"Revealed: UK fast fashion staff deprived of pay by jobs agency", 27 August 2022

A jobs agency that supplies warehouse workers to fast fashion and high street brands repeatedly underpaid staff and deprived them of holiday pay, an Observer investigation has found.

Workers hired on zero-hours contracts to help process orders for PrettyLittleThing, its parent company Boohoo, The Very Group, Sainsbury’s and Currys are among those who claim to have had wages withheld by Mach Recruitment.

In an employment tribunal judgment handed down in May 2022 – one of six so far this year – Mach was ordered to pay £1,184 to a worker who worked 12 shifts at a warehouse for The Very Group in 2021 but never received his wages. In June 2022, the agency was ordered to pay £138 for taking unauthorised deductions from a worker’s salary, including failing to pay his holiday entitlement. In July it was ordered to pay £430 to a worker who claimed that she had not been paid for shifts. In another case last June, Mach was ordered to pay a worker £12,000 for unfair dismissal, £3,960 for unpaid bonuses, and £1,064 for unpaid holiday, tribunal records show.

In all, the agency has been taken to 12 employment tribunals in the past two years that resulted in it being ordered to pay money to workers, including 10 involving unpaid wages, unauthorised salary deductions or a failure to award holiday pay.

Mach did not engage in the cases and failed to answer calls and emails from the tribunal service, according to the judgments. In a statement this weekend, the firm blamed the communication and pay issues on Covid-19, adding that the claims were unfounded and that it was challenging the rulings.

...the Observer spoke to eight former Mach workers who were at the company between 2020 and 2022 and analysed evidence including pay slips, contracts and text and email correspondence that suggest the practice of underpayment is widespread...

As well as problems with wages, many of the complaints against Mach relate to workers not being paid holiday entitlement they were owed...

Tom Zyzak, managing director at Mach Recruitment, said: “While we are aware that there a number of rule 21 judgments, whereby decisions were made automatically due to no response being received, a large proportion of these are down to claims raised during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown periods when offices, sites and business were closed down. When we were made aware of these, we immediately began the legal process of challenging the claims, as we believe them to be unfounded. The UK court system is experiencing a severe backlog of all tribunal cases so many of these are still being processed.”

When asked for further information the company said it was “unable to go into a lot of detail due to them being ongoing”, but that it was challenging all of the rulings.

Zyzak said all workers were paid holiday and bonuses owed to them and that Mach worked closely with clients to ensure wages were paid correctly. He said the company was aware of “a number of issues that impacted on our normally swift resolution time” and had “worked hard over the last six months” to address them, including expanding its teams and building new systems to “monitor and resolve all queries in a timely fashion”. “We process payroll for up to 15,000 colleagues weekly and our colleagues have multiple communication channels to escalate any queries accordingly,” he said.

Boohoo said: “We take employee welfare very seriously and will be investigating these claims carefully.”

Currys said its outsourcing partner GXO was investigating with Mach. “We expect the robust standards we set on supplier auditing, in line with our own rigorous supply chain due diligence process, to be upheld,” it said.

Sainsbury’s said it did not comment on specific cases but suppliers were expected to comply with the law and good industry practice, adding that it regularly reviewed its partners.

The Very Group said it worked with agencies to resolve payment problems swiftly and would “have an ongoing dialogue” with Mach and partners “to ensure robust policies relating to temporary colleagues” were followed.

The government said it could not comment on individual cases but took agency worker protections “very seriously”, adding that the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate had “a good track record in protecting agency workers”.

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