Mr Nigellus Vaz v Mr Darshan Singh Grewal — 2021

Mr Vaz and Mr Grewal gave sharply different accounts of the employment relationship, the pay arrangement and the circumstances of Mr Vaz's departure. The tribunal preferred Mr Vaz's account on the key issues, finding that he started work on 12 April 2018 on £550 per week, later dropped to £400, then £300, then a 20% commission arrangement in November 2019, and that the respondent controlled the takings and staff wages. It found the claimed self-employed arrangement was not genuine and that Mr Vaz was moved between pubs at Mr Grewal's direction.

Applying Ready Mixed Concrete and Carmichael, the tribunal held that Mr Vaz was an employee and, for Working Time purposes, a worker. It found that he was simply evicted from the bar with no process whatever, and without good reason, so the ordinary unfair dismissal claim succeeded. The separate automatic unfair dismissal allegation under section 104A ERA failed because the reason found for the dismissal was refusal to agree to a pay cut, not action taken or proposed to enforce national minimum wage rights.

The tribunal upheld the wage and working-time claims. It found that Mr Vaz was underpaid in breach of the national minimum wage rules, that he worked roughly 12 hours a day from 6.30 am to 11.30 pm with only about seven hours between shifts, that he did not receive the required weekly rest, and that no annual leave was taken over the roughly 2.5 years in question. It referred to Kreuziger v Land Berlin and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft v Shimizu when considering annual leave. It also found a failure to provide written employment particulars and said a further award of four weeks' net pay was indicated, but compensation was left for the remedy stage and was not quantified in this liability judgment.