Aldi tops up wages for staff: ‘Our people are the driving force of our success’
Aldi has announced a top-up to its staff wages, retaining its crown as the UK’s highest-paying supermarket.
The new minimum rate of pay, which increases to £14.33 within the M25, will take effect from 1 September this year.
It further exceeds the Real Living Wage of £12.60 an hour that was set by the Living Wage Foundation in October last year.
“This latest investment in pay is a reflection of [our staff’s] hard work and the incredible contribution they make every single day,” Aldi CEO Giles Hurley said.
“Our people are the driving force behind our success across the UK… We’re proud to remain the UK’s highest-paying supermarket and will continue to support our colleagues in every way we can,” Hurley added.
The government increased both the minimum wage and the Real Living Wage in last October’s budget, with the Real Living Wage rising to £12.60 in UK and £13.85 in London.
The move gave half a million Living Wage workers a pay boost, but drew some criticism from stretch businesses, which argued the higher benchmark was an unsustainable increase in costs.
The British Retail Consortium said that the increase in the minimum wage would cause retailers to spend an additional £2.73bn per year, a key contributor to the £7bn in extra costs post-Autumn budget.
Others, like Dunelm’s CEO Nick Wilkinson, said that the money would lead to an increase in consumer confidence – due to higher disposable income – and ripple through the market, boosting demand.
“Those national living wage increases are also going into the consumer market… we have many more customers than we do employees, so in general it’s very good for us to see consumer confidence growing, disposable income increasing [and] pay going up slightly higher than the level of inflation… Those are all good impacts for us,” he said.