Sacked kitchen worker served £3k victory

Tuesday 24 September 2019

A kitchen assistant has been awarded nearly £3,300 after the financially struggling café she worked in - for less than minimum wage - closed without telling her she would be losing her job.

The success for Ana Soares came after she brought a claim against her former employer, Kufra's Trading Ltd, in the Employment Tribunal.

Ms Soares was awarded a total of £3,280.56, after the tribunal panel found that she had not only been unfairly dismissed, but that Kufra’s hadn’t been paying her minimum wage.

The decision was made in two separate judgments – one which found that the company owed their former employee for unpaid holiday pay, failing to give her notice as well as not providing a written statement of the dismissal, pay statements or paying her minimum wage.

Pictured: It was found that the café wasn't paying Ms Soares the minimum wage.

The Tribunal was told that Ms Soares was employed by Kufra’s from January 2018 until April 2019 when she was dismissed “on the grounds that [the employer] had no more work” for her. 

The café and shop space has been permanently closed since this date and a second judgment from the Tribunal shows that the business “ceased operating… as it was no longer affordable to run.”

The only people who worked for the business were Ms Soares and the owner of the shop/café. However, Ms Soares was never informed that Kufra’s would be closing and that she would lose her job until the day that the business permanently shut its doors. 

For this, Ms Soares asked the Tribunal to award her notice pay.

The former kitchen and shop assistant also claimed that she was being paid 38p shy of the minimum wage at that time, and that she was owed holiday pay for the bank holidays and annual leave that she’d had to work whilst employed at Kufra’s.

Pictured: Ms Soares was also owed notice pay and holiday pay.

Ms Soares’s former employer failed to respond to her claim for compensation within the allotted timeframe and therefore the Deputy Chairman of the Tribunal approved the claim for compensation as it was uncontested by any evidence put forward by Kufra’s. 

To account for notice pay, holiday pay, no written statement of terms, no pay statements and being paid below minimum wage, Ms Soares was awarded £2,555.60.

The claim that Ms Soares was unfairly dismissed also succeeded, but the Tribunal had to defer the question of compensation until another date so that it could gather some more information. 

In her written judgment, the Tribunal’s Deputy Chairman found that because Kufra’s was “a small business with few employees and no human resources function, a lengthy redundancy consultation process would not have been necessary.

Pictured: The café closed permanently in April without telling its employee that she would lose her job.

“That said, [Ms Soares] should, at least, have been afforded some notice that her job was at risk and dismissal was likely, if not a forgone conclusion.”

She then decided that two weeks’ notice “would have been sufficient to render this dismissal fair".

Ms Soares was therefore awarded an additional £724.96 in lieu of notice pay, making her total compensation claim £3,280.56.