A fast food retailer that took almost $3.4 million in Covid wage subsidies failed to pay staff for working public holidays, the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) found yesterday.

Wendco, owned by West Auckland’s Lendich family, admitted it failed to pay workers for working public holidays between 2020 and 2021.

The company is run by West Auckland’s Lendich family and has the exclusive licence to operate American burger chain Wendy’s Hamburgers in New Zealand.

ERA member Rachel Larmer said in a report yesterday that Wendco breached collective agreement clauses including the “Mondayisation” of public holidays on December 26, 2020 and January 2, 2021 and failing to pay some workers an average daily pay for unworked public holidays.

Wendco admitted that it failed to pay five employees for “an alternative holiday they were entitled to”, however Larmer said the case needed further investigation.

“The total number of breaches has not yet been determined, as it is unclear whether the ‘Mondayisation’ issues were limited to five affected employees or involved more than that,” Larmer said.

Trade union Unite said 33 union members working for Wendco had not received public holiday entitlements between Christmas 2020 and New Year 2021.

Unite advocate Mike Treen said the group looked at the wage and time records for the holiday period between 2020 and 2021.

 “We discovered that almost no one got paid for not working the public holiday no matter how obvious it was that it was ‘an otherwise working day’ for them,” Treen said.

Wendco said that because it always closed its restaurants on Christmas Day, 25 December 2020 would not otherwise have been a working day for any of the affected employees.

Unite Union found that Wendy’s tried to make two illegal requirements for the day to become an otherwise working day.

“One was you had to ‘volunteer’ to work the day and the other was you lost the entitlement if they rostered the hours on another day of the week,” Treen said.

The ERA said the requirements were unlawful and ordered Wendco to pay compensation to the affected employees.

“However, Unite Union has called on the Labour Inspectorate to force the company to redo the earlier botched remediation process for all employees because otherwise, the company has got away with stealing thousands of workers’ holiday entitlements [for years] and they shouldn’t be able to profit from that,” Treen said.

Wendco operated 22 fast-service restaurants in New Zealand as of 2022 and has about 450 employees.

Work and Income Covid-19 wage subsidies showed the company took over $3.37m between 2020 and 2021.

Chief executive Danielle Lendich and her parents are shareholders and directors of Lendich Group and directors at Wendco.

In 2017, Wendco was prosecuted by the Labour Inspectorate for refusing staff the right to an alternative day if they worked on a public holiday which was “an otherwise working day” for staff.

The company said no working day was an otherwise working day because staff were on a variable roster. The ERA rejected this claim.

At the time, Wendco had to pay 3500 staff who had worked for them over six years from 1 July 2012.