A chef has said he worked over 220 hours over a fortnight to get a Limerick city restaurant up and running but later backed his colleagues’ decision to shut it down after their employer missed payroll for a second month in a row.
“I think everyone should receive pay for working. If they don’t get paid, they shouldn’t have to work. I agree with them,” Frederico Rocha Madureira told a Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) hearing.
He was giving evidence in a series of statutory claims against The Food Point Ltd of Thomas Street, Limerick city which he has accused of failing to pay him wages, holiday entitlements, Sunday premium and notice pay.
He is one of a number of workers who have referred similar complaints in the wake of the closure on November 26th, 2023.
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Mr Madureira said he received his gross pay of €2,843 for September 2023 as expected after working 222 hours in the space of a fortnight at €12.80 an hour. However, he said staff pay was late in October and did not come at all for some workers. Nobody working at the restaurant got their wages when the November payroll was due, he added.
“There’s two people who didn’t receive pay from October yet, so that’s why they decided to close,” he said of the events of November 26th last year.
“I went to the restaurant to work but [the staff] didn’t want to work,” Mr Madureira said. “We sent [the company] a letter: ‘When are you going to pay us?’ and they didn’t reply, they never replied,” he said.
Adjudicator Ewa Sobanska said: “The staff decided to close the restaurant? It wasn’t the owner, it was the staff?”
“Yes,” said Mr Madureira.
When Ms Sobanska asked whether the manager, another employee, had “any say” in the matter, Mr Madureira said he had not.
The adjudicator sought clarity on a claim brought by Mr Madureira under the National Minimum Wage Act, noting that he had given 222 hours as his working time over two weeks in September 2023. The complainant confirmed this had been the case.
“111 hours a week?” Ms Sobanska asked.
“When they asked me to start working, I said it would take one month at least to open the kitchen. They gave me 24 hours, that’s why I worked so much,” he said.
Explaining his working hours claim, he told Ms Sobanska he had opened the restaurant kitchen while lacking cooking equipment and was taking home kitchen linen to launder as the restaurant did not have a washing machine.
His evidence was that he had been paid for all 222 hours at a rate of €12.80 an hour. Ms Sobanska noted that this was 10 cent above the current minimum wage.
The worker told the tribunal he was still seeking wages for 163 hours of work he alleged ought to have been paid to him in November.
He said his payslips indicated deductions had been for tax purposes but that “Revenue told me I don’t have taxes at all” when he inquired. He also confirmed that he got nothing in respect of annual leave or holidays.
Another former employee of the restaurant, kitchen assistant Rafaela dos Santos, also advanced claims for alleged non-payment of wages and various other statutory entitlements.
Giving evidence through a Portuguese-language interpreter, she said she had been left without wages in November 2023 and got no notice pay.
“They stopped paying us, so we stopped working,” Ms dos Santos said.
Nobody from the company appeared at the hearing to respond to the claims.
Ms Sobanska directed both workers to furnish the tribunal with payslips and contracts of employment and said she would give her decision after receiving the documents.
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