Posted By Kelvin Hughes Can anyone advise me on introducing a cashless pay system in our company? We are an old fashioned company with a large number of employees still receiving their wages in cash. This brings its own problems in this day and age. I have undertaken a risk assessment and notified senior managers of the outcome and the risks involved. There is a large union representation on the site and resentment to having their wages paid into an account of their choice. Is there a way of persuading these people to have their wages paid by another means?

Posted By Karen Todd Hello Kelvin, I think you have to try to persuade people of the benefits. My husband used to get paid weekly by cheque and it drove me nuts having to go and lodge a cheque every week. I could never get to the bank in time and had to lodge the cheque through the hole in the wall and so it took ages to clear. The temptation if you get paid in cash is that you never lodge as much. Whereas if the money went direct into your bank account you would (hopefully) spend less. With Christmas coming up, people having large sums of cash in their pockets or in their office is not good. I have seen monthly pay forced on people who were previously weekly paid. This is much harder to get used to as it is a struggle for the first few months. They had a choice: accept the employer was in breach of contract and continue to work, or not. Regards, Karen Todd

Posted By Gilly Margrave Obviously as a TU officer I would never accept changes in payment of wages being imposed on staff. However it is usually heplful to explicitly point out that this is not a backdoor way of introducing monthly pay (assuming of course it isn't). Other reassurances would be that pay slips would be issued in the usual way (preferably before payday) so that it is easy for workers to check that their pay is correct. It is also important to have agreements in place to deal with glitches in payment or underpayment - an arrangement for disputed payments to be corrected in cash so that the worker is not left out of pocket pending resolution. Finally has your company considered a cash sweetener as one of the major advantages to the employer can be that non-cash payment is easier and cheaper to administer and workers may feel that they should share this potential windfall? Gilly