Terry Gorry

The Labour Court Recommends €90,000 Compensation In Unfair Dismissal Claim Against Park Hotel

I have written a number of blog posts about probation and the options open to an employee who has been dismissed whilst on probation.

The general position is that you cannot bring a claim for unfair dismissal under the unfair dismissal acts for section 2(1) Unfair Dismissals Act, 1977 sets out a number of categories of employees who are excluded from the protection of the act as follows:

2.—(1) This Act shall not apply in relation to any of the following persons:

(a) an employee (other than a person referred to in section 4 of this Act) who is dismissed, who, at the date of his dismissal, had less than one year’s continuous service with the employer who dismissed him and whose dismissal does not result wholly or mainly from the matters referred to in section 6 (2) (f) of this Act,

You will note that the act does not apply to employees with less than 12 months’ continuous service. Accordingly if you are fired with less than 12 months’ service you can almost alwasy forget about the unfair dismissals act, 1977.

Recently, however, a case was brought by a former manager of the Park Hotel in Kenmare to the Labour Court. You may have heard of this hotel as it is owned and run by the high profile Brennan brothers who present that television programme where they go around telling other small business owners how to develop their small hotels or bed and breakfast business.

In this case, however, the general manager of the Park Hotel was employed on a 36 month contract and was dismissed during the probationary period without fair procedures.

Specifically the man was not told of any performance issues, no warning was given that his job may be at risk, no opportunity for representation was afforded to him, he was not given any reasons for the dismissal, and he was not given a right to reply.

The hotel relied on the contract of employment which clearly stated that either party terminate the contract by giving written notice.

How can the employee bring this claim to the Labour Court if the Unfair Dismissals Act, 1977 excludes employees who have less than 12 months continuous service?

Labour Court and Industrial Relations Acts

The employee can bring a claim for unfair dismissal to the Labour Court under the Industrial Relations Act, 1969. This is precisely what happened in this case involving Francis Brennan’s Park Hotel and the Labour Court recognised that employer was entitled to dismiss the employee during the probationary period.

The Labour Court found, however, that the employee is still entitled to fair procedures and natural justice and in this case found that this did not occur.

Accordingly, the Labour Court recommended that the employer pay €90,000 in compensation for the unfair dismissal. Note that this is a ‘recommendation’ and is not legally enforceable.

Why would an employee go through this procedure and perhaps incur legal costs if he only ended up with an unenforceable recommendation which the employer can ignore?

Only the employee can answer that question but he may have hoped that the publicity surrounding the case may have persuaded the employer to settle his claim to avoid reputational damage to the hotel.

He may also have hoped that the employer would accept the moral or persuasive authority of the Labour Court’s recommendation and pay out.

Or he may have taken the case on a point of principle and to restore his good name and professional reputation if he felt that they were damaged as a result of the termination.

Conclusion

If you are an employer you may or may not, depending on your business, be concerned about reputational damage or the likelihood of industrial relations action on foot of a Labour Court recommendation which you may intend ignoring.

If you are concerned then you should ensure fair procedures and natural justice in the termination of any employee’s employment, even those on probation.

If you are an employee with less than 12 months service you may consider going this ‘industrial relations act’ route to the Labour Court; but you may end up with an unenforceable recommendation.

Read the full decision of this case here.

Legal Representation in Disciplinary Proceedings in the Workplace-October, 2018 WRC Decision Clarifies

Are you entitled to legal representation if you are involved in a disciplinary proceeding in your workplace?

If you are an employer how do you respond to requests from an employee who is the subject of a disciplinary or investigation procedure to be represented by a solicitor or barrister?

Last year I wrote about three High Court cases which looked at this issue and the whole area of fair procedures in investigations and disciplinary proceedings.

These cases were Lyons v Longford Westmeath Education and Training Board, E.G. v The Society of Actuaries in Ireland, and N.M. v Limerick and Clare Education and Training Board.

And there appeared to be a certain degree of inconsistency in these cases which left a feeling of uncertainty for employers and employees alike. That blog post is worth a read, however, as it will give you a good idea of the factors and issues which the Court will look at when addressing this question.

WRC Decision

More recently the WRC has had to determine this issue in A Security Officer v A Security Company (ADJ-00011096). In this case the security officer brought a claim for unfair dismissal.

He partially succeeded with his claim insofar as the Adjudication Officer, Catherine Byrne, held even though there were substantial grounds for the dismissal-gross misconduct constituting the failure to carry out a reasonable instruction and behaving in an aggressive, demanding and disrespectful manner to the company’s managers-he was not actually dismissed for these substantial reasons.

Instead he was dismissed without warning that his refusal to work a particular roster would lead to his dismissal.

Accordingly, it was held the dismissal procedure was unfair and he won his case for this reason; however, the adjudicator held that he contributed significantly (75%) to his own dismissal and, having regard for the fact that the had obtained new employment quickly, he was awarded only 1 week’s pay of €422.50 by way of compensation.

In the course of the hearing, however, the adjudicator was asked by the security officer’s representative to hold that the fact that he was not was not given the right to be represented by a solicitor or a member of the Citizens Information Service in meetings with the employer meant that the disciplinary process was flawed.

The adjudicator did not agree with this argument and also suggested that if he had a representative such as a work colleague or union representative he could have been steered in a calmer direction.

The adjudicator decided that “I do not find that any unfairness resulted from the company’s policy to allow him to be represented by a colleague or a union official, and not by a solicitor or an advisor from the Citizens Information Centre.”

Supreme Court Decision: Alan Burns and Another v The Governor of Castlerea Prison and Another

This Supreme Court decision is a vital one to look at when addressing these issues.

In a 2009 decision the Supreme Court set out 6 factors that should be considered whether a solicitor or barrister should be allowed to allow a fair hearing:

The seriousness of the charge and of the potential penalty.
Whether any points of law are likely to arise.
The capacity of a particular prisoner to present his own case.
Procedural difficulty.
The need for reasonable speed in making the adjudication, that
being an important consideration.
The need for fairness as between prisoners and as between prisoners and prison officers.

Significantly, the Supreme Court also held “I would reiterate that legal representation should be the exception rather than the rule.”

Conclusion

Legal representation in a disciplinary investigation or hearing should be the exception, not the rule, and there is no automatic right to be represented by a legal professional.

The employer can, however, allow a legal professional for tactical reasons-that is, to ensure the later argument of lack of fair procedures and constitutional justice is holed below the waterline.

Adverse Publicity in Employment Cases-Employees, Don’t Make This Mistake

Are you an employee who is thinking about bringing a claim against your employer?

Or maybe you have already brought a claim?

I meet employees frequently and they may come to me before, during, or after a dispute with their employer.

And I see them making many mistakes.

These mistakes can range from bringing the wrong claim to suing the wrong entity as employer to missing the time limit to bring the claim that is misconceived or badly founded from the outset.

One mistake I frequently encounter, though, is the employee’s insistence that the employer will probably settle or roll over by reason of his fear of the ‘adverse publicity’ which the case is bound to generate.

This is a serious mistake because the employee places far too much importance on the threat of ‘bad publicity’.

It is an understandable mistake to make because the employee has a problem that has caused her great anxiety and stress and it has been a large part of her every day life for a considerable amount of time.

And now she is going to finally take action and remedy the wrong done to her.

But the wider world at large has their own individual, personal problems.

They may be big or small ranging from paying the mortgage to buying food or other daily essentials to avoiding the sack to dodging redundancy to the health and welfare of their loved ones to the kids getting on satisfactorily in school to getting good exam results.

And so on.

The list goes on and on. Some people would just call it ‘life’.

These problems may understandably detract from them noticing whether you were treated unlawfully in work or not, and how your claim goes at the WRC.

Quite frankly, other people have their own issues and may not have too much time for your case against your employer. It may not even register on their radar.

Or if it does it is soon forgotten. Tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapper.

For this reason your employer may not have as much to fear on the publicity front as you would expect.

Workplace Relations Commission Claims are Private

Virtually all work related claims have to first be brought to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC). However, the Workplace Relations Act at section 41 (13) states:

(13) Proceedings under this section before an adjudication officer shall be conducted otherwise than in public.

This means all claims are held in private, not public.

Thus, the chances of a tremendous amount of bad publicity arising from the case are minimised.

And to make matters worse from a publicity perspective all decisions of the Workplace Relations Commission when published on their website are anonymised-that is, the identity of the parties is not disclosed and the decisions will have titles like ‘A Worker Versus a Retail Company’ or other nondescript, anonymous titles.

Conclusion

If you bring an employment related claim against your employer you need to weigh up carefully the pros and cons of your case, the potential outcomes, and the cost. These are the factors that you should place most emphasis on when arriving at a decision.

If you lose your case and you appeal to the Labour Court your case will be held ‘in public’ and there may be greater scope to wave the ‘adverse publicity’ stick as a weapon against your employer.

But in looking at your options in a WRC claim my advice is not to overegg the pudding in relation to idea that the employer will be fearful of the tremendous amount of bad publicity surrounding your case.

Because the reality is quite different, apart from some exceptional cases which hit the headlines for obvious reasons unique to that particular case.

Discriminatory Dismissal Leads to €46,000 Compensation Award

Could you afford an employment law award of €46,000 against you? Let’s face it you would be hard pressed to just take it on the chin and chalk it down to experience.

But that is what you could be facing if you are at the losing end of a WRC decision as occurred recently in a case involving a claim founded on discrimination.

An office manager in a software firm was awarded €46,000 in compensation by the WRC for her discriminatory dismissal.

The employee who brought the claim had an incurable degenerative disease (fibromyalgia) and was dismissed whilst on sick leave. This disease caused her muscle pain, fatigue, sleep and memory problems.

The €46,000 award comprised 2 parts:

€23,000 in respect of the actual discriminatory dismissal and
€23,000 for the failure of the employer to make reasonable accommodation in allowing the employee to continue in her job.

The award took into account the way the employer dismissed the employee: by telephone.

Background

The background to the case is the employee was employed since 2015 and went on certified sick leave in May 2017; in November 2017 she was dismissed by conference call. Whilst she was out sick her occupational therapist made a number of recommendations as to how she could be accommodated in the workplace including:

Working from home
More rest breaks
Flexible working rosters
A temporary reduction in working hours.

The employee was then involved in a car accident in August 2017 and she was not expected to return to work until January 2018 as she required a spinal implant procedure.

However, in November 2017 she was told by phone that she was being given one month’s notice of dismissal but would be paid in lieu of notice and her termination was, therefore, with immediate effect. The employer mentioned incapacity and “the problems her absenteeism were causing.”

In her evidence at the WRC the employee told that she was not given any warning of her potential termination nor was she given the chance to appeal the decision. The employee was on certified sick leave at the time and was taken aback at the decision which had a significant impact on her from a personal and financial perspective.

She also spoke of the pride she took in being able to work despite her difficulties and she was anxious to show that sufferers from such diseases/disabilities can do things and take part in the workplace.

The employer denied it failed to offer reasonable accommodation and stated it could not hold her position open indefinitely.

Warning for employers

This case is further evidence, if any were needed, that employers need to be very careful about how they deal with their employees, especially when it comes to terminating employment on the grounds of incapacity.

Employers are perfectly entitled to terminate an employee’s job on the grounds of incapacity but only after looking carefully at the options, obtaining updated medical evidence, warning the employee his/her job is at risk of termination, and giving them the opportunity to appeal the decision.

Otherwise, the employer runs the risk of a discrimination-based claim either on the grounds of discriminatory dismissal or straightforward discrimination or failure to make reasonable accommodation for the employee’s continued employment.

How to deal with employees on long term sick leave
How far must the employer go in making reasonable accomodation?

The Avoidable Fears and Panic of Small Employers-3 Illustrative Cases

Are you an employer? Have you been stressed and anxious about an employment issue recently?

I have met a number of employers in the last year or so and I had a great deal of sympathy for them.

Let me explain.

It’s very easy for you as an employer to make mistakes in relation to your employment law obligations. One of the obvious reasons for this is the massive body of employment law legislation on the statute books.

If you throw in EU directives and regulations and statutory instruments and recommended workplace policies/procedures and common law and decided cases and the constitution you would be forgiven for not knowing whether you were coming or going when an employee makes allegations or claims against you.

I have recently encountered a number of cases where employers eventually contacted me for advice and had they contacted a solicitor earlier in the day they could have saved themselves a lot of money, anxiety, and stress.

Referring a complaint to the Workplace Relations Commission

The first case involved a small family owned business who were, like most small business owners, flat out doing what they did: making stuff and selling it. Out of the blue they received communication from a trade union on behalf of a long standing employee. The letter set out a number of grievances going back many years and demanded a meeting with the trade union official and their member employee.

The employer, acting in good faith and trying to ‘do the right thing’, agreed and a number of meetings were arranged. These meetings were only moderately successful and involved the employee complaining about many issues, mostly trivial matters frankly, going back many years.

A number of meetings took place involving management of the company and the trade union official and employee. These meetings were time consuming and necessitated the preparation and issuing of minutes and the focusing of valuable management time.

Ultimately the meetings failed to resolve the issues and the employee, with the assistance of the trade union, submitted a claim to the Workplace Relations Commission. Once the employer received the formal letter from the WRC advising of the complaint he immediately panicked and embarked on another round of meetings to try to resolve the issues.

Schedules had to be arranged to facilitate all concerned and ultimately proved to be a waste of time as the employee was still not satisfied.

This whole episode caused great anxiety and stress to the owners of this small business who were anxious from the outset to deal with the problem fairly and in accordance with the law.

What the employer could have done

Firstly, the employer should have obtained professional advice.

If he did he would almost certainly have been told that the issues raised by the employee were grievances or complaints but not breaches of the employee’s rights. Therefore nothing unlawful had been done and there was no cause for panic.

Secondly, the employer could have given the employee a copy of the staff handbook and directed his attention to the grievance procedure in the handbook and told him he was obliged to use the internal grievance procedure to try to ventilate his complaints and have them dealt with.

He would also have been told that the outcome of the grievance procedure could be appealed if the employee was still not happy but ultimately the decision of that appeal was final.

Thirdly, if the employer sought professional advice early he should have been told that the complaint that was submitted to the WRC was a ‘trade dispute’ under the Industrial Relations Act, 1969 and the employer could simply refuse to have it investigated by the WRC by ticking a box on the letter he had received from the WRC.

A lot of stress and anxiety, and expenditure of management resources, would have been avoided, not to mention money saved.

Alleged breach of contract

The second case involved an employee going to a solicitor and making a wide number of allegations about non payment of wages for extra hours allegedly worked, holiday entitlements, public holidays, failure to pay minimum wage, a stress related injury as a consequence of the workplace, and so on.

The threatened legal action contained in the solicitor’s letter on behalf of the employee covered all of the above issues going back many years and demanded a significant payment to ‘settle the matter and all claims arising from the employment’.

It was a real ‘mixum gatherum’ of a demand letter and caused the recipient small business owner a great deal of anxiety and stress. She was an elderly lady who had employed this employee for over thirty years and in addition to the stress and worry at receiving such a letter was also personally disappointed on a human level for she felt she had been very fair with this employee for three decades and was taken aback to see the relationship go downhill.

The small business owner, an elderly lady who has retired from the business which was now run by her son, was incredibly upset by the whole affair.

The employee who was making this claim was at an age when many people would consider retiring and it appeared that this claim may have been one motivated by a desire to get recognition for the years of service, one way or the other.

On the face of it the demand by the employee for an eye watering amount of money was intensely worrying. However, when the issues and claims were stripped down to their essence the situation was not nearly as bad as first appeared.

Firstly, I explained that even though the employee was claiming a stress/psychological injury as a result of the situation in the workplace it is very difficult to successfully succeed with such a claim. I told her son that the employee would need to prove a number of things:

That he had suffered an identifiable psychiatric/psychological injury
That the injury suffered was as a result of the negligence of the employer
That the injury was forseeable and the employer had failed to act as a reasonable employer would.

In other words if the employee had only suffered ‘ordinary stress’ and not a recognised psychiatric injury he would be unlikely to succeed with a personal injury claim. Courts recognised that work is generally a cause of stress. It is not play or entertainment or recreation.

Moreover, bringing a personal injury claim would require expensive medical reports and take quite a while to get to court for hearing and incur significant legal costs with an uncertain outcome thus leaving the employee with a touch decision to make.

In short when the rubber hit the road this ‘stress’ claim may not even get off the ground.

With regard to the other claims concerning holiday pay, public holiday entitlements, or non payment of wages, for example, these would need to be submitted to the WRC (Workplace Relations Commission) within 6 months of the alleged breach of the relevant act.

Thus, the WRC would not be able to deal with the entire value of his claim, assuming there was merit in it, as he would be ‘out of time’ for the bulk of what he was claiming.

This six months rule would not apply if he sued for breach of contract in the Civil courts and he could go back 6 years. However, this would involve legal proceedings for breach of contract in the civil Courts and with the amounts of money involved it may not actually be worth the risk in the end.

Yes, if he won he would almost certainly get his legal costs awarded by the Court, however if the claim was a relatively small one would it be worth it? Would he have the evidence to support all aspects of his claim? Would the employer have a good defence and/or better records? And he would be statute barred in respect of the parts of his claim which were over 6 years old.

Therefore when this particular claim, which commenced with a demand for an eye watering sum of money from the employer, was stripped down to its bare essentials it was not nearly as worrying or stressful for the employer.

Nor an attractive money pot for the employee.

Unfair dismissal

Another employer contacted me in a lather of sweat about an unfair dismissal claim that is coming up. She checked online and discovered that the potential award in an unfair dismissal claim is up to 2 years’ salary.

However, the legislation allows the award of financial loss to a maximum of 2 years’ salary and this level of award is extremely rare.

In her particular case, however, the employee had got a new job within 1 month of the dismissal. Therefore the maximum financial exposure for this claim was 1 month’s salary.

If she calculated how much this would amount to, and the fact that she could put up some sort of defence to the claim when the hearing was held, she would have seen that it was not something that should cause a great deal of anxiety.

And she could always try to settle it in advance of the hearing and avoid the time and cost involved in attending a WRC hearing, especially if she wanted to have legal representation. I would have had to advise her, however, that the cost of defending the case using a solicitor might actually exceed the potential award to the employee.

So, if she wanted to defend it she could consider doing it herself and taking her chances.

Normally I would not recommend this approach but if an employer has a potential exposure for a small award that is not likely to exceed the cost of legal representation then I would advise her to this effect and let her decide.

Conclusion

You will see from these three examples that massive fear and worry can be caused to decent employers if they do not obtain sound professional advice from the outset.

Yes, employers must afford employment rights to their employees and treat them decently, with respect, and lawfully. And if they don’t they will be brought to account. Quite right, too.

But unnecessary fear or stress to employers caused by bad or no advice can be avoided if they seek professional advice early in the day from someone who is familiar with the ins and outs of employment law in Ireland.

Otherwise they will experience worry and anxiety that may be wildly out of proportion to their potential exposure in the claim(s) they are threatened with.