Sacked without work, Indian nurse wins UK legal battle; claims $22,000 in unpaid wages – Firstpost

An Indian nurse who was fired by a British care company received a large compensation award on Monday, and lawyers say the case could also spur other migrant workers to file lawsuits against unscrupulous bosses.

Kirankumar Rathod is one of more than 100,000 foreign workers who have come to the UK to take up care jobs since 2022, when the government opened a new visa route to address huge staff shortages.

However, critics say that since the system was introduced, reports of labor rights violations in the industry have skyrocketed.

Rathod said he got into serious financial difficulties after London-based Clinica Private Healthcare Ltd hired him but failed to find him a job and subsequently fired him.

In an unusual ruling on Monday, employment judge Natasha Joffe ordered Clinica to pay Rathod nearly £17,000 ($22,260) in unpaid wages and to continue paying his salary pending the outcome of his unfair dismissal claim.

“This is very significant,” Rathod's lawyer Sarmila Bose of the Work Rights Centre told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It shows that redress is possible for the many people who have been wronged by the way the visa system has been handled.”

Bose said the award was “a lifesaver” for Rathod, his wife and six-year-old daughter, who had been left in a “desperate financial situation” by Clinica.

After the verdict, Rathod said he was “enormously relieved”. “This has been an incredibly stressful time for me, both emotionally and financially, because while Clinica denied me work and income, I was unable to provide for my family,” he said in a statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Legal experts said it was extremely rare for judges to grant “interim injunctions” and the ruling was a strong indication that Rathod would win his case at the Central London Employment Tribunal when it eventually went to trial in full. Rathod said he paid an agent in India £22,000 to get him a nursing job in the UK – although there was no suggestion that Clinica knew about it.

Upon his arrival in May 2023, he was given a contract as a health and nursing assistant with an annual salary of £23,500.

When no work came along, Rathod and other staff members visited Clinica's West London offices several times.

After a visit, he received an email accusing him of “gross insubordination.”

After months of being out of work, Rathod told a company representative that he would take legal action and was fired the following day, November 8, 2023.

“I told him the situation was killing me and I couldn't sleep at night,” Rathod said in a witness statement.

In an earlier written summary of the case, the judge said that Clinica had “stalled” a significant number of others and that her conduct was “somewhat
“wrong” in the way it conducted its business.

The court heard that Clinica's licence to employ foreign workers had since been revoked. The company's representative had argued that the company could not be required to pay Rathod as it no longer had a licence to employ foreign workers.

The Work Rights Centre, which is helping three other migrant workers make claims against different companies, said more than 60 people have contacted the centre with similar stories this year alone.

But Bose said this was just the tip of the iceberg.

“Some companies have hired dozens of people (from abroad) even though they didn't actually have jobs for them,” she said. “The total number of people affected is in the thousands.”

Labour experts said in a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation this year that abuses in the care sector were widespread, but most migrant workers did not complain because they feared losing their visas and being deported.