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.

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 Rights Commissioner found in favour of IFUT in all areas of its submission. Specifically she said inter alia that:

• The Promotions Board changed the procedures without agreement and after the application had been submitted and assessed.
• There was no agreed appeals procedure.
• The member’s Freedom of Information request was not dealt with before he lodged a “without prejudice” complaint.
• The claimant was not told in advance that different values would be given to references depending on the qualification of the referee.

The Rights Commissioner also told NUIM to confirm to the member that his future promotional prospects would be in no way affected by the outcome of this promotions round.

Finally, the Rights Commissioner has also recommended the putting in place of a formal, agreed appeals process as a matter of urgency.

Both NUIM and IFUT have accepted the Recommendation and early implementation is expected.

The IFUT Press Release is available here.