The Woolworths EBA has been mired in controversy. Bradley Kanaris
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The Retail and Fast Food Workers Union has launched legal action to terminate Woolworths' enterprise agreement and make it liable for an estimated $1 billion in alleged underpayments.
RAFFWU member Loukas Kakogiannis applied on Thursday to terminate the retail giant's 2012 EA that his union argues pays the vast majority of the retail giant's 100,000 workforce less than the award.
Mr Kakogiannis also applied to backdate the EA termination date and the appropriate penalty rates, casual loading and overtime to the date of operation in November 2012.
The effect of backdating is that workers would become entitled to the difference between the wages they would have been paid under the award, and the wages they were paid
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Retail and Fast Food Workers Union official Josh Cullinan is backing the legal action against Woolworths. Penny Stephens
"Based on information available to RAFFWU, this is estimated to be up to $1 billion," RAFFWU said in a statement.
The Woolworths EBA has been mired in controversy because it applied similar trade offs of penalty rates for higher base hourly rates as the Coles agreement, which were found to pay workers who do evening or weekend work less than the award.
"Today I applied to terminate the old agreement which has paid me and many of my colleagues less than the minimum wages in the award." Mr Kakogiannis said. "I am losing $4000 a year and many other workers are losing even more."
"The agreement pays no penalty rates on weeknight evenings, during the day on Saturday and cuts the Sunday penalty rate. Casual loading is cut from 25 per cent to 20 per cent and 17 and 18-year old staff have cut rates too," said Mr Kakogiannis.
RAFFWU secretary Josh Cullinan said the Fair Work Commission relied on misleading material from Woolworths and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Union when approving the 2012 deal.
"They provided 'indicative rosters' which were nothing of the sort," he said. "The material did not deal with workers working most of their hours on evenings and weekends. We know the vast majority of workers work at those times. Many of them, like Loukas, have lost a fortune."
Woolworths dismissed concerns over the status of its agreement and said it would defend the case.
"We were surprised to learn of this application through a press release given we have been in negotiations with RAFFWU over a new agreement for more than six months," a spokesman said.
"We have every confidence in the validity of our existing enterprise agreement and will respond to the application as required."
Mr Cullinan previously helped lead the landmark case to overturn Coles' enterprise agreement in 2016 because its penalty rate trade off failed to ensure workers were better off than the award minimum at all times.
A subsequent termination case to hold Coles liable for underpayments was ultimately settled.
But the Fair Work Commission ruling sent ripples across major retail companies with similar penalty rate trade offs, including Woolworths, Big W, BWS, Dan Murphy, Kmart, Officeworks and Super Retail Group.
Last week, Woolworths reached an in-principle agreement with the SDA for a replacement EBA that would restore the award's full penalty rates as well as protect take-home pay for existing employees on the higher base rates.
However, the RAFFWU opposed the deal because it failed to compensate workers for alleged underpayments under the old EA and because it cut the higher base rates for new employees.
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