A long-serving member of the administrative staff at the country’s largest trade union who “filled her time drinking coffee and doing crosswords” after having been left with no work to do following her election to an internal staff council has been awarded €15,000 at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
The WRC adjudicator hearing the case, taken by Anne Fedigan under section 13 of the Industrial Relations Act, 1968, also ordered that a much-delayed investigation of her complaints be carried out and her employer, Siptu, restore her to a role of equal value to the one she previously held within a matter of weeks.
In her decision on the case which the adjudicator, Patricia Owens, heard on July 29th, it is reported the complainant, Ms Fedigan, worked as personal assistant to a senior official in the union before being moved in a reorganisation in 2017.
She contested the decision to move her and ultimately took a case to the Labour Court which ruled in her favour in 2021.
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Following her election to the organisation’s Staff Representative Council (SRC) in 2020, it was argued, she was further marginalised to the extent she “had been demoted by stealth, was being humiliated, degraded and ostracised systematically”.
She also said she believed she had been “harassed and victimised for making previous complaints”.
She felt that as a result of her “long and loyal service” to the union and given “the particular nature of the organisation and its espoused values” it “would have dealt with the issues fairly and expeditiously”.
Instead, the process became long and drawn out, in part because several meetings had to be postponed at her request but also because the sides failed to agree on a number of occasions on a suitable candidate to investigate the grievances raised.
The adjudicator was critical of Ms Fedigan’s objection to the nomination by Siptu of someone it felt to be “a person of standing in the world of industrial relations” on the basis it had been a man when she would have preferred a woman. This would only have been justified had the content of the complaint been sensitive, which it was not, she said.
She found the complainant had been justified, however, in rejecting the subsequent suggestion of a senior member of staff who had found against her in relation to the earlier case in which the Labour Court had ultimately found in her favour.
The adjudicator was critical of the union’s failure to attempt to engage with Ms Fedigan during these delays or to recommend proceeding based on an existing Dignity at Work policy that included an agreed list of investigators.
She ordered the union to engage with Ms Fedigan in the coming weeks to restore her to work of a similar value to that which she had been doing before being elected to the SRC and that it pay her €15,000 “for its failure to address her complaints in a timely matter”, saying the amount took into account her contribution to the delays.
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