In a recent Determination, the Labour Court upheld a Rights Commissioner Decision that UCC should pay an IFUT member the amount of redundancy payment claimed by IFUT, statutory redundancy plus four weeks. UCC was represented in the Labour Court by one of the most expensive legal firms in Ireland at taxpayers’ expense. IFUT is now advised that, incredibly, UCC has retained this expensive law firm and have embarked upon a very costly appeal to the High Court, allegedly “on a point of law”.

IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, says the Minister should intervene “to prevent the college squandering more than 20 times the payment due to a former employee on a spurious legal adventure which seems designed purely to defer the payment. This is not a case of IFUT seeking more money from government. Instead it is asking the Department of Education to step in to prevent a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money”.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

Documentation on the case, including IFUT’s letter to the Minister, is available here.

In one case, a Researcher in NUI Maynooth has been awarded four weeks pay per year of service (pys) on top of her statutory entitlement (two weeks pys) by the Labour Court, in a Determination that is binding on the university. The case was taken by IFUT. In two other cases in UCC, a Rights Commissioner awarded six weeks pay per year of service to two contract employees who had been made redundant following the expiry of their contracts.

Mike Jennings, General Secretary of IFUT, who represented all of the claimants in these cases, said, “These cases make a strong legal point that when contract staff are made redundant, for instance, due to the expiry of their contracts, they must be paid exactly the same redundancy payments as permanent staff would have been paid had they been made redundant”.

It is estimated that there are several thousand workers on contract in Irish universities and many thousands more throughout the Public Sector. This number is increasing due to current Government policy. Mr Jennings said, “What these important victories establish is that at least in the case of severance payments these workers must be treated equally. However, in many cases we believe that we can prove that the workers are in fact entitled in law to be made permanent”.

The IFUT Press Release is available here.

IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, said that IFUT wanted complete transparency in the payment of allowances and was critical of those allowances which were not directly linked to the performance of extra duties. However, he was clear that with regard to those “legitimate” allowances that were paid to staff for taking on additional workloads, IFUT members would not be performing such role if they were not paid the allowance.

The full article from Industrial Relations News (Issue 30, 27 August 2009) is available here.

“In view of the crisis now facing our sector, I am proposing that the Heads of Irish Universities and all those in senior management in education unite with IFUT and other employee bodies in education, to work together to defend the entire sector,” Mr Jennings said.

The IFUT Press Release is available in full here.

“This report, and, in particular, the parts of it which relate to education, will come to be regarded as one of the most short-sighted documents in Irish education history. At a time when more and more people are turning to education as an intelligent, self-enhancing alternative to unemployment, how could any group of consultants recommend a total reduction of almost seven thousand jobs in education, two thousand of them in higher education alone?”

The IFUT Press Release is available is full here.

The Press Statement announcing the release of the report is available here.

The report itself is in two volumes, Volume I and Volume II.

Access to the report on the IFUT Website is restricted to IFUT members only.

This Framework was promised in the letter of 1 April from the HEA to the President/Provost of each of the seven Universities. This letter was sent in response to a letter from the Department of Finance to the Department of Education and Science in late March. In their letter, the HEA stated that “with effect from 27 March there should be no filling of vacancies by recruitment, promotion or the payment of an allowance for the performance of duties at a higher level, except possibly in the case of academic and support posts that are considered essential to maintaining core service activities”, pending the publication of the Framework arrangements.

The HEA Employment Control Framework document shall operate from 1 July. It is available here (Members only).

The transfer of these pension funds has been under discussion for a number of years and legislation was promised in the last mini-Budget. It is IFUT’s understanding that the Government wishes to “fast-track” the bill and have it passed by the Oireachtas and signed into law before the end of June.

The Judgement has interesting implications regarding tenure for university staff.

The full text of the judgement is available here (Members only).