DD worked for 9 weeks and hasn't been paid yet

[livingontheedgeee]

DD took on a paid job three days a week over the summer working for a national charitable organisation. After 9 weeks she still hasn't been paid.

On pay day, she didn't get paid and was told it was because she started after the cut-off and would get paid on the 25th August. No pay arrived then either so I contacted the payroll dept who said didn't have her bank details nor had the manager submitted her hours. They requested the hours, she sent in another bank details form.

The payroll department said they would process her payment today. They didn't because DDs manager didn't authorise them to.

Now she's in a position where she's worked 9 weeks without pay. The fault lies with the company's processes (or lack of). She's now told she'll be paid next week but whether she will or not is another matter.

So, she has been told to put in a complaint about her manager which makes her extremely uncomfortable.

Why should DD have the stress of dealing with this when it's their issue? All it's going to do is create an atmosphere when she goes back at Xmas.

This is surprisingly common, although that won’t make you feel better.

I have experience of this, on the ‘sorting out’ side, when I worked for a PLC. National organisations seem to cock up the process of making people payroll active because the processes are labyrinthine, few people understand them and centralised payroll teams are reactive, not proactive.

I was way too senior to intervene in payroll problems in my business but I ended up doing it because (1) nobody else understood the process and (2) you’d need a heart of granite not to want to help a 22 year old who hadn’t been paid for two months and would be skint over Christmas.

Unfortunately, the problem is her line manager, whose responsibility it is to make sure that they understand what is needed to get somebody payroll active and actually get them paid. A frightening number of line managers in my previous organisation thought that the payroll fairies would make everything happen by magic and they didn’t have to engage with dull and tortuous processes because they were too busy. Wrong!

I’d advise your daughter to ask for an interim payment to be netted off her salary when it is finally paid. Her line manager should be moving heaven and earth to make this happen. I wouldn’t advise complaining about her line manager, though: better to guilt him or her into doing better in future by asking for the salary advance.

Good luck.

This happens all the time in my company. As a starting point, if you work on August 1st, you are paid on September 25th. Then, on top of that they often miss your time sheet. So, you're paid on October 25th. Never an apology, or a rush through, just a cursory 'we'll add it to your next pay.'

I'm shocked that companies expect you to work for so long without being paid. I bet the people who make the decision to run such an unethical payroll process don't have to worry about where the next penny is coming from.

Thanks Nettletheelf. I'm going to send a very rational and composed email now that I've calmed down a bit. I'll let you know the outcome.

I hope you get a good result.