Dargaville Fresh Vibe Cafe ordered to pay $6000 to an employee it underpaid for four months.

Dargaville's Fresh Vibe Cafe is in trouble again for under-paying another employee for four months' work.

In January the cafe was ordered to pay an employee $20,000 in wage arrears by the Employment Relations Authority (ERA).

Another employee, Mandeep Singh, took his claim to the ERA last month after Fresh Vibe only paid him a full week's salary for the four months he worked there.

Singh worked at Fresh Vibe Cafe in a customer service role from December 2015 until March 2016, when his student work visa expired.

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Singh worked 40 hours a week until January 18 and then his hours were halved to 20 hours a week to align with the conditions of his visa, which required him to work part-time during the study term.

Although there was a dispute about Singh's start and end date of employment, the ERA recorded the date his first pay was sent to Inland Revenue and the last, based on the expiration of his student work visa.

The ERA said Singh should have been paid $5870 for the work he did from December 2015 until March 2016, but he only received $700 for his entire employment period.

Singh's manager, Payal Kumar, was "left to her own devices" in terms of managing the cafe and was in charge of the payroll and staffing issues as the cafe's owner, Ben Singh Holdings, was based in Auckland.

Fresh Vibe also failed to correctly pay Singh for working two public holidays and failed to provide days in lieu.

The cafe did not provide wage and pay records to the ERA during the investigation.

Kumar said there were no records of the cash payments because the ledger that recorded the payments was allegedly stolen during a break-in.

This was the same reason that was given for a lack of payroll records in the previous ERA case against the other underpaid employee.

The authority member, Rachel Larmer, said it was odd that someone burgling a cafe chose to remove a notebook about wage payments.

Fresh Vibe Cafe has been ordered to pay Singh $6103: $5,170 in underpaid wages; $364 public holiday entitlement arrears; $498 in annual holiday arrears and $72 to reimburse his filing fee.