How one no-show employer turned a $1,000 order into a five-figure payout
An Alberta restaurant employer that skipped its own hearing and kept no payroll records did not escape a wage claim. Instead it handed a labour tribunal the freedom to rebuild the numbers itself, and the bill grew far beyond the original order.
The Alberta Labour Relations Board, sitting as the appeal body under the province's Employment Standards Code, released its decision on July 10, 2026. Vice-Chair Jeremy D. Schick found the employer owed the worker $9,780.78 in wages, $1,391.23 in vacation pay and $1,130.43 in general holiday pay, on top of an order-of-officer fee raised to $1,230.24. An employment standards officer had originally pegged the debt at just $1,000.
A restaurant job that stopped paying
The worker testified that he began managing the store and kitchen in August 2023, opening and closing the restaurant and putting in long shifts seven days a week. He said he was paid $4,000 a month, split into two cheques of $2,000.
According to his testimony, the payments held up until January 2024, when the trouble started. He said he was told not to cash one January cheque because the account lacked funds, a February cheque bounced, and he received only a $1,000 payment from a related company before working through March and April with nothing further. He stopped working on April 21, 2024.
He testified that he never received an employment agreement or pay stubs. Co-workers backed his account, telling the board that their own cheques had begun bouncing and that pay eventually dried up. A chef and another employee put the manager's pay at around $4,000 a month.
An empty chair on the employer's side
The employer did not appear at the appeal and, according to the decision, had not provided records or a response during the original investigation. Faced with that gap, an employment standards officer had limited recovery to a single bounced $1,000 cheque, finding too little reliable evidence to assess the rest of the claim.
On appeal, the board had the worker's testimony and evidence from four witnesses, with nothing from the employer to contest it. Schick noted that the company chose not to take part. "And in this case, the Employer has remained silent," he wrote.
Schick found that the evidentiary holes traced back to the employer's own conduct. Keeping employment records is the employer's obligation, he wrote, and a worker should not be faulted for failing to log his own hours when no agreement or pay stubs were ever provided.
How the board rebuilt the wages
Schick accepted the worker's estimate of his hours and his evidence that he earned $4,000 a month, which worked out to an hourly rate of $15.38. From the wages owed for the unpaid period, the board subtracted the $3,000 it accepted the worker had received, including a $2,000 cash payment noted in his appeal.
That produced $9,780.78 in unpaid wages. On top of that, the board added $1,391.23 in vacation pay, covering both the reconstructed wages and the earlier stretch of employment, and $1,130.43 in general holiday pay for six holidays the worker said he worked.
The board leaned on provisions of the Employment Standards Code that let the decision-maker fix an amount when an employer has not kept proper records. As the decision put it, in that situation "the officer may determine the amount in any manner that the officer considers appropriate."
