Mr Gera worked for Ace Rentals for six months in 2013. Not long after that Hertz bought out Ace Rentals.
In 2022 Mr Gera sued Hertz in the Employment Relations Authority for failure to provide certain benefits such as health insurance, a phone and a laptop.
Usually the time limit for raising a personal grievance claim in the Authority is 90 days. But it’s not often the Limitation Act 2010 comes up in employment proceedings. The purpose of the Limitation Act is “to encourage claimants to make claims for monetary or other relief without undue delay by providing defendants with defences to stale claims”.
In Authority Member Robin Arthur’s determination, it mentions that “Hertz said its wage and other employment records had been destroyed after the statutory period of six years that it was required to keep such information and it could not fully answer Mr Gera’s allegations”.
Businesses and government departments are legally required to keep certain records for six years for a number of reasons. For example a tax audit can go back six years, but not beyond. After the six years is up, purging old documents frees the entity from potential legal baggage, not to mention clutter!
Me Gera was self-represented and perhaps did not have a lawyer or advocate to explain that the Limitation Act alone would make a claim eight years after his employment ended hopeless.