New laws urged to halt ‘scumbag’ shop assaults

Western Australian retailers are pleading for a hardline crackdown on workplace attacks amid shock new data that reveals most shop attendants no longer feel safe at work.

The call comes as a Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association survey reveals a 56 per cent rise in members being assaulted in the past year.

Legislative Council president Kate Doust has sponsored the 9,500-signature strong SDA-led petition urging the WA government to fast-track hardline penalties under which all attacks on retail workers would be classed as aggravated assaults.

SDA WA state secretary Ben Harris said customer violence increased during COVID and got worse in the years since.

“For more than half of all Australians a retail job … or a fast-food job is their first job, and what they are learning in their workplace is that it is a place to be afraid,” he said.

“These are people’s kids, these are people’s parents who are turning up every day to put food on the table.

“Every member of parliament, including those on the opposition cross benches, should be supportive of this because surely they have people in their families or in their community circles have worked in retail and fast food, and have experienced some of this terrible behaviour.”

The SDA is calling for laws that echo those implemented in NSW, where people who assault retail workers face 11 years’ jail.

Woolworths Group state manager Karl Weber said the supermarket giant was witnessing assaults in its WA stores every day.

“As late as last week, we had a team member confronted with an individual in store who showed them in a bag a twelve-inch hunting knife,” he said.

“[He] didn't produce the hunting knife, but just showed them while he filled the bag up and left the store.”

Mr Weber said the violence was not confined to certain regions in the state.

The SDA survey found less than half of respondents felt safe at work and 30 per cent of members were reporting incidents on a weekly basis.

Some 17 per cent of respondents reported they had been sexually abused in the past year, and 9 per cent reported being spat on.

Liquor Stores Association of WA chief executive Peter Peck said people attacking shop workers were “grubs”.

“You don't crawl out from under a fridge like a cockroach, act like a complete scumbag in a retail outlet and assault somebody's children or threaten them so that they're scared to go to work,” he said.

“As far as I'm concerned, these people don't deserve any sympathy at all.

“What we need to do is for these people to start acting like human beings again.”

Verbal abuse was rife, with 87 per cent of respondents experiencing it in the past year, 76 per cent of whom experienced it at least monthly.

One quarter of respondents were targeted with racial, ethnic or cultural slurs and 12.5 per cent were victims of physical violence.

Ms Doust said the state government should back a legislation change to better protect retail workers.

She said she hoped those changes would be expedited.