An office worker who was made redundant for making a complaint about a hotdesking arrangement after a tradesman started cutting a hole in the roof above her with an angle grinder has been awarded €20,000 in a workplace rights claim.
Cruinniú Bia Ltd, the operator of the former Heaney Meats factory shop at Williams Gate, Galway, has been ordered to pay compensation to the worker, Patricia Higgins, for penalisation in connection with a health and safety complaint and for less favourable treatment as a part-time worker.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) was told Ms Higgins had worked for the business for 14 years between 2008 and her redundancy in September 2022 in sales and administrative roles and had been working part-time since returning from maternity leave in 2017.
Legal submissions to the WRC by Ms Higgins’ solicitors, Alastair Purdy and Co, stated that after her original employer, Heaney Meats Ltd, was “bought out” by Cruinniú Bia, a new general manager, Allen Morris, asked her in April 2022 whether she would consider going full-time.
Ms Higgins declined a plan to increase her hours on the basis it would have meant lower hourly earnings and higher childcare costs, her solicitors said.
She said in evidence that after turning down the full-time hours, Mr Morris described her wages – €350 for a two-day week – as “lunacy money” in one meeting. There were continuing discussions on her role in May and June that year, the tribunal heard.
Ms Higgins’ case was that on May 30th, 2022, she reported to the office, found she had nowhere to work and was directed to a desk in a new office. After an hour there, a tradesman arrived and told her he would be cutting a hole in the roof to install a skylight, the tribunal was told.
Since there was “no other workspace available” and Mr Morris had not told her to move, she stayed put, the WRC heard.
“[She] found herself working under the roof where a tradesman was using an angle grinder to cut through the roof above her desk,” her solicitor’s legal papers stated.
A further offer of increased hours was tabled by the firm and then declined by Ms Higgins in early June 2022. After this, her solicitors said, “every morning on arriving at work the complainant would have to wait for a desk to be assigned to her”.
This went on into July, the tribunal was told, leaving Ms Higgins to move two screens, her computer, mouse and keyboard each time she was told to move desks, it was submitted.
She wrote a letter of complaint referring to the angle grinder incident and alleging that her health and safety was put at risk. She also stated her belief that she was “being bullied and harassed” – agreeing that on July 19th that the matter should be investigated as a formal grievance, the WRC was told.
Then, at a meeting on August 8th, 2022, Ms Higgins was informed by the firm’s HR manager, Geraldine Gantly, that she was being made redundant, the tribunal was told.
The WRC heard that no appeal mechanism was provided and that Ms Higgins was told she could not work out her six weeks’ notice in the office.
Ibec, for the company, said the business had faced closure for breaches of food safety practices following an inspection in 2020 and had to make “significant changes”. This meant cost-cutting measures and an efficiency programme, the business organisation said.
The company “denied that there were any threats to the complainant to work full-time” and took the position that Ms Higgins “was offered options to avoid redundancy”.
But adjudicator Louise Boyle, in her decision on the case, wrote that the company showed “complete disregard” to its obligation to ensure Ms Higgins had a safe workstation and noted that its management “constantly made reference to her previous conditions of employment”.
“It would appear … all bets were off when [Ms Higgins] submitted her health, safety and welfare at work complaint regarding the tradesman working above her, having to constantly hot-desk and the bullying and harassment claims,” Ms Boyle wrote.
Ms Boyle said Ms Higgins had suffered a detriment when she was dismissed and “would not have been made redundant” unless she had made the safety complaint.
She awarded Ms Higgins €15,000 in compensation for penalisation in breach of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005.
The adjudicator also noted it was when Ms Higgins rejected proposals that would have seen her switch to full-time hours at a lower rate of pay that she was told she needed to move from her usual desk.
That would not normally be unreasonable, Ms Boyle wrote, except that it seemed to her that Ms Higgins was the only one who had to hotdesk and that fulltime staff had not been required to do so.
The adjudicator wrote that without objective justification Ms Higgins had been treated “differently than a comparable full-time worker because of her status as a part-time worker”.
She ruled this to be a breach of the Protection of Employees (Part-Time Work) Act 2001, and awarded the worker a further €5,000.
The total awarded to Ms Higgins in the case was €20,000.
