Jacob Pietras is now working as a photographer and cinematographer. Photo / Jacob Pietras
Jacob Pietras is now working as a photographer and cinematographer. Photo / Jacob Pietras
A man who was never paid for two days of work collecting signatures for a petition to Parliament ran into a bureaucratic brick wall when he tried to find his employer, a mystery woman named Tanya.
Jacob Pietras helped with the petition in 2020, but the woman he thought was his employer ignored his emails afterwards.
Now working as a photographer and cinematographer in Wellington, Pietras says he has decided to drop his three-year search for Tanya after taking the matter all the way to the Employment Court with no result.
Pietras was a university student studying communications and looking for extra income when he answered an advertisement on the Student Job Search website in 2020.
Pietras then contacted Student Job Search, who told him the advertisement had been placed not by Tanya Struck, but by a Tanya with a different surname.
Pietras contacted Parliamentary Services to obtain further details of who lodged the petition in Parliament, but they refused him on “privacy grounds”.
Pietras then filed a claim before the Employment Relations Authority (ERA), asking it to obtain identification evidence from Parliamentary Services.
He said he did so on principle, and that was more important to him than the $122 he should have been paid.
“I just didn’t like it that someone could do something illegal and morally wrong just because it was too small [a matter] to pursue.”
The ERA declined to approach Parliamentary Services, saying that Tanya had not been served with a statement of the problem.
Meanwhile, Pietras had been combing the electoral rolls. He could not find a Tanya Struck, but he did find a Tanya with the surname on file at Student Job Search.
Despite being on the electoral roll, this Tanya lived in Spain.
Pietras arranged for documents to be left at the Auckland address and emailed the woman’s father, who seemed to be acting as a property manager.
Jacob Pietras collected signatures for a petition that was later presented to Parliament - but never got paid for the work. Photo / Mark Mitchell
On that basis, the ERA tried to deal with the problem.
It ordered the Tanya in Spain to pay Pietras $122.47 in wages and a penalty of $4000, with half to go to Pietras. Plus, it ordered costs of $2534.
Tanya in Spain applied to have the ERA determination set aside. She told the authority that although she had recently visited New Zealand, she had been living overseas for years.
She said she did not know Pietras, or anything about the proceedings, and the whole matter was causing her a great deal of stress.
Pietras again sought a direction from the authority to require Parliamentary Services to disclose the identity of the person who lodged the petition.
The authority declined, and although it said it would open an “investigation meeting” in June, Pietras launched a challenge in the Employment Court against the ERA’s decision not to seek information from Parliamentary Services.
Last week, the court said it had no jurisdiction to hear the challenge and dismissed it.
This week, Pietras told the Herald he was giving up.
“It felt completely futile,” he said of his three-year effort. “There was just so much back and forth to get any sort of justice.”
Pietras finished his degree long ago, and says that his work in photography and cinematography is going well.
“It’s much better than doing petitions for Student Job Search.”
