When you are young sometimes, it makes sense to work at a lower paying job in order to get some valuable experience.
What happens when the place you are working not only doesn’t give you good experience but fails to pay you what you are owed?
That is what happened to the young mechanic in this story, but years later he was able to get what he was owed.
Check it out.
Deny my wages and steal my stuff? I’ll take that and more, and prevent you from owning a business again.
About 5/6 years ago I was doing my apprenticeship to become a mechanic.
I managed to land my apprentice role at a classic car restoration shop.
It was a one-man band operation run by an ex-Lotus technician (we’ll call him Slimy Git), and I thought it’d be a great business to be a part of and help grow.
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
Looking back on it, SG clearly only took me on because the UK government has an arrangement with various trade industries that, if a company takes on an apprentice taking part in an official apprenticeship scheme (which I was), the government gives the company a cash grant.
They’re also allowed to pay apprentices well below the minimum wage as an additional incentive.
During my 11 months at that workshop I earned only £300 a month.
So SG got free cash, and also got to use me as dirt cheap labour, but I was willing to put up with it for a couple of years and learn the trade on awesome old cars.
It didn’t turn out that way.
This guy is shady.
Whilst I was working there, SG asked me to do many questionable things, including removing parts from a customer’s car and using them to fix another car of the same model that we had in the shop.
Also disassembling a large part of another customer’s car, before ceasing all work on it.
I later found out that this was his tactic to put the car in an undriveable state, and then effectively hold it hostage so he could extort more money from the car’s owner for repairs that, ultimately, we would never do.
I really wish I had wisened up to what SG was doing at the time, and I feel really awful for my part in his fraud.
But I was a young, naïve apprentice, and I just did what I was told.
Then, one Monday in late 2014, I turned up for work in the morning, and SG didn’t.
After an hour of waiting, I drove home again and fired up my computer, and found an email from SG, saying that he was super sorry, but he was closing the business.
That was that.
At the time he was overdue with my wages by two months, but promised in the email to pay them into my account before long.
That was the last I ever heard from him.
He never replied to any emails or picked up his phone, and of course, I never got my last two months wages, leaving me £600 out of pocket.
There is no reason for that.
Not only that, but SG stole my socket set, worth about £100.
By the time I was able to get the landlord of the workshop to let me in to retrieve it, all the tools were cleared out.
I was totally furious as you can imagine, but luckily my dad knows what to do in this kind of situation, so we started putting together a case for small claims court.
We basically assembled as much evidence as we could that I was owed money, with a demand that SG pay me £700 (unpaid wages plus the socket set), and send it to the county court (I suppose similar to a district court in the US).
The court accepted our case, and sent it to SG to give him the chance to respond.
He responded basically saying that, because I had been employed by the company (that he was the sole proprietor of), and not directly by him, he didn’t have to pay me, as the company was no longer in existence.
We wrote back to the court asserting that this was basically false, especially as I had an email from SG’s personal account promising to pay me.
He obviously owes the money.
The court agreed, and lacking any further replies from SG, automatically settled in our favour, slapping SG with a County Court Judgement (CCJ) ordering him to pay me the £700.
If you’re not from the UK, a CCJ is a real ball and chain to have on your name.
It can make it very difficult or downright impossible to do things like apply for credit cards, buy things on finance, get a loan or a mortgage, or start a new business.
I’m not sure exactly how you get rid of one, but obviously paying the debt it was awarded for probably helps.
What it did do though, was give us the option to have government bailiffs forcibly collect the £700 from SG.
One problem though, I didn’t know where SG lived, as he had moved out of his old house a month or so before, clearly part of his escape plan, and I didn’t know his new address.
We appealed to the same county court to furnish us with SG’s address, but they wouldn’t because of some ridiculous bureaucratic reason, I imagine to do with data protection or something.
If I wanted to get my money back, I would have had to somehow find out SG’s new address.
Short of hiring a PI, I had no idea how to do this, so, reluctantly, I decided to let the issue go, and chalk it up to experience, and hoped the CCJ would give SG grief in the future.
Fast forward to last year, and a letter drops onto my doormat.
It’s from a county court, this time in Kent, which is about 300 miles away from where I live.
Turns out, SG had moved there, and applied to the court to have his CCJ dismissed, as apparently, he had tried to set up a new business, and had applied for a bank loan, and had been denied both by Companies House, (the governmental register where all businesses in the UK must be registered), and by the bank, because of my CCJ against his name.
Of course they do.
The court had contacted me to ask if wanted to oppose his motion to dismiss the CCJ.
You bet I did.
My dad and I got hold of all our original evidence from 4 years earlier, which luckily my dad still had on his computer, and trekked all the way to Kent to face this guy in court.
Since CCJs and small claims stuff is fairly low level, lawyers are apparently not usually involved in the court proceedings, so SG and I were representing ourselves.
The judge asked me first what the original CCJ was about, and I summarised it for him, stating that I was after my £700.
The judge then turned to SG, and asked him why, after 4 years, he hadn’t paid the debt.
SG then goes on a whiny little tale, giving the same argument that he gave 4 years ago, that I was employed by his company, not by him, and that the CCJ was unfair, and that I was being “vindictive”.
The judge asked for my response, and I simply told him that that was SG’s original defence, and that if it hadn’t stood up in a different court 4 years ago, it shouldn’t stand up now.
There was a bit more back and forth, but ultimately, the judge agreed with me, and gave his ruling.
Good job judge!
Not only did the judge order SG to pay us not £700, but £1000, to compensate us for interest and having to come to Kent to go to court, but also slapped the CCJ on him for ANOTHER 5 YEARS!
He actually said to SG “You are a deceitful man, who clearly cannot be trusted with a business or with employees.”.
As soon as we were done, SG just turned and stormed out of the courtroom, and that was the last time I saw him.
I waited for a cheque for my £1000 to arrive, but of course it did not.
Finally!
Luckily, however, this time we had SG’s current address from the court documents, so we contacted the court and arranged for bailiffs to pay him a visit.
It took another two months for them to do their thing, and I had to pay a £60 fee, but I finally got my grand.
So finally, after years of waiting, I get my wages, tool money, and then some, and the satisfaction of knowing SG won’t be able to scam anymore customers or employees for years.
He would have been so much better off just paying the money.
Take a look at what the people in the comments have to say.
It should have been.
Good suggestion!
Paying what you owe should be a priority.
It took awhile, but this guy finally got what he deserved.
Sometimes the wheels of justice grind slow.
Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.