A hotelier has been ordered to pay a former employee in excess of £40,000 in personal injury compensation after it was discovered that the worker, a chef with the vulnerable mental condition of autism, was only being paid £90 a week, work accident claim experts recently reported.
Joseph Louei, the hotelier in question and the owner of the Astor Hotel, located in Plymouth, faced strong condemnation for his exploitation of Adam O’Dee, the twenty three year old chef that had been threatened with sacking because he had taken too much off the end of a cucumber.’ Accident claim experts also reported that members of the Exeter tribunal panel also heard that Mr Louei threw frozen bread rolls around the kitchen after he wrongly blamed the young autistic man for neglecting to remove them from the freezer.
Adam, who has been diagnosed with dyslexia and the autism spectrum disorder known as Asperger Syndrome, resigned from his position after being bullied by Mr Louei, relinquishing a 40 hour a week job for which he was paid a paltry weekly wage of only £95, less than 50 per cent of the national minimum wage. He won his compensation claims against Astor Hotel Ltd and Mr Louei for minimum pay, disability discrimination, and unfair dismissal, with John Hollow, the tribunal judge, stating that ‘it beggars belief’ that Mr Louei paid the young man less than £100 a week for a full 40 hours of work.
While the tribunal had no precise figures for the hours Adam was working on a weekly basis, the judge said, it was understood that £95 a week left him very substantially underpaid based on what a minimum wage worker would earn on a 38.5 hour work week. To expect Adam to work such long hours for such little pay stretched the credibility of the tribunal ‘to breaking point,’ the judge also remarked.