Elena has received her remaining wages! Thank you to everyone involved.
Elena left her job at Green Eco Plus in February as she wasn’t being paid. She managed, through her persistence and some help from friends and Solfed, to get back an initial £300 over a couple of months. After this the director of the company (Chris Rose AKA Kyriacos Pitsillos) told Elena that the company was liquidated (it wasn’t) and he wouldn’t pay the remaining £250.
At this point it was clear that letters and phone calls were no longer going to produce results, so Elena decided to ratchet up the pressure. The company has no functioning office, website, social media or telephone which made it more difficult to fight than more public facing companies. Luckily we had the director’s home address and mobile number. Elena, along with friends, Solfed, IWW and Afed members paid Kyriacos a visit. Only his brother was in so we handed him a demand letter and left, giving him a week to pay up. A week passed with no money. We then organised a phone blockade where supporters called and texted Kyriacos throughout a Monday. Again this didn’t produce results.
The next week posters appeared around the director’s neighbourhood informing his neighbours about his business practices. A leaflet was also printed up and a sample was presented to Kyriacos. At this stage Kyriacos gave in to the mounting pressure and paid Elena the remaining £250!
This was a difficult campaign but Elena’s determination and great support from friends and comrades pulled it off. Direct action, solidarity and self-organisation gets the goods once again.
Company background:
At the time of writing Green Eco Plus is still not dissolved and Kyriacos is still listed as its director.
Green Eco Plus goes door to door assessing people’s eligibility for the government funded Green Deal (installing new boilers etc) and selling this information on to companies who do the installations. From what we know, Kyriacos’s companies are short lived, getting what they can and then shutting down without paying workers.
Here is what other ex-workers have said about some of his companies:
http://greendealallround.weebly.com/
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4311989
His company history can be found here:
http://companycheck.co.uk/director/908095149
It seems he normally gets away with it and wasn’t expecting this campaign. Elena contacted other ex-workers at Green Eco Plus to fight for their wages but unfortunately they weren’t interested at the time.