Do you pay for staff parking at a shopping centre?
Join our campaign for free and safe parking.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many shopping centres around Australia waived staff and customer parking fees to reduce financial burdens at a difficult time and entice more people to shop at their struggling centres. We applaud this decision as it was the right thing to do. However, now many restrictions have been eased shopping centres have now reinstated parking fees and in some cases increased staff parking charges.
The SDA – the union for workers in retail, fast food workers – has contested staff parking in Queensland since taking up the fight in 2012. Staff now pay up to $7.50 a day to park in shopping centres, and even more in the city and tourist areas. However, during a pandemic and a recession the reasoning for imposing high staff parking fees on low-paid workers has little justification.
Why is this important?
Most paid parking schemes have a free period of 2-3 hours, and then charge for every hour thereafter. This means that almost no customers pay for parking, in media quotes from Westfield themselves they have stated “92% of customers complete their visit within the two-hour free parking period”. So we can only assume that the millions of dollars of revenue that Westfield accumulates is from the staff that work there themselves.
Full-time workers in shopping centres have to pay thousands of dollars a year just to park – this is a further tax they can’t afford and don’t deserve.
Sign the SDA’s petition to #MakeItFree!