She worked 88 hours in a week with no day off. Then came the mystery deduction
A Hamilton restaurant worker who was denied annual leave, had shifts cancelled without pay, and had more than $5,000 quietly deducted from her final wages has been awarded over $30,000 by New Zealand's Employment Relations Authority.
The worker was employed as a front-of-house representative at Mex it Up, a takeaway restaurant in Chartwell operated by YK Foverage Limited (YKFL). She started in late December 2021 or early January 2022 - the parties disagreed on the exact date - and resigned in February 2023, effective March 8, 2023. She had worked there for roughly 15 months.
During that time, the Authority found, quite a lot went wrong.
Visa threats and 88-hour weeks
The worker's employment agreement provided for permanent full-time hours, and her employment was conditional on holding a valid work visa. She told the Authority that a former director of the company had pressured her to make a complaint against her partner - who also worked at the restaurant - and told her that if she refused, her hours would be cut or her visa cancelled.
That former director did not give evidence at the investigation meeting. The Authority accepted the worker's account as uncontested and found that a comment along those lines was made.
Payslip records backed up the worker's description of punishing schedules. In one pay period in June 2022, she worked 88 hours across seven straight days. She then worked an eighth consecutive day before getting a day off, followed by 11 days in a row, a single day off, and another six straight days.
The worker said she was never allowed to take annual leave during her entire employment, despite asking. YKFL's own payroll calculation at the end of her employment recorded her annual leave entitlement at 5.35 weeks - consistent with someone who had taken no leave at all over 15 months.
Shifts cancelled, sick leave tangled
When the worker fell ill in January 2023 and provided a medical certificate, she said the employer cancelled a full week of shifts and refused to pay her. Text messages in evidence showed at least two shifts were cancelled at late notice while she was at home and unwell. YKFL told her by text that employers could cancel shifts with two hours' notice, citing a clause in the employment agreement.
No such clause existed.
The sick leave picture was just as tangled. Payslips showed five days of paid sick leave over the entire employment. But the employer's own leave history recorded 33 days. A medical certificate covering five days in January 2023 matched only two paid days on the payslips. And the employment agreement still referenced the old entitlement of five sick days per year, even though legislation had increased it to 10 days from July 24, 2021 - before the worker started.
In March 2022, the worker had Covid and was off for about two weeks. She said the employer used the Covid wage subsidy to pay her sick leave in advance, without discussing it with her.
The Authority found the records could not be reconciled. Because YKFL had failed to produce adequate wage and time records - prejudicing the worker's ability to bring an accurate claim - the Authority accepted the worker's figure of four unpaid sick days, totalling $736.
The $5,088 deduction nobody could explain
The worker resigned on February 23, 2023. A personal grievance had already been raised on her behalf on January 30, and a meeting took place on February 17. YKFL's sole director said everything was resolved at that meeting.
The Authority disagreed. The worker's representative wrote to YKFL again in April and May 2023 disputing unpaid final wages and holiday entitlements. And as the Authority pointed out, final pay issues could not possibly have been settled at the February 17 meeting - because the worker had not yet resigned.
When payroll records were finally produced in 2026, they showed the worker was owed $6,172.44 gross in accrued annual leave and alternative leave. But her final payslip recorded take-home pay of just $1,307.10. The difference was a deduction of $5,088.06, labelled on the payslip as both a "pre-tax deduction" and an "overpayment."
YKFL's sole director said it related to sick leave the worker had been paid when she had supposedly exhausted her entitlement. The Authority asked for the spreadsheet that had been shown to the worker's representative at the February meeting.
It was never provided.
Text messages from the director to the worker in April 2023 broke the claimed debt into two parts: $506 for annual leave used to cover sick leave, and $2,780.66 for a wage overpayment. Even those two figures did not add up to the $5,088.06 actually deducted.
Under New Zealand's Wages Protection Act 1983, employers can only deduct from wages for a lawful purpose and with written consent. The employment agreement had no general deductions clause. Even though the worker had signed a consent-to-deductions form, the Authority found it could not be relied on - the worker's representative had expressly rejected the overpayment claim and repeatedly asked for the supporting calculations, which were never provided. The employer also could not rely on the Act's overpayment recovery provisions, because the clawback fell well outside the required two-month window.
The Authority found YKFL was not entitled to make the $5,088.06 deduction.
Three years without records
The record-keeping failure ran through the whole case. The worker's representative first asked for wage and time records in January 2023. YKFL's consistent position - in 2023 and again at the investigation meeting in January 2026 - was that the worker had access to a payroll platform as an employee and had therefore already been provided with the records.
That was not good enough. After the investigation meeting, when the worker contacted the payroll provider directly, she was told to go back to YKFL. The records were not produced until after the investigation meeting - more than three years after the first request.
The Authority found YKFL had breached its statutory obligation to provide employment records on request, and noted one previous case in which YKFL had been ordered to pay wage and holiday arrears to another employee.
What it cost
The Authority ordered YKFL to pay the worker $20,000 in compensation for hurt and humiliation across seven identified disadvantages.
On top of that: $5,088.06 for the unlawful deduction from final wages, $4,232 gross for 23 cancelled shifts, and $736 for four days of unpaid sick leave.
YKFL was also ordered to pay a $3,000 penalty to the Crown. The Authority noted the two breaches - failing to provide records and making an unlawful deduction - were deliberate and intentional, and globalised them from a potential maximum of $40,000 down to $20,000 before settling on the $3,000 figure.
Interest was ordered on the total wage arrears of $10,056.06 from the date of the determination until paid in full. Costs were reserved.
For HR teams, the case is a practical reminder that pointing a worker toward a payroll platform does not discharge the legal obligation to hand over records on request - and that unexplained deductions from final pay invite the kind of scrutiny that tends to go badly.
