Employment Discrimination Lawyers and Labor Law Lawyers

Didn't get paid for working.?

So this is going to sound a little silly and a lot naive. I am from the United States and studied abroad at a university in Kingston upon Thames. When school finished I had a lot of free time so I then decided to get a side job at a pub. I set up a student account with Barclays and forwarded my deposit information to my manager. I worked roughly 90 hours before I had something to leave to go back to the states for a family emergency. I gave a weeks notice before my departure but still hadn't received my first pay check. Assuming it would be deposited to the account in which I set up because I didn't know as much as a should have known about payment and employment laws in the UK. After returning to the states I wasn't able to open my account to check the funds available because of lost log in information. Long story short, I finally am able to access the account online and have come to find I was never compensated for the time spent working. What do I do?

Most employers in the UK do pay directly to bank accounts and if they have your bank details, it is reasonable to assume that they should pay directly to your bank.

I guess what you should know, based on what you have written above, is:

- They have to pay you for every hour that you worked, even if you hadn't given any notice at all, and they should also pay for any annual leave which you had accrued but not yet taken

- They are only obligated to pay you on their normal pay day, which may be some time after you finish depending on how often they pay (e.g. a company which pays monthly could potentially pay you your final pay about four weeks after you actually leave, if that is when pay day happens to fall). However, I would imagine a pub would be more likely to pay weekly so there shouldn't be such a long delay

- Depending on how payroll works in that particular organisation, it could be possible that you would not get paid in your first month at all (you then get paid twice in your second month). For example, in my organisation, pay day is the last day of the month. But the deadline for managers to submit information to payroll is the first of the month. So, if you happened to start work on 2 May, you would be too late to have your details added to payroll for payment at the end of May, and you would receive your first payment at the end of June, when you would be paid for both May and June

So, all of this explains why there could potentially be a delay, but you don't say exactly how long you have been waiting. If you think it has been an unreasonable amount of time, then I would suggest that your first step would be to contact the pub directly. Remember there could be a perfectly innocent explanation - maybe they just took your bank details down wrong!

The next step, if that fails, would be to contact ACAS (see link below), who are an organisation who can help employees if they have disputes with their employer. They may advise, though, that since you are not in the country, it is not feasible for you to proceed with the next step, which would be taking the employer to a tribunal.

If/when you finally do get paid, make sure you get your pay slips! You will be entitled to claim back any tax which you have paid if you don't plan to return to the UK during this tax year (which ends in March 2010).

Stumpy - why do you assume that she was working illegally? It is perfectly legal for university students who are here on a student visa to take on part-time work, regardless of their country of origin.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Employment Discrimination Attorney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.