He called it a cash favour for a friend, but the Authority saw an unjustified dismissal
A takeaway owner who paid a cook in cash faces over $30,000 in payments and penalties, Authority member Robert Davies ruled on 19 May 2026.
Shaoqiang Chen answered an advertisement for a part-time cook in late November 2024 and, after an interview at a Flat Bush takeaway, started work in December. He says Wen Hui Lin, the man who hired him, agreed to pay $1,200 a week in cash and told him he had the job. There was no written agreement.
Chen worked six days a week, cooking and occasionally serving at the counter, until Lin dismissed him on 24 January 2025, saying he had hired someone else and that Chen's supervisor thought he was too slow. Chen was told he could stay on for a fortnight while job-hunting, and his last day was 9 February 2025.
In Chen v Lin [2026] NZERA 307, Davies found Lin had dismissed Chen without warning, without raising the performance concerns first, and without any process. The dismissal, he ruled, was both procedurally flawed and substantively unjustified.
A central question was who actually employed Chen. A letter from an advocate for Lin's side argued the real employer was his company, MH Beached AZ Limited, and that the job was only ever a temporary, informal favour to a friend, paid in cash at Chen's request because he was on a benefit. Chen denied being on a benefit, and his tax records backed him up.
Davies found Lin was the employer personally. Lin had interviewed Chen, paid him in cash, fielded his complaints and dismissed him, and Chen did not even know the company existed until later. The job, Davies held, was permanent and full-time, with nothing to suggest it was ever meant to be temporary.
Because Lin never took part in the case, Chen's account went largely untested, and it was not flawless. Davies found Chen had wrongly claimed, under affirmation, to have sent Lin a photo of a diary entry at the outset, which made the entry look "self-serving and contrived." Even so, he accepted Chen's core account of how he was hired, paid and let go.
Chen also claimed his supervisor had bullied him, describing several incidents including one on 31 January 2025 when, he says, the supervisor "...suddenly got angry and came to me wanting to beat me." Davies was not satisfied the conduct amounted to bullying, finding it reflected occasional workplace tension rather than repeated and unreasonable behaviour.
Once Davies applied the minimum wage to Chen's hours, the gap was stark. Chen had been paid $10,800 for work worth $14,358.94 before holiday entitlements. Lin was ordered to pay wage arrears, alternative and annual holiday pay, $5,833.80 in lost wages and $8,000 in compensation for hurt and humiliation, along with costs.
Davies also imposed penalties for breaches of the Minimum Wage Act 1983, the Holidays Act 2003 and the Employment Relations Act 2000, ordering $12,000 in total, with $11,000 going to the Crown and $1,000 to Chen.
On compensation, Davies kept the award modest. The evidence of lasting harm was limited, and at the investigation meeting Chen's evidence suggested he had treated the incidents he described as "water off a duck's back."
