Cricket Australia Looking for Temporary Jobs for Stood-down Staff at Supermarket

Sydney: Cricket Australia staff, which has been stood down amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, could find new jobs stacking supermarket shelves in the coming days.

According to a report in Sydney Morning Herald, chief executive Kevin Roberts has written to his counterpart at Woolworths to ask if the supermarket giant can help make up for the loss of hours by cricket staff after drastic cuts at head office.

Up to 80 per cent of full-time staff at Cricket Australia, which has a workforce of about 330, have been stood down on 20 per cent pay for the final two months of the financial year.

“Our people and culture team is also working with other organisations who are in the habit of placing people in organisations and industries that have a temporary need for more people,” Roberts said on SEN radio station on Wednesday.

“We’re doing things proactively, absolutely. People are at the centre of everything we do and as much as we hate making those sorts of decisions we had to make last week, the other side of the coin is certainly we’re supporting our people and looking for even temporary opportunities to be involved and earning income elsewhere when their income is reduced from cricket,” he added.

Under the federal government’s JobKeeper support program, Cricket Australia is currently not eligible as they have not lost major revenue streams from cancelled matches.

Roberts has already defended the salary cuts of staff stating that pay cuts are necessary to keep the board financially stable.

“In pre-coronavirus world, we were already projecting that our cash and investments would reduce to about $40 million at the start of September this year,” Roberts told journalists through video conferencing on Tuesday.

“The unfortunate reality of that is that we’re estimating that we’ve taken a $20 million impact thus far. We have to anticipate that there will be more risks than that $20 million.

“If you contemplate the prospect of the international season, in particular, being affected, we have an issue of hundreds of millions of dollars on our hands,” he added.