Hi. Throwaway account for anonymity.
I’m still doing my research on this, and would appreciate some input from the community.
Background: I currently work for a small tour company as a full time contract worker. My employment contract runs out at year’s end and I was not planning to renew it, though that’s not immediately relevant to this situation.
Aside from the regular work I do for the company at the office, we also have a separate setup where I will accept work as a tour guide. The compensation for that is entirely separate from my salary – I act as an independent contractor, billing the company as a client for the work and declaring that income myself. For when the company asks me to do a tour on a business day, we have a scheme worked out to avoid conflicts between office work and tour work. The details of that scheme are not really relevant.
The office work is under a normal labor contract and for the tour guide work we don’t really have a written contract as a separate document but the conditions and payment scheme are laid out in written communication between us and there’s years of evidence of me doing the work and them paying me according to the scheme, so a contract definitely exists.
I hold PR so there’s no visa-related shenanigans here.
Now, the situation: one of the tours I was guiding recently ran into some trouble, the details of which I’ll leave out as they’re not quite relevant to the question. The trouble resulted in a hefty cancellation fee at a certain venue – haven’t seen the bill yet but it’s somewhere between 100k and 200k. While I don’t believe myself to be responsible for this, the company has accused me of negligence and has communicated to me that it plans to withhold the cancellation fee from my compensation (as opposed to, say, billing me for damages separately). What this likely means is that they plan to not pay me the full sum when I bill them for the work later this month. Since I don’t accept responsibility for this situation, I plan to fight it as soon as the reduced payment lands in my bank account.
My question is – what’s the best way to fight? On the one hand there’s the 支払督促 (not sure what the right name for this in English) which seems like the most streamlined option, not even requiring a lawyer, unless the company fights back. On the other hand, this mechanism seems to be mostly for situations where there is no dispute but rather just a failure by one party to fulfill its obligations. So, since the company has a justification (although one I don’t agree with), perhaps 支払督促 is not what I need? The other obvious option seems to be Small Claims Court, but that would obviously be more expensive and require more effort.
Any insight on which option I should go with?
by After-Jelly-7834