Of course I didn’t get paid!

So payday arrived and of course the bitch has tried to stiff me.
In a civilized country such as Taiwan or the UK, this is not something I really worry about anymore. Years ago, working in construction in Germany, not getting paid was an occupational hazard. It happened all the time, but since then I’ve learned to deal with it by taking advantage of government agencies which exist precisely to stop this kind of abuse.
A few years ago, someone in the UK tried to get out of paying money that was owed to me for work done and I just rolled my eyes and started going through the process. Get everything in writing, send an email or even a WhatsApp explaining what you think your owed and why, ask them to reply within a week. If you don’t get a satisfactory response then write again and tell them you’re going to start a process through ACAS. Give ’em another week to reply.
Get all the forms filled in online, it’s pretty straightforward, and the moment your deadline passes (“midday on this date”) just hit send. You get an email acknowledgement with the case number, and forward this on to the employer with a note to let them know someone will be in touch.
And then you just wait. It takes a few weeks but eventually someone is assigned to your case. They email and then phone you, and if you agree to mediation then they contact the employer on your behalf to try and get things sorted out. They try not to take sides, but will generally offer an opinion on whether you have a case.
After some more waiting, and maybe some back and forth, it’s all over. The outcome is confidential, so you can’t announce in your blog that you got x amount from someone, but I think it’s okay to say that I was happy with the outcome I got.
So when I left my last job unexpectedly I was pretty relaxed about whether I would get paid. I had money in the bank, no bills, and I wasn’t under any pressure. I could see there was a possibility of a bit of a shitfight, but was confident it would be sorted out eventually. I just need to be ready.
So I looked through my record of hours worked and identified the weeks where I hadn’t reached the guaranteed minimum. I wrote down how many hours were owed, and added that to the total of hours actually worked in the current pay period. Then I added that number to the total hours worked since I had started the job, to calculate my statutory holiday entitlement.
I added those numbers together to get a final total of what was owed, and send it to my employer with an explanation of how I had calculated it on WhatsApp. (That was our usual channel of communication.) The first response was to tell me that she wouldn’t discuss it until payday at the end of the month, then she went on to tell me that she was going to charge me a cleaning fee for my room. I knew that she knew that was illegal, pointed that out to her, and since she was obviously being difficult told her that we could discuss at the end of the month.
The next thing I heard from her was when a payment landed in my bank account that was substantially lower than I was expecting. Obviously tax and national insurance would be deducted so there’s no point querying the final amount until you know how it was calculated, which is why she’s legally required to provide a payslip. But she hadn’t sent one, and when I asked for an explanation on WhatsApp I realized she had blocked me! 🤣
No worries, I just sent an email giving her seven days, and went off to fill in the ACAS forms. She never replied so they got sent in and now I’m waiting for them to assign me a case officer. Yawn. It’s all kind of sad and routine, not stressful, just disheartening.
If she was just a bitch who thought she could get away with this I could be enjoyably and righteously angry, but I think she’s just a limited individual who doesn’t even understand what she has done wrong or how this is going to play out. I feel not exactly sorry for her, just kind of depressed that this is normal, this is the level that most people work at.
It’ll take a few months to get my money, meanwhile I’m at the beach! 😎