Sacked waiter wins £12,000 payment

From the archive, first published Tuesday 5th Dec 2006.

A waiter has won £12,608 from a Bradford restaurant group after a tribunal ruled it had illegally docked his wages.

Akbars restaurant chain was ordered to pay compensation to Fiaz Khan at an employment tribunal remedy hearing yesterday following an earlier judgement which ruled he had been unfairly dismissed and that unlawful deductions had been made from his wages.

The tribunal heard Mr Khan, 21, of White's View, Whetley Hill, Bradford, lost his job after he wrote a grievance letter to his bosses about the docking of his wages.

Tribunal chairman Christine Lee said: "This letter was raising a grievance because Akbars was deducting a fine of £5 from your wages if you had gone to work without having shaved and if you could not attend when your name was on the rota of £15.

"If a customer at a table left without paying then that was deducted from your wages. You refused to pay on July 2 when you were asked to pay £150 for someone who did not pay their bill."

The tribunal also heard that when Mr Khan, who had worked at Akbars restaurants in Bradford and Leeds, was never given a written contract of employment.

Akbars was not represented at yesterday's hearing in Leeds. The tribunal was told the firm had failed to respond to a letter which gave details of the compensation

Mr Khan was awarded £4,700 for money which he had claimed had been kept by his employers in tips.

Mrs Lee said: "I am prepared to accept the claim for damages for breach of contract that relates to the claim that throughout his employment the claimant has been paid only half of the tips to which he was entitled.

"I accept the claimant's evidence that on occasions he was asked to divide the tips and that that was the basis on which tips were divided to staff. That's not an appropriate division of tips. When customers leave a tip they expect all that money to go to staff and not half of that to be creamed off to the employer."

Speaking after the hearing, Mr Khan, a father-of-two, said: "I worked for them for two years and I should not have had to go through this."

Akbars' managing director Shabir Hussain said after the hearing: "No-one was there because from what we were told it was solved. This is a shock."

Mr Hussain denied that waiters' wages were deducted if customers left a restaurant without paying the bill and he said staff received all the tips. He also insisted that the fines system was only used as a deterrent and had never been implemented.

e-mail: fiona.evans@bradford.newsquest.co.uk