Social affairs ministry inspectors have fined postal delivery company Sandd €289,000 following a complaint from 28 workers about being underpaid.

Sandd pays its freelance delivery workers according to the amount of time it estimates it should take them to do a job, not on the basis of actual hours, making it impossible to see if minimum pay rates were being met.

‘The company had established its norms to the second, but the workers we interviewed said this was impossible,’ the inspectors said in their report. According to the FNV trade union, the Sandd position meant workers had to run between houses ‘and even then they could not meet the norms’.

Because Sandd could not supply details about the actual amount of time people worked, it was impossible to say if people were being under-paid, the inspectors said.

This, the inspectors said, is breaking the rules on minimum pay and minimum holiday pay.

The company was also ordered to improve the way it registers the actual number of hours that freelancers work.