Written answers

Tuesday, 16 April 2019

Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Protected Disclosures

Photo of Micheál MartinMicheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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256. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation if her attention has been drawn to an article (details supplied); and if she will make a statement on the matter. [17460/19]

Photo of Pat BreenPat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael)
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The April/May addition of the Village Magazine contained an article within which a former Inspector of the National Employment Rights Authority (NERA) and latterly the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) made specific allegations in relation to both those bodies’ approach to specific inspections. 

The individual involved made a protected disclosure to my Department in October 2015 related to alleged wrongdoing in the Labour Inspection services of the WRC.  My Department is committed to fostering an appropriate environment for addressing concerns and supporting workers in speaking up in relation to potential wrongdoings in the workplace and in meeting its obligations under the Protected Disclosures legislation.  The matter raised was investigated using an external professional company in the succeeding months. This investigation concluded that there was no systemic wrongdoing in the work of the Labour Inspectorate.  This conclusion was accepted by the Department and the outcome was communicated to the individual in April 2016.  The individual was offered the opportunity of a review of this decision and this offer was not taken up within the timeframe provided.

The individual subsequently sought on a number of occasions to have the matter re-investigated, by my predecessors, who were satisfied that appropriate and due process had been followed in responding to the individual’s original disclosure.

As also outlined in the article in the Village magazine, since the individual’s initial disclosure, my Department has, and continues to be, engaged in responding to a number of claims of penalisation and unfair dismissal brought by the individual to the independent Adjudication Services of the WRC and on appeal to the Labour Court.  These are the appropriate statutory fora for dealing with such claims.  As some of these proceedings continue to be active cases, it would not be appropriate to comment further on these, other than to assure you that my Department will continue to engage with these fora. 

Under its establishing legislation, the WRC is independent of the Minister and the Department in the performance of its functions. The policy for the WRC as agreed by the Oireachtas, is set out in the Workplace Relations Act 2015.  In that regard, the WRC correctly operates a compliance approach to employment law.  This approach has worked very well to date, as demonstrated by the data.  Prosecutions are taken only where the compliance route has not worked.  

The Inspectorate Division of NERA and more recently the WRC have played an extremely important role in securing employment rights for employees and ensuring that compliant employers are not put at a disadvantage. When finding that an employer is not compliant with legislation (for example, inadequate records, improperly calculating hours worked or holiday entitlements) the approach of the Inspectorate is to bring that employer to compliance by pointing out the breach(s) and affording them a specific time in which to rectify them. Occasionally the Inspector may issue “Compliance Notices” and “Fixed Payment Notices” in this regard. The success of this approach is such that prosecution is required in less than 10% of cases where employers are found to be in breach (i.e. 5% of all inspections). Last year, the WRC completed almost 5,800 inspections – an increase of 20% on 2017 – and recovered €3.1m in unpaid wages for employees.

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