Anxious times for workers left opening the doors.
Dick Smith workers say they are suffering mentally and emotionally as they wait for receivers Ferrier Hodgson, to advise them of the final closure of the business.
Describing their situation as “employment purgatory” because they are unable to move on with their careers, some workers have erected window signs with these pithy comments as “When are we closing? How long is a piece of string?” and “Most of us have not found jobs yet so feel free to recommend us to anyone you might know that has something going.”
Unfortunately, the chain is about half way through an eight-week fire sale, and Ferrier Hodgson has intimated that all stores will close their doors around the end of April.
The workers feel they are unable to find new jobs without knowing when Dick Smith will terminate them as they will potentially be giving up thousands of dollars in entitlements.
A spokeswoman for Ferrier Hodgson has said employees would receive redundancy notices and final work dates “closer to the closure date of their store”. She added that it anticipated the current stock sale to generate enough cash to pay all workers their entitlements.
“Employee entitlements are priority claims that rank ahead of the secured and unsecured creditors and are expected to be paid in full,” she said. “The timing of the individual store closures will be dependent on the outcome of the stock realisation sale. Not all stores are expected to close on the same date.”
The spokeswoman said workers would be paid the equivalent of their full notice period regardless of when they were told their store was closing.
“The receivers are endeavouring to provide employees with as much notice as possible of the exact date that their store will close,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, the union representing Dick Smith workers, has told the media that it received reports of employees deciding to sacrifice redundancy payouts and accept work elsewhere because they feared other job offers would be scarce.
“These are anxious times, particularly for those people in regional Australia where the job opportunities aren’t that great,” SDA national secretary Gerard Dwyer said.
Dwyer believes that a better model was to guarantee redundancy payments through extended notice periods, while offering workers incentives to work until stores closed.