Training wage, suspension, job threats, a botched disciplinary - all in one probation
A car parts company suspended a worker, threatened her job, and botched a disciplinary process - all inside three months of employment.
The Employment Court of New Zealand has found that Japanese Car Parts Ltd constructively dismissed an Auckland employee after a run of employer missteps that began on her very first day and never let up.
The judgment, delivered on October 9, 2026, ordered the company to pay the worker a total of $39,040 - made up of $25,000 in compensation for the constructive dismissal, $11,040 in lost wages, and $3,000 for unfair bargaining. A separate $2,000 penalty for breaching the employment agreement was directed to the Crown.
It started simply enough. The worker was interviewed on a Saturday in late July 2022 and offered a general administrator role at a car parts yard in Auckland. She accepted on the spot and showed up the following Monday ready to go.
That Monday, she was handed a proposed employment agreement and a covering letter. The letter asked her to sign and return the agreement that same day. She did not sign. She wanted time to read it and have her mother look it over. The company agreed - but then the disagreements started.
The proposed agreement had problems from the jump. The company had inserted a training wage of $16.96 per hour for the first two weeks - a rate the Court found it was not entitled to use given the worker's age and the nature of the role. When that error was corrected, the company's director instructed that the third week be paid at $20 per hour. That was still below the minimum wage and below the $23 per hour agreed at interview.
Both rates were eventually fixed and backpaid. But the relationship was already fraying.
The worker raised concerns in two emails fired off minutes apart on October 2, 2022. She queried the hours, the pay, the notice period, a restraint of trade clause, and a probationary period that had appeared in a later draft but was never part of the original offer. The director responded the next day, addressing most of the points - but the revised agreement he sent back still had the pay wrong, listing $21.20 per hour for the first two weeks instead of $23.
The notice period became the sticking point. As originally drafted, the worker had to give three months' notice to resign; the company only had to give one month. She pushed back. The company would not budge.
Then things escalated.
On September 30, 2022, the worker was called to a meeting with no advance notice. She was told that if she did not sign the agreement, she would not be allowed to come to work the following Monday. The Court found that instruction came from the company's director. Despite the worker protesting that she was still trying to sort out issues with the agreement, the threatened suspension went ahead.
The company tried to justify the suspension on health and safety grounds - arguing the worker could not be on site without a signed agreement. The Court was unimpressed. She had already signed all the company's health and safety documents during her induction on day one.
On October 7, while still suspended, the worker met with two managers. One of them told her - in terms the Court accepted - that if the agreement was not signed, her employment would end. The company later argued that manager did not have authority to make that statement. The Court did not accept that.
Three days later, the director relented on the notice period, making it one month for both parties. The worker signed the revised agreement that evening.
The Court found this sequence amounted to unfair bargaining through what it described as oppressive conduct and duress - meaning the company used illegitimate pressure to force the worker's hand. The suspension, the threat to her job, and the pressure to sign while legitimate concerns remained unresolved went beyond what any fair employer would do, the Court held.
But signing the agreement did not reset the relationship.
On October 19, the worker received a letter inviting her to a formal disciplinary meeting. The letter - which the Court noted was prepared by an external consultancy on the director's instructions, not by the manager who signed it - raised a string of concerns: absenteeism, performance issues, excessive phone use, failure to disclose a medical condition, and sending an inappropriate email to a company neighbour. The letter warned she could face dismissal.
The worker's lawyer described it as "a textbook example of how not to conduct a disciplinary process." The Court found substantial weight in that criticism. Several of the complaints were either wrong or unfair. The email to the neighbour had been drafted by the worker but changed and sent by someone else without her knowledge. The phone use was necessary for the role, which required apps like WhatsApp, Facebook and TradeMe. And the performance concerns sat oddly alongside praise the same manager had given the worker earlier that month.
When the disciplinary meeting took place on October 27, the manager chairing it set the company’s letter aside. He bluntly dismissed several of the complaints as overblown, ran an informal discussion instead, and told the worker there would be no adverse outcome. She said she was satisfied with that.
But both managers in the room recognised the worker was at risk of leaving. The Court noted they asked her, in quite strong terms, not to resign.
That proved telling.
The following week, the worker fell ill. She took sick leave on October 31 and November 1. When she called in sick again on November 2, one of the managers suggested she come in to show the director she was genuinely unwell. She did. She spent an hour at the workplace - even though two managers could see she looked unwell - before being told to go home on sick leave. A medical certificate later confirmed her illness.
She resigned with immediate effect on November 7, 2022.
The Court applied what employment lawyers call the "last straw" test. That means the final incident - in this case, the way her sick leave was handled - did not need to justify the resignation on its own. What mattered was whether it was the tipping point in a pattern of conduct that had worn down the employment relationship to breaking point. The Court found it was. Given the "checkered nature" of a relationship that had only been running for three months, the resignation was entirely foreseeable.
One detail worked against the worker on the question of lost wages. Less than three months after resigning, she was offered a replacement full-time job. She turned it down because the role required COVID-19 vaccination and she preferred not to be vaccinated. The Court accepted that was her right - but held the company was not on the hook for her lost income beyond three months as a result. Lost wages were capped at $11,040.
The Court also reversed a decision by the Employment Relations Authority to dock the worker's compensation by $3,750 for her own conduct - things like timekeeping and longer-than-allowed breaks. The Court found those issues were "inconsequential" in the bigger picture. That view was reinforced by the company's own managers, who had told the worker during the October 27 meeting that criticisms against her were being unfairly enlarged and that she was being picked on.
For HR professionals, the case reads like a compressed catalogue of onboarding and management failures - from pay errors to suspension as a bargaining tactic to a retaliatory disciplinary process - all inside a single probationary period.
