworths to back down on mandatory bag checks and remove security gates.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The union has called on Woolworths to stop mandatory bag checks by staff. (ABC News)<\/p>\n
Retail and Fast Food Worker Union secretary Josh Cullinan said staff were increasingly afraid to go to work.<\/p>\n
“Bag checks are likely to lead to forms of violence,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Even if it’s one in a 100, they’ve got so many customers [to serve] they have to worry every single time they look in someone’s bag: what’s going to come next, is it going to be abuse, is it going to be harassment, is it going to be a punch?”<\/p>\n
Mr Cullinan said body-worn cameras rolled out by Coles and Woolworths also put staff at risk because they had to tell customers during bag checks when they began recording.<\/p>\n
“It’s about putting staff on the front line to stop stock loss, it’s not about safety, it’s about theft. Having to have a camera strapped to your body that is in your face \u2026 is just asking for trouble. These steps need to stop.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A Coles worker wears a body-worn camera in 2023. (ABC News)<\/p>\n
According to documents from the ACCC supermarkets inquiry last year, abuse, threats, intimidation, assaults and other workplace violence involving Woolworths staff had increased year-on-year since 2014.<\/p>\n
Records of a point-of-sale “verbal abuse tool” that allows Woolworths staff to push a button and record verbal abuse instances found they were occurring almost 700 times a week on average, impacting 430 staff members across 233 stores.<\/p>\n
During the inquiry, Coles reported that from June 2013 to March 2024, about 8,000 cases of customer violence or aggression towards staff were reported.<\/p>\n
Data from Victoria Police also found retail theft was up 36 per cent across the state in the past year.<\/p>\n
“By putting in place structures to limit stock loss [from] theft, [supermarkets] have been putting our members on the front line and that’s what’s causing a lot of this hostility,” Mr Cullinan said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Police Minister Anthony Carbines says the government will soon introduce retail worker harm legislation. (ABC News)<\/p>\n
Police Minister Anthony Carbines said the government would be introducing retail worker harm legislation this year, “that brings serious consequences to those who do harm and assault retail workers”.<\/p>\n
“We need to send a very clear message to the community and reflect the community’s expectations that young people and all people who work in our retail sector are safe.”<\/p>\n
An Aldi spokesperson said the company valued its people and was “committed to their health and safety”.<\/p>\n
“This matter is currently going through legal proceedings so we cannot comment on the specifics of it.”<\/p>\n
A Woolworths spokesperson said the company treated “the safety of our team members and customers very seriously”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sadie Simmonds was just 18 years old when she was attacked at work while conducting a bag check.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49208,1108,43,44,5216,67543,16863,41,39,42,40,102],"class_list":["post-91001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-aldi","tag-court","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-retail","tag-retail-workers","tag-safety","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-woolworths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}