Wendco Ltd found to be routinely denying staff public holiday rights
Friday 5 May 2023, 7:01AM
By Unite
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Wendco Ltd, owned by the Lendich family in West Auckland, has found to be routinely denying staff their right to public holidays in an Employment Relations Authority (ERA) decision yesterday.
In 2017, Wendco was prosecuted by the Labour Inspectorate for refusing staff the right to an alternative day if they worked on a public holiday which was "an otherwise working day" for staff. The company claim, which was rejected in an ERA decision, was that no working day was an otherwise working day because staff were on a variable roster.
They lost that case and had to remediate 3500 staff who had worked for them during a six-year period from 1 July 2012. At the time, they remediated staff for the missing alternative holiday if they had worked the day and it was an otherwise working day for them. The formulas they used for that process were accepted by the Labour Inspectorate and Unite Union.
"At the time, Unite Union assumed the same formulas for what was an otherwise working day would also be applied to non-worked public holidays," said Unite Union advocate Mike Treen. "That was a mistake," he added.
"We did a routine wage and time record request for public holidays over the Christmas New Year period from 2020 to 2021. We discovered that almost no one got paid for not working the public holiday no matter how obvious it was that it was "an otherwise working day" for them.
"We discovered that Wendy's had introduced two new requirements for the day to become an otherwise working day. One was you had to 'volunteer' to work the day and the other was you lost the entitlement if they rostered the hours on another day of the week. The Employment Relations Authority found that neither situation was lawful and ordered the company to pay compensation to the affected employees.
"However, Unite Union has called on the Labour Inspectorate to force the company to redo the earlier botched remediation process for all employees because otherwise, the company has got away with stealing thousands of workers' holiday entitlements for for years and they shouldn't be able to profit from that.", said Mike Treen.