LCR22281

1. Redundancy of 65 Staff due to Company going into Liquidation

BACKGROUND:

2. The case before the Court concerns a dispute relating to the issue of 65 Members being made redundant due to the company going into liquidation. The Unions referred the matter to the Labour Court in accordance with Section 20(1) of the Industrial Relations Act, 1969. A Labour Court hearing took place on 23 October, 2020. The following is the Recommendation of the Court:

RECOMMENDATION :

This matter comes before the Court following the entry into liquidation of the nursing home and the redundancy on statutory terms of all of the staff. The redundancy terms were funded by the State through the arrangements in place to fund such matters in the event of insolvency.

The Trade Unions seek the payment of enhanced redundancy terms and contend that the main funder of the service, the HSE, and the sole shareholder of the employing company in liquidation, the Religious Sisters of Charity, should take responsibility for payment to the redundant workers of fair a reasonable redundancy terms.

The joint liquidators of the company attended the hearing of the Court and gave a comprehensive submission setting out the legal framework within which they operate. In particular, they set out that, given the circumstances of this liquidation, there will be no legal means available for payment by the liquidators of enhanced redundancy terms to the workers.

Th Court has recently issued Recommendations in respect of two other entities owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity which have ceased trading and have entered into liquidation and whose employees were also made redundant on statutory terms. The services and operations both of those entities were also funded, at least in significant part, by the HSE. The claim from the Trade Unions in both of those cases was identical to the claim before the Court in the within matter.

It is a source of concern to the Court that, while the Trade Unions have engaged with the stakeholders following the issue of two earlier recommendations as referred to above, those engagements have not resulted in a level of understanding such as to remove from the workers before the Court today the burden of making the within referral of their identical claims to the Court.

The Court notes that the workers concerned were made redundant on 14^th August 2020. It is the Court’s understanding that engagements between the employer and the Trade Unions took place on 24^th and 30^th July 2020. The Court is also given to understand that the Trade Unions sought an urgent conciliation conference at the Workplace Relations Commission following those meetings but that the employer declined to attend such a conference.

The Court recognises that this matter is complicated by the fact of provisional liquidators having been appointed on 11^th August 2020 and that those appointments were confirmed on 21^st September 2020 by order of the High Court.

In all of the circumstances, the Court recommends that the parties to this dispute should accept that the reasonable response to the Union side claim is that

• 
  • Redundancy terms paid to staff being made redundant should be calculated on the basis of the formula applied to public service workers, and

  • Staff with less than two years’ service should receive fair and reasonable termination payments

	Signed on behalf of the Labour Court
	Kevin Foley
TH	______________________
27 October 2020	Chairman