Complainant

Respondent

Parties

Federico  Saavedra Navarro

Richmond Properties Ireland Ltd

Act

Complaint Reference No.

Date of Receipt

Complaint seeking adjudication by the Workplace Relations Commission under Sick Leave Act 2022

CA-00072839-001

26/06/2025

The complainant gave evidence on affirmation.

This is a complaint under the sick leave act 2022 and the complainant says that he was denied payment for a period of absence on sick leave.

He claimed that he had eleven days sick leave in 2024 the last of which was in October.

In 2025 he had one day sick leave on June 18th.

The complainant confirmed in his evidence that he submitted his resignation six days before this date on June 12th.

The respondent Ian Taylor give evidence on affirmation.

He submitted that there was no annual leave due to the complainant in respect of 2024 and he gave details of a period of sick leave absence for which the complainant had been paid in May 2024. He was paid a total of seventeen hours’ pay for that period of sick leave. This is equivalent to three shifts.

The respondent says that he received a letter of resignation from the complainant on June 12th, 2024, and that the complainant did not present for work after that date.

Accordingly the respondent says the complainant was no longer in his employment from that date and that he is not entitled to any payment under the Act.

On the complaint form, the complainant asserted that he was owed payment for five days due to absence on sick leave.

In the course of his evidence, he confirmed that he had resigned on June 14th.

While he was somewhat equivocal initially about whether or not this was notification of his resignation, the message, when he read it in his evidence, was not at all equivocal and he accepted that it was capable of only one interpretation, viz, that he was resigning from his employment.

The entitlement to sick leave is provided for in Section 5 of the Sick Leave Act, 2022 as follows.

Subject to this Act, an employee shall, in respect of a day on which he or she would ordinarily work but is incapable of doing so due to illness or injury (in this Act referred to as a “statutory sick leave day”), be entitled to statutory sick leave.

A question therefore arises as to whether on the day for which the complainant asserts his right for payment was a day on which ‘he would ordinarily work’ as required by the Act.

Regarding the days claimed for 2024, the last of these was in October, well outside the cognisable period as the complaint was submitted on June 26th, 2025.

In respect of the one day claimed in June 2025 the evidence of the respondent on affirmation was that he did not return to work after submitting his notice and it seems clear that it was not, therefore a day on which he would ‘ordinarily work’. This follows from his failure to tend for work in the preceding days and it is clear from this that he had no intention of returning to the workplace.

Accordingly, I find that he does not qualify for a payment under the Act, and indeed it would be most inequitable for him to benefit from its provisions on these facts.

For the reasons set out above complaint CA-00072839-001 is not well founded.

Paid sick leave.