Cleaning company founder apologizes for 'unintended delayed payments'
The founder of a B.C.-based cleaning company is apologizing following CTV News' reporting that numerous contractors were not compensated for their work.
Scrubbi CEO Daniel Deckert issued a statement Tuesday, acknowledging "unintended delayed payments" to cleaners and saying he is sorry for the "adverse impact" it had on those workers and their families.
"We value our cleaning professionals, and I am personally overseeing that unnecessary delays never happen again," the statement said, attributing the delays to a change in the company's method of payment processing.
"We have abandoned our new payment processing system and reverted to our previous system. We are also trying to determine if additional cleaning professionals are impacted."
The apology comes a week after CTV News first reported on the issue, sharing the stories of three women – one in Vancouver, one in Ottawa, and one in Victoria – who all said they had been waiting weeks or months for payment. Further, they said that the company seemed to ignore their attempts to follow up.
"They don't seem to care," said Jessica Davis, a mom who lives in Ottawa.
Just hours after CTV News contacted the company to inquire about those first cases, the workers were paid.
But more cleaners kept coming forward with similar stories, whether they were located in B.C., Ontario, or Saskatchewan. The amounts they said they were owed ranged from $400 to nearly $2,000. Not all of their issues were recent; some reported payment issues dating back to the summer of 2022.
A former employee from the company's head office also spoke to CTV News, saying calls from distressed contractors who were missing pay were commonplace.
"Daily, we were getting about five, six different contractors calling, wanting to get payment," said Sonia Cheeba, who worked for Scrubbi for nearly a year and a half.
She said the tough phone conversations were the main reason she left the Canada-wide company.
"They couldn't pay their bills, they were crying, some of them got their cars repo'd," Cheema said.
Deckert's statement says his company’s vison was to "elevate the cleaning profession beyond stereotypes," to pay the contractors well and to allow them to keep all their tips and set flexible schedules.
"While we recently fell short of our obligations in some cases, you have my renewed commitment to demonstrate how much we value our cleaning professionals and clients," his apology ends.
Experts have also noted the uphill battle individual workers trying to fight the company for payment would face, particularly since many of them are racialized women or recent immigrants, as well as because they are classified as independent contractors who lack the legal protections of employees.
With files from CTV News Vancouver's Kevin Charach and Angela Jung
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
OPP's mandatory alcohol screening during traffic stops 'not acceptable': CCLA
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
Maple Leafs down Bruins 2-1 to force Game 7
William Nylander scored twice and Joseph Woll made 22 saves as the Toronto Maple Leafs downed the Boston Bruins 2-1 on Thursday to force Game 7 in their first-round series.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Southern Alberta store broken into by burly black bear
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.