How one company used a chef's own holiday pay to fund a wage cut he never agreed to
An Auckland chef's holiday pay covered a pay cut he never agreed to, Employment Relations Authority member Marija Urlich ruled on 30 July 2026.
The chef worked for his employer from 15 January 2025 to 19 October 2025. His written employment agreement, signed on 20 January 2025, set his pay at $25 gross an hour for 30 hours across five days a week, and required any change to those terms to be agreed in writing.
The employer's sole director accepted holiday pay was owed but disputed the amount. He said the chef had agreed, from 2 June 2025, to work three fewer hours a week for correspondingly less pay, pointing to an email he sent proposing the change on 8 June 2025.
Urlich found that email did not record any agreement, and no later written confirmation existed either. She considered it more likely the chef never agreed to the change, since his pay did not actually drop. Instead, she found, the employer had been using the chef's public holiday entitlement to make up the missing hours.
That conclusion traced back to an email the chef had sent on 2 June 2025, asking for a payslip and listing six public holidays he said had gone unpaid. In it, he told the director, "you haven't paid me anything".
Later correspondence bore this out. The employer applied part of the chef's public holiday entitlement to his pay on two occasions: nine hours between 9 June and 29 June 2025, and a further twelve hours...
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