Head lice treatment company must pay €1,000 to former technician

A head lice treatment company has been ordered to pay over €1,000 to a woman who has spent four years trying to secure back wages from a part-time job with the business during college.

Niamh O’Brien, who worked for Innominato Ltd trading as The Head Lice Experts, said she decided to quit after four and a half months in the job because the “wrong hours” were being put on her payslip and she was being underpaid.

In complaints to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) under the Payment of Wages Act 1991, she sought €264.07 over the pay packet issue and further alleged she had been denied her breaks, annual leave entitlements and notice pay.

She had been earning €10 an hour as a clinician with the firm during her final year in college, she said.

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Ms O’Brien, who represented herself at a hearing in December 2020, said she only discovered that the wrong hours were going on her payslip after six weeks in the job and had been assured by her former employer the matter would be resolved “as soon as possible”.

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Ms O’Brien said she decided to quit because the matter was “never properly addressed” and gave the month’s notice required by her contract on 10th October, 2019 – but was given just one more five-hour shift before finishing up on 7th December that year.

Adjudicating officer Michael Ramsay noted correspondence from the firm to the WRC in August 2020 stating that it had been “dissolved” as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

When a link for a remote hearing link was provided to the company, it wrote again to the WRC case officer stating: “Without prejudice: regrettably the respondent company is dissolved. I will therefore not be discuss[ing] this matter any further.”

Mr Ramsay pressed on with the hearing in the absence of the respondent and accepted Ms O’Brien’s “uncontroverted” evidence and her calculations for the sums of money owed to her.

These were €264.07 for the shortfall in pay due to the wrong hours going on her payslips; €170 for breaks Ms O’Brien said she was never allowed to take, €333.40 in lieu of annual leave paid on termination and €300 for her notice period.

“These complaints are well founded,” Mr Ramsay wrote, ordering the company to pay Ms O’Brien €1,067.47 in a decision published on Wednesday.

The decision, issued to the parties at the end of September, comes nearly four years on from Ms O’Brien’s initial complaint to the tribunal on 18 November, 2019.