“Distressing” and “devastating” is how Indian migrant Ranjit Singh describes his experience of working at a 7 Eleven store in Sydney where he was paid as little as $9 an hour and was sometimes required to work up to 60 hours a week.
Mr Singh worked at a franchisee-owned store in Sydney from March 2009 until February 2016 where he was paid between $9 and $15 an hour at different times.
“There was no night-shift allowance, no weekend or public holiday penalties, no overtime.”
After the issue of widespread underpayment of wages to employees came to light and the company set up a wage repayment program, Mr Singh says he was hopeful making a successful claim.
“The officer who prepared my case calculated that I worked 15,200 hours at the store,” Mr Singh tells SBS Punjabi.
He submitted a claim to the independent wage repayment program that he was underpaid for those hours.
The wage repayment program refused his case citing the reason that Mr Singh was involved in “distributing funds to other employees outside the normal payroll process and potentially may have benefitted” from this.
Ranjit Singh has now approached the Fair Work Ombudsman to seek a redressal of his claim of underpayment. Source: Supplied
Mr Singh denies any involvement and deriving any benefit from handing out cash payments to other employees at the store.
“I was an employee and the franchisee ordered me to hand out cash payment to the workers who weren’t working on the day he [the franchisee] visited the store. If a worker wasn’t going to be at work for 3-4 days, I couldn’t keep cash with me and I used to deposit it into my bank account and withdraw when the worker came in and hand them the money,” he tells SBS Punjabi.
SBS Punjabi spoke to some of Mr Singh’s co-workers who say he was just a worker at the store and had no role in underpaying them.
“I was underpaid by the franchisee, not by Ranjit Singh. He was just my colleague,” said Misbah Ul Haq. Mr Haq had also submitted a claim of underpayment and was subsequently back paid nearly $100,000.
Source: AAP
Another worker, Ghulam Hamdani, said Mr Singh had no involvement in underpaying workers at the store. “He was just a worker, like us,” he said.
Mr Singh claims that he would have been entitled to a “substantial payout”.
“The average claims are much smaller than the one I had put up. My claim was definitely going to be several hundred thousand dollars, in fact close to half a million.”
SBS Punjabi contacted 7-Eleven for a response. A spokesperson said they were unable to offer a comment, citing confidentiality protocols of the under which, he said, 7-Eleven wasn’t notified of the identities of individual claimants.
The spokesperson said the company was aware that a number of claims in similar circumstances were “appropriately denied”.
Mr Singh moved to New Zealand after quitting his job at 7-Eleven in 2016.
He has now approached the Fair Work Ombudsman to seek a redressal of his claim.
