REVEALED: UK fast fashion workers denied pay by employment agency. Employment law

An employment agency that supplies warehouse workers to fast fashion and high street brands, repeatedly underpaying workers and denying them holiday pay; Observer Investigation found.

For PrettyLittleThing, parent company Boohoo, The Verge Group, Sainsbury’s and Couriers are among those who say workers on zero-hours contracts to process orders have been denied wages by Match Recruitment.

In an employment tribunal judgment handed down in May 2022 – one of six this year – Mack was ordered to pay £1,184 to a worker who worked 12 shifts at The Very Group warehouse in 2021. In June 2022, the agency was ordered to pay £138 for taking unauthorized deductions from an employee’s wages, including failing to pay holiday entitlement. I was ordered to pay £430 to a worker who was not paid for a shift in July. In another case last June, Mack was ordered to pay an employee £12,000 for unfair dismissal, £3,960 for unpaid bonuses and £1,064 for unpaid holiday pay, court records show.

In total, the agency has been brought to 12 employment hearings in the past two years and ordered to pay workers, including 10 for unpaid wages, unauthorized deductions or non-payment of holiday pay.

Mack was not involved in the case and did not return calls and emails to the court service, according to the ruling. In a statement this weekend, The company has blamed communication and payment issues on Covid-19, saying the claims are unfounded and is contesting the decisions.

Also, by examining the cases that went to court, Observer In the year He spoke to eight former Mach employees who were at the company between 2020 and 2022 and analyzed evidence including payslips, contracts and written and email correspondence that suggested underpayment.

Mo Ajala, 23, who was employed taking orders at PrettyLittleThing’s Sheffield warehouse at the time of the outbreak, said he struggled for more than six months to pay for a week’s night shift. Despite repeated phone calls and text messages to Match’s offices, the business graduate was ignored. “I’d call and they’d say, ‘We’re going to pay you this week.’ Then one week, two weeks, three weeks, four go by,” he said.

He was eventually paid £289 for raising the issue with Acas, which supports employment disputes, and later took Match to court, where in January 2021 the agency made an illegal deduction from his salary. Mack was not involved with the process. “It was very stressful to go through all that just to pay off the money I owed,” Ajala said. “They didn’t even come. It felt like they didn’t care.”

Lalit Yadav, a 25-year-old master’s student from India, submitted documents to prove that he himself was underpaid by Mach. In February, Yadav took a part-time job at a Sainsbury’s distribution center near Leeds, combining night shifts with his studies. He had to take three buses to get to the warehouse and the physically demanding job made him lose 18 kilograms in two months. But he didn’t intend to “work full time” because his salary – paid regularly at first – helped him cover the cost of living.

The problems began three months later, he said, when he realized he had not been paid for an eight-hour night shift he had worked in June. Mack told him he needed more documents to process the payment, so he provided them, but was told he didn’t make that shift. “I’m sure, I’m sure they can check the cameras, and they should have records of me going in and out. But for some reason they don’t seem to want to check, saying, ‘You must have worked on this day or not,’” Yadav said. “Not getting paid after working so hard was very encouraging.”

Yadav said that he had repeatedly called Mac to resolve the issue but it was passed between employees who either failed to help or promised and did not take any action. Finally he gave up. Others say they were paid only for messaging company executives on LinkedIn or posting on the company’s Facebook and Instagram pages.

Mach has grown rapidly over the past two years. According to data, the company It will have an average of 9,542 temporary workers per month on its books in 2021, up from 5,783 in 2020, while turnover will almost double from £110m to £200m and pre-tax profits will rise to £3.8m.

Ads aimed at job seekers paint a glowing picture. Earlier this month, the company launched a campaign to attract employees to PrettyLittleThing, a fashion brand known for its affordable clothing, which includes “ambassadors.” Island of love Stars Molly-Mae Hague and Gemma Owen. The adverts promise workers will benefit from a “friendly environment” and receive “excellent hourly pay” from £9.90. During previous recruitment drives, Mach posted a video on Tik Tok of workers dancing at a PLT warehouse. He has also carried out recent recruitment drives for The Very Group, owner of Littlewoods, and food warehouses across the UK.

Jamie Woodcock, Author The gig economy And a senior lecturer in management at the University of Essex, said the match system was “highly exploitative” and could lead to low-wage workers receiving less than the minimum wage. “If you systematically underpay people and pay them on holidays, you’re going to be taken to court all the time. But you’re significantly undervaluing that labor, because a lot of people don’t pursue it or don’t know how to do it,” he said.

WAGE RELATED PROBLEMS Most of the complaints at Mach are related to non-payment of vacation pay to employees. Agency workers have fewer rights than permanent workers, but are still entitled to at least 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per year.

Lee Robson, 47, who worked the night shift at Bohu’s Burnley warehouse until October 2021, said he had not taken a break during that time and was waiting for the hard-earned money to start his new job. But when he got his final pay package, he says the holiday pay was not included.

When he called the match office he said he was told to fill out a form, but after doing so he said he was not paid. “I was calling the number to employers and they were ignoring me, blocking my number or forwarding it to someone else,” he said.

One day, about three months later, £380 was deposited into his bank account without explanation. Mach believes he paid because he was “pushed” but not everyone went to the same lengths. “It was becoming a bit of a nightmare,” he said.

Father-of-two Steve Smalley said he did not get the holiday he was owed after leaving his role at the Curries warehouse in Newark, Lincolnshire in January.

He said he got “blank left, right and center” when he raised the issue with Mac. A senior manager said he received the outstanding £180 in April after he sent a message on LinkedIn hoping to avoid going to court. “It was very disappointing. After a few months I started getting texts saying ‘We have shifts’. “I thought, ‘You cheeky bastards,'” he said.

Nick Clark of the Unpaid British Project, which investigated wage theft in the UK, said the cases at Mach were a “typical story” and echoed cases in other sectors. He called for more effective enforcement and said the system must be improved to hold “repeat offenders” accountable. Courts can impose fines in cases where employers have engaged in “particularly bad behaviour”, but the powers are “very rarely used”, he said. “They don’t seem to see how many other cases there were,” he said.

Ryan Bradshaw, a specialist legal adviser on employment matters at the law firm League Day, said companies that outsource recruitment to third-party agencies have a “moral responsibility” to ensure workers are paid correctly. “Outsourcing allows companies to push responsibility to someone else. But it’s not enough. They need to know these things are happening, and if they’re not, they’re not paying enough attention,” he said.

Match Recruiting Managing Director Tom Zyzak said: “Many of the laws have been made without response knowing that there are 21 judgments, the majority of which relate to claims made during Vivid. -19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown periods where offices, places and businesses are closed. When these were brought to our attention, we immediately began the legal process to challenge the claims as we believed them to be unfounded. The UK court system is experiencing a heavy backlog of all court cases so many of these are still pending. “

When asked for more information, the company said it was “unable to disclose many details as they are still in progress” but was opposing all decisions.

Zyzak said all employees were owed vacation and bonuses and that Mach would work closely with clients to ensure wages were paid correctly. The company said it was aware of “a number of issues that impacted our normally fast resolution times” and had “worked hard over the past six months” to address them, including expanding its teams and “building new systems to track and resolve them all.” “We process payroll for up to 15,000 colleagues every week and our colleagues have multiple channels of communication to escalate any queries accordingly,” he said.

“We take employee safety seriously and will investigate these claims carefully,” Bhu said.

Currys said it was investigating with its outsourcing partner GXO Store. “We expect the strong standards we set for supplier audits to be upheld through our own rigorous supply chain due diligence process,” he said.

Sainsbury’s did not comment on specific cases but said it regularly reviewed its partners to ensure suppliers were expected to comply with the law and good industry practice.

The group said it would work with agencies to quickly resolve payment issues and would “engage in ongoing dialogue with MAC and partners to ensure robust policies are in place around temporary workers.”

The government said it could not comment on individual cases but took agency worker protection “very seriously”, adding that the Employment Agency Standards Authority had a “good track record of protecting agency workers”.

Wood Ibere, 29, who moved to the UK from Nigeria to study public policy and is the founder of Do Take Action, a non-profit organization that campaigns on social issues, said she was unpaid for several shifts while working in a warehouse. In the year March 2021 via Cardiff. “I can’t allow this lie,” I thought. I went to the office and said I want my money. I lost my home at that time. I was struggling for money. It was really bad,” she said.

Emails show that four months later, after forced administrators, Ebere was paid. But she said many others are afraid to speak up. “People don’t complain because they need money. But you work very, very, very hard. You work very hard. They don’t even pay us a salary,” she said. “It makes you feel worthless. They must be held accountable.