I’m asking this question from the point of view of an employee.

On occasions I and other menbers of staff have applied for annual leave, with pay, which we are entitled to. However we are then left sitting in the dark waiting for a response, be it paid annual leave being denied or payment being made, if payment is denied we often actually don’t get any formal response advising of this.

As a supervisor I am generally the first person the staff come to with a query, if I can’t persoanlly help then I always report back to the manager in our branch. If he then can’t help, he reports back to Head office.

As there is no HR departments in any of the branches all wages are dealt with in Head office, which none of the staff are ever given access to freely, thus enabling them to go straight to the appropriate person with their problems.

All the feed back we get when we ask is that the forms have gone up to head office and we have to wait and see what happens. Or we are told that the forms are waitng to be signed off by the company owner, which often takes months to happen.

I persoanlly suffer financially for not having being paid for my time off and have incurred several bank charges as a result of the non-payment.

I would really like to know what my rights are and is the company legally allowed to operate in the manner described above?

Ashley Whittingham-Orford