€91,000 compensation in Dublin "slavery" case

mango salsa wrote: »

Obviously not :rolleyes: - particularly when they hold your work permit and passport and control your living accommodation

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Do you also have a huge difficulty understanding why people stay with abusive partner?

CiaranMT wrote: »

You couldn't come across as more naive/ignorant of others' situations.

conorhal wrote: »

What I don't understand is how the authorities haven't revoked this chancers residency permit, deported his slave owning ass back to Pakistan and seized his businesses and sold them off to ensure that this poor man got his compensation.
The level of inertia in this country when it comes to regulation and enforcement just staggers me.

conorhal wrote: »

Nonsense like this just angers me. It think it's time we fly in a plane load of those transexual tax-inspectors that they use in Pakistan to flashmob his businesses and barrak him until he pays up....

Dionysus wrote: »

I just heard a variant of this story on the radio on the way home.

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Boss ordered to give €91,000 to 'slave' worker
By Aideen Sheehan
Wednesday September 14 2011


A HIGH-PROFILE restaurateur has been ordered to pay a worker €91,000 for gross exploitation which has been likened to slavery.

The Labour Court has ordered Poppadom restaurant chain owner Amjad Hussein to pay Pakistani chef Muhammad Younis €91,000 over breaches of employment rights.

Mr Younis said he was forced to work 77 hours a week as a Tandoori chef at Poppadom takeaway in Clondalkin, with Christmas Day his only time off during the seven years he worked there.

During that time he was paid just 51c an hour between 2002 and 2005, although he secured increases to €4.46 an hour in 2005 and €6.25 an hour in 2006, all well below the minimum wage.

Mr Younis said he was also forced to work without any contract, tax or social contributions being paid, and his employer failed to renew his work permit or his passport as promised, leaving him undocumented.

He shared an overcrowded house in Leixlip provided by Mr Hussein.

He eventually left the job in 2009 and approached the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) for assistance.

Rulings by the Labour Court this month have upheld previous Rights Commissioner rulings that Mr Younis should be paid €86,134 in back pay owed to him by his former employer under the National Minimum Wage Act 2000 and €5,000 under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997.

Desperate

However, Mr Younis may now face another legal battle to get his money, as the MRCI said it may have to seek an order for payment from the Circuit Court if Mr Hussein fails to pay up what he owes.

Mr Younis told the Irish Independent he was desperate to get the money he was owed as he has a wife and nine children at home to support. He has not seen his family since he came to Ireland in 2002.

He said that while he was working at Poppadom between 2002 and 2009, he despaired for his future. "The exploitation I suffered put me in a deep, dark well. I felt I had no hope for my future and no way out," he said.

He is currently living in a hostel on the equivalent of an asylum seeker's allowance of €19.80 a week, and has been seeking a new job to secure a work permit.

The case is one of 150 taken by the MRCI in the past six years -- including five cases this year -- for a variety of workers including domestic and restaurant staff, farm and circus workers.

"The gross exploitation and chronic conditions that Mr Younis suffered constitute forced labour.

"In Ireland there is no legal punishment for forced labour and so the only remedy open to Mr Younis was to pursue breaches of employment law," said Grainne O'Toole of the MRCI.

Ireland was in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to bring in legal protection against slavery and forced labour, she added.

Mr Hussein did not respond to requests for a comment.

Boss ordered to give €91,000 to 'slave' worker

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If, like me, you're ethically and culturally hostile to Independent Newspapers, this is Journal.ie's take on this story:


Restaurant worker awarded €86,000 after years of forced labour in Dublin


A RESTAURANT WORKER who was forced to work for seven years for paltry pay and almost no days off has been awarded €86,000 by the Labour Court.
Muhammad Younis, who is originally from Pakistan, worked as a chef at the Poppadom restaurant in Clondalkin from 2002 to 2009 in what have been described as ‘chronic conditions’ by the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI).
Younis was forced to work 77 hours a week without a contract. He paid no tax or social insurance contributions and was subjected to threats.
The Irish Independent reports today that he was paid just 51 cent an hour during the first three years that he worked at the restaurant. His hourly pay rose to just under €4.50 in 2005, and then to €6.25 in 2006.
Younis shared a house with nine other workers. The accommodation was provided by his ex-employer Amjad Hussein, who was this week ordered to pay tens of thousands in back wages by the Labour Court. A Rights Commissioner originally awarded the sum to Mr. Younis, but his former employer has not yet paid the compensation.
Younis has been living in a hostel for the past two years, after he left his job and sought assistance from the MRCI. His former employer had failed to renew his work permit, leaving him undocumented. Younis has welcomed the Labour Court decision, saying:
I am away from my family, jobless and I am owed a lot of money for my work. I am suffering because of the bad treatment I was subjected to. All I want now is justice.
The MRCI yesterday said that it regularly comes across cases in Ireland were vulnerable people are being held and forced to work in conditions of slavery. The organisation said there have been at least 150 cases in the past six years.
Delphine O’Keefe of the MRCI told TheJournal.ie that the restaurant industry is one of the sectors where non-compliance and exploitation are ongoing issues. She’s calling on the government to introduce a law to specifically criminalise forced labour.
The MRCI has said that Ireland is in breach of Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides protection against slavery and forced labour. It says that the biggest struggle facing the MRCI in terms of Mr. Younis’ case is ensuring that he actually gets paid what he is owed.

Restaurant worker awarded €86,000 after years of forced labour in Dublin

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Imagine that, a complete bastard and he's not one of the 88 million Germans/Nazis (:rolleyes:) but living here in Dublin and the culprit in question is not being imprisoned because the democratically-elected government of Ireland does not have laws to imprison somebody who "enslaves" another person in Ireland. Does this mean, going on the Germans=Nazis analogy throughout this thread, that all the Irish people support slavery? (hey, weren't those people in Britain also Irish? - oops, this German=Nazi analogy has its faults!)

Anyway, the above anti-retard rant out of the way, how many more people in this state are being exploited to the extent of bonded slavery and the offenders are getting off because our elected governments have failed to make it a crime worthy of imprisonment? Leaving aside all the ethnic restaurants like that Indian restaurant in Clondalkin, how many cheapskate Irish people are, as I write, exploiting non-Irish au pairs and house staff of all sorts in an abysmal way, a way they would not be able to treat an Irish person?