Masala restaurant boss sentenced for exploiting migrant workers
Friday, 28 October 2016
The head of an Indian restaurant forged documents to hire a woman as assistant manager, paid her $3 an hour and got her to do housecleaning, in a case described as exploitation of a migrant worker.
Rupinder Singh Chahil, a New Zealand citizen who was involved in running the Auckland restaurant chain Masala, was sentenced at the Auckland District Court on Friday to six months' home detention and ordered to pay $2500 reparation.
He earlier pleaded guilty to providing false or misleading information to an immigration officer.
In hiring the woman as assistant manager, Chahil signed all documents in the name of Joti Jain, a director and shareholder of Goldlink Enterprises Limited, the employer of workers at Masala.
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He provided those documents to Immigration New Zealand (INZ) and the woman was issued a two-year visa, approved in January 2013.
INZ said that when she started work she was on an agreement saying she would be paid $15 per hour for 30-40 hours week. However, that turned into about 66 hours a week at a rate of $3 per hour, and her roles included mostly waitressing and sometimes cleaning private properties.
By the time she left her job after 10 months, she was owed wages and holiday pay of more than $23,000.
An extensive investigation by INZ found that in all, four Indian nationals were significantly underpaid between 2012 and 2014, forced to under record the hours they worked, return some of their pay back to their employer and not paid any holiday pay.
Jain was sentenced in October last year to 11 months' home detention, 220 hours' community work and ordered to pay almost $58,000 reparation.
A second defendant, Rajwinder Singh Grewal, was sentenced to four-and-a-half months' home detention and ordered to pay almost $5000 reparation.
INZ assistant general manager Peter Devoy said the sentences sent a strong message that migrant exploitation would not be tolerated.
'We will not tolerate employers who exploit migrant labour for their own commercial advantage and will not hesitate to prosecute in cases where warranted,' he said.