Two Lecturers in TCD with long service have been made redundant and a long serving member of the Library staff has also been issued with notice of dismissal.

Mike Jennings, General Secretary of IFUT, said that “last year, IFUT members, with considerable reluctance, voted to endorse the Croke Park Agreement following detailed clarifications from the Department of Education as to how its provisions would apply in the university sector.

“In return for agreeing to substantial extra productivity and input, we were guaranteed no job losses and no further pay cuts on top of the substantial reductions already suffered by staff. The authorities in TCD have, in spectacular fashion, broken this agreement. No party to an agreement could be expected to continue to honour it when the other party so blatantly welshes on their commitments.

“This dispute will, at IFUT’s request, now be investigated by the Labour Court in March. Until then, IFUT is putting its participation in Croke Park on hold”, Mike Jennings said.

The IFUT Media Release is available here.

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.

These contributions are in addition to the costs of substantial, well-staffed Human Resources Departments. In addition, it should be noted that the State, through the Labour Relations Commission and the Labour Court, provides a free service for the resolution of disputes between employers and employees.

Despite this duplication of costs, whereby universities employ substantial numbers of HR staff and then go on to pay IBEC ‘for advice’, the universities also routinely incur massive legal costs for the hire of lawyers to deal with employees.

“IFUT has expressed serious concern over recent years that universities are using needlessly expensive legal teams to deal with industrial relations matters. Not only does this involve huge avoidable cost to the university – money which could be better used elsewhere – but also, we believe, there is an element of trying to intimidate staff against raising grievances even of a relatively simple nature”, said Mike Jennings, IFUT General Secretary.

The IFUT Press Release is available in full here. The fees paid by the Universities to IBEC are available here.

Responding to a proposal by Labour Senator Brendan Ryan, Minister for Labour Affairs, Dara Calleary, said that he was “sympathetic” to retired people having “a facility whereby grievances arising from their former employment relationship might be examined on their merits”.

IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, said the current situation “represents an unjust anomaly which has allowed unfair treatment of older employees to go uncorrected”. The anomaly arises because of a ruling 30 years ago by the then Attorney General that a retired person could not be regarded as a ‘worker’ and so could not bring a claim to the Labour Court.

“We welcome the Minister’s commitment to removing this anomaly, but it is important that his expressed sympathy for retired workers be converted into effective amending legislation without delay”, Mike Jennings said.

The IFUT Press Release is available here.

The seven university presidents have also been considering a court challenge against the new Employment Control Framework which some maintain runs counter to the 1997 Universities Act, guaranteeing their independence.

While university presidents are cautious about a legal challenge, IFUT General Secretary, Mike Jennings, said the new stipulation which allows colleges to engage academic staff largely on fixed-term contracts is a clear breach of European employment law.

The article published in The Irish Times of 7 September 2009 is available here and here.

It is calling on the Commission to investigate Ireland’s non-compliance with the fixed term workers directive, and Fixed Term Workers Act, 2003, the statute examined by the Labour Court in the run-up to its decision.

The 2003 Act provides protection to employees in the form of accrued rights, culminating after a set period, in the right to a contract of indefinite duration. However, exemptions on “objective grounds” are provided for.

In February 2009, the Court overturned a ruling by a Rights Commissioner in favour of the academic, Ann Buckley, awarding her a contract of indefinite duration, together with €5000 in compensation.

The full article from Industrial Relations News (Issue 31, 2 September 2009) is available here.

The Labour Court also recommended (LCR 19466) that the university, Trinity College Dublin (TCD), should “proceed as swiftly as possible to reach an agreement” with IFUT on a new, agreed approach to Academic Research.

The case, which has been in progress since Autumn 2007, was better known in academic circles internationally than it was in Ireland. This was because the issue in dispute was recognised by international unions representing university staff as being hugely significant for the right of such staff to keep freedom of control over their own research.

For details on the background to the case, see the IFUT Press Release.

The Labour Court also awarded additional compensation of €2500 each to the two women.

IFUT, which fought the case on behalf of their members, has warmly welcomed the ruling.

“One notable aspect of this case”, said Mike Jennings, General Secretary, “is that I personally made direct pleas to the then Minister, Mary Hanafin, not to embark on this illegal discrimination. Regrettably, the Minister each time rebuffed our representations”.

The Labour Court has formally noted that the Barrister who represented the Department of Education at the Labour Court Hearing “rightly conceded that the stated position of the Minister is unsustainable in law”.

The IFUT press release is available in full here.

The full text of the Labour Court Determination is available here.

The member in question had twice won his appeals against his non-selection for promotion. The Appeals Committee had explicitly said that “it was unreasonable to conclude that you had not met the requirements for promotion to Associate Professor on grounds of Research and Scholarship”.

The Appeals Committee directed that this decision should be revised. They subsequently clarified this as meaning “to reverse”. The University Committee on Academic Appointments Tenure and Promotion (UCAATP) refused to abide by this directive, despite the fact that the Appeals Committee decisions are, according to university rules, “binding”.

IFUT has warmly welcomed this decision and congratulated the member concerned for his determination to stand up for his entitlements.

“By doing so he has won an important victory which will benefit many of his colleagues facing similar unfairness and obduracy”, said Mike Jennings, IFUT General Secretary.

The Labour Court Recommendation is LCR 19410 and was issued on 8 December 2008. More details are available here.