Asda, Sainsbury's must act fast to get shocked staff onside with merger

Amid the excitement generated by Sainsbury’s plan for a mega-merger with Asda, spare a thought for the people that work there.

Asda once had an ad in which a shopper slapped their behind to make the spare change they’d supposedly got from its low low prices jingle. This must feel to its employees like a kick to the same place, or somewhere even more painful, all the more so given the way it leaked out.

It’s hard to imagine how awful it must have felt to those manning checkouts or shop floors to be told by their customs that their employer was in talks about a supermarket sweep with the chain down the road on the busiest shopping day of the week.

I’m told a message was hurried out from Asda CEO Roger Burnley confirming the media reports and not much more because of the ‘stock exchange rules’ which always seem to hit real people with real mortgages on the head like a sledgehammer.

No wonder Asda union the GMB described a mixture of fear, shock, worry and anger among staff, who have undergone successive waves of redundancies, restructurings and, most recently, voluntary changes to contracts to make them more “flexible”.

I imagine similar feelings were expressed by their colleagues at Sainsbury’s.

Both sides will be well aware that when bosses start congratulating themselves with the “synergies” they’ve found - £500m a year or more in this case - it’s the people working under them that have to pay up. There are more than 300,000 of them at the two companies, similar to the population of, say, Nottingham.

Theresa May keeps on talking about a Britain that works for everyone. This deal could very well provide an example of exactly why it doesn’t, with the interests of employees left at the back of the queue while corporate executives unveil their grand designs, inevitably including the prospect of grand bonuses for themselves.

They would do well to remember that without those on the shop floor, and in the back offices, and on the road, there wouldn’t be any business, let alone any bonuses.

As the merger process continues both sides would be advised to think very carefully about where they go from here with their communications with those people.

What I heard when I listened in to the merger press conference left me less than impressed.

The two sides need to raise their games. They need to keep their people on board and in the loop. A fall in morale could badly affect both businesses. Worse still, quite a few people might just decide to jump ship before anyone has the chance to push them. Losing too many good employees like that will badly hurt the chances of success of this deal, which the stats say are fifty fifty at best.