Waitrose's kindness gap: how a supermarket lost its humanity

"It's not often you see a supermarket make national news for not letting someone work for free. Usually the outrage runs in the other direction-"greedy corporations exploiting unpaid labour" and so on. But today's piece in The Telegraph about Waitrose and Tom Boyd, a 27-year-old man with severe autism, has managed to flip that script entirely. And in doing so, it has revealed something rather telling about the way big companies like to wrap themselves in the language of "inclusion" while quietly stripping the humanity"

"Tom, by all accounts, was a model volunteer. For four years, nine hours a week, he stacked shelves at the Cheadle Hulme branch. He turned up on time, was loved by staff, and-most importantly-he belonged. His mum, Frances, says he'd given more than six hundred hours of his life to that store. That's not a "trial shift" or a "placement". That's a commitment longer than most marriages."

"Now, if you've ever dealt with a big corporate HR department, you can almost hear the cogs whirring. Alarm bells, legal risk, safeguarding, health and safety. Someone in Bracknell probably got a "risk alert" email saying "URGENT: volunteer exceeding hours threshold, potential classification as employee." So they did what corporates always do when confronted with something messy, human and potentially emotional: they pulled the plug."

Tom Boyd, a 27-year-old man with severe autism, volunteered at a Waitrose store for four years, working nine hours a week and accumulating over six hundred hours. He arrived reliably, was liked by staff, and felt a sense of belonging. A request from his mother for him to be paid prompted Waitrose to refuse payment and end the placement. Corporate HR concerns about volunteer hours, legal risk and potential employee classification influenced the decision. The response prioritised procedural risk management over an individual’s sustained contribution and sense of belonging. Waitrose says it is investigating the situation.

Read at Business Matters