A woman hired by Hamilton firm Simply Girls Painters and Decorators was sacked two months later after she raised issues around her contract. Stock photo / 123RF
A woman hired by Hamilton firm Simply Girls Painters and Decorators was sacked two months later after she raised issues around her contract. Stock photo / 123RF
An employer who sacked a worker and was ordered to pay her $22,000 compensation has posted a video on TikTok saying she won't pay a cent.
Ronique Rosser was dismissed from her job as a brush hand two months after starting, following a confrontation with her boss Katherine Courtenay-Roe over the employment contract.
Rosser has now been awarded $22,000 in compensation, lost wages and entitlements by the Employment Relations Authority.
But a video Courtenay-Roe posted to social media makes it clear she has no intention of paying the award, describing the problem as one of "self-entitled employees in this country who run crying to the ERA when they f****d up their work".
Rosser joined Hamilton house painting firm Simply Girls Painters and Decorators as a brush hand in November 2020.
Two months later she was gone, amid accusations and counter allegations over what transpired on site the day she lost her job.
Now the firm has been ordered to pay Rosser $12,000 in compensation, plus money in lost wages and entitlements and a further $1800 in interest on the unpaid entitlements, dating back to January 2021.
Rosser claimed she was unjustifiably dismissed on January 11 last year.
She said her dismissal came after she had tried asking Courtenay-Roe - the company's sole director and shareholder - why she had not been paid for statutory holidays over the Christmas and New Year period.
Simply Girls said that because Rosser was a casual employee she was not entitled to payment for statutory holidays. It argued she was not unjustifiably dismissed.
The business also said Rosser's conduct justified "peremptory dismissal" with no further process.
Rosser was enticed by a friend to join the firm. After a phone call with Courtenay-Roe she was offered a full-time position of up to 40 hours per week, working Monday to Friday 9am-5pm.
An employer ordered to pay a sacked worker compensation has vented on TikTok that she won't be paying a cent. Photo / 123RF
She was given a written individual employment agreement when she turned up for work on her first day, and returned it signed the next day.
She told the ERA she was confused to see the employment agreement was only casual, but she did not raise this with Courtenay-Roe at the time.
Early in January 2021 Rosser noticed that she had not been paid for the statutory holidays over the Christmas/New Year period and raised this with her employer by text message.
She was told that she was not entitled to be paid for public holidays, but Rosser did not think this was set out in her individual employment agreement.
She tried raising it again with Courtenay-Roe when visiting the job site on January 11.
The ERA said each had a different view of the exact nature of the altercation which followed but the outcome was that Rosser was told to leave the job site and informed that she was fired.
A spokesperson for workers' advocacy group Sacked Kiwi, which represented Rosser, told Open Justice the case raised a number of interesting issues, a key one being how often employers mistakenly believed they could just fire a casual employee.
Employment Relations Authority member Pam Nuttall found in her decision of August 9 that Rosser was not a casual employee, therefore the statutory standard for justification of the dismissal had to be met.
Rosser made a recording on her phone the day of the onsite exchange with her boss.
The short audio file used in evidence confirmed that Rosser was being told that she was fired because she was "bullying and harassing Courtenay-Roe".
Rosser was warned she would not be paid if she turned up at work the following day, to which Rosser responded she had to be given two weeks' notice because it was in the contract.
The ERA said that although there had been an attempt to arrange a meeting to address the issue of Rosser's entitlement to public holiday pay, there was no other indication that any statutory fair process requirements had been followed in dismissing Rosser.
Nuttall said the proceedings had a long history of attempting to engage the respondents – the company as first respondent and Courtenay-Roe as second respondent.
Courtenay-Roe said in a video posted on TikTok that she would be telling the ERA she did not respect its authority, because of what she saw as its bias toward employees.
She added that while the employee had won, she was "never going to get any money out of me", because the company in question was waiting to be voluntarily liquidated.
"Businesses just don't have that sort of money. What comes in goes out to pay employees and bills.
"The company she took to court is no longer trading either. It's sitting there to be voluntarily liquidated and we'll be working under a new company name so anything coming in will be under a different company name."
Sacked Kiwi founder Alex Kersjes told Open Justice it was unlikely Rosser would secure all, if any of the award, but they would not know for sure until the enforcement process started.
