She paid her boss rent straight from her paycheque, and it wasn't legal
A worker living in her employer's home was told the money taken from her pay was rent. A tribunal just ruled it was something else entirely: an unlawful wage deduction.
In a July 10, 2026, decision, a British Columbia Employment Standards Tribunal panel chaired by Kenneth Wm. Thornicroft ordered a food service business to pay a former employee an additional $1,800, plus vacation pay and interest, after finding it required her to pay two $900 installments from her wages under the guise of rent.
The worker, a temporary foreign worker, filed a confidential unpaid wage complaint in October 2020, alleging unpaid overtime, vacation and statutory holiday pay, unauthorized deductions and excessive hours. She also alleged one of the employer's principals subjected her to ongoing sexual harassment. That claim was not part of this reconsideration, though the panel said it strongly disagreed with an earlier, unappealed finding that treated the alleged harassment as accepted conditions of her job.
The worker lived in a room in the principals' private home from May 2019 to May 2020, while the couple travelled abroad twice, leaving her alone in the residence. The employer maintained the arrangement was a verbal rental agreement of $650 a month plus deferred rent from her unemployed months. The worker said there was no rental agreement, that she did household labour for...
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