Employer refusing to pay holiday pay - legal options?

GenericName

Hi,

I'm posting this on behalf of a friend working in a city centre based company. For a couple of reasons she decided that she'd rather get experience in another industry. She gave a few weeks notice and will be leaving in the near future.

In the job she was required to work a lot of evenings and weekends on top of the normal working week. Also, for a period she was left on her own and so could not take any days off. So obviously she built up a lot of holidays. She says 'reasonable overtime' is not stated in her contract as part of the job. But she probably built up over 15 days so that's beyond reasonable in any case.

After holidays taken, she's still left with about two weeks untaken upon leaving the company (part overtime, part regular holidays). She was told that she won't be paid for these holidays. The reason being that they don't pay staff for working on Saturdays. This wasn't in her contract on joining, but they changed her contract later, after staff started looking for pay or holidays for the weekend work. I think she may have been given the choice of accepting this or leaving. They also said that staff should have taken a day off during the week following weekend work. Though they were never told this. Her contract was changed after 7 months and she will have worked 10 on leaving.

She sent a letter to her boss stating her concerns, her start date, holiday entitlements, overtime during the week and overtime at weekends, and concuding with what she believes she's owed. Their response was to accuse her of being cheeky and threatening behaviour. I've seen the letter and the only thing that could be considered threatening is to say that she will unfortunately have to take things further if she is not paid.

This smacks of bullying to me, she's quite young so I guess that's not uncommon. What sort of options does she have here? Is there a legal road if it comes to that? Small claims even? I guess preferably she'd like to avoid that so would simply threatening with a solicitors letter do the trick?

Cheers for any help guys

SouperComputer

not so much the small claims court, but the Labour court.

TempestSabre

Sound like a complete bumch of chancers. Labour court is the only way forward.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Absolutely. Name and shame them. Remember that, if the holiday period she's claiming for contains a bank holiday, to contain bank holiday pay too, as she's technically on holiday rather then resigned until her holiday pay runs out. I'd put on them paying up before it gets to court, too.

DublinWriter

Tell her to get in contact with SIPTU.

Another important point is to get her to document everything.

Litcagral

TempestSabre wrote:

Sound like a complete bumch of chancers. Labour court is the only way forward.

This would be too trivial for the Labour Court. They only deal with cases when all other avenues have been exhausted. Contact the Labour Relations Commission who will refer it to a Rights Commissioner.

The Rights Commissioner Service,
Tom Johnson House,
Haddington Road, Dublin 4.
Tel: (01) 6136700 or Lo-Call 1890 220 227

Employment Rights Unit
Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment
65A Adelaide Road,
Dublin 4.
Tel: (01) 631 3131 or Lo-Call 1890 201 615 .

Bamboozled

Try the Citizens Information Centre.

There might be too many problems for them to advise her on, but at least they will send her in the right direction.

Get her to pick up a copy of Comhairle's Employment Rights Explained so she can understand what her rights really are.

There are a few issues that will need to be cleared up, like when the contract was changed, did she agree to the change, or was she pressured into signing it. Did she sign her employers copy at all? That book will explain a lot and she might have to seek a solicitors advice as I'm currently doing.

Or check out www.comhairle.ie for the info. It gives a list of the nearest Citizen Information Centre to her also.