UDD2528

UD/24/96

PARTIES:

DIVISION:

SUBJECT:

Appeal of Adjudication Officer Decision No's: ADJ-00046797 (CA-000057594-001)

BACKGROUND:

The Worker appealed the Decision of the Adjudication Officerto the Labour Court on 7 August 2024 in accordance with Section 8A of the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 to 2015. A Labour Court hearing took place on 31 July 2025.

The following is the Decision of the Court: -

DECISION:

1.The Appeal

This is an appeal by Mr Josef Kubicz (‘the Complainant’) from a Decision of an Adjudication Officer (ADJ-00046797, dated 10 July 2024) under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 (‘the Act’). The Adjudication Officer decided that the Complainant’s claim that he had been constructively dismissed from his employment by G4S Secure Solutions (Irl) Limited (‘the Respondent’) was not well-founded. Notice of Appeal was received in the Court on 7 August 2024. The Court heard the appeal in Dublin on 31 July 2025. Only the Complainant gave evidence; no witness was called on behalf of the Respondent.

2.The Factual Matrix

The Complainant was employed as a Security Officer by the Respondent from 12 July 2005 until his resignation on 6 July 2023. At the material time, the Complainant was based at a data centre facility operated by client of the Respondent.

An incident allegedly occurred at that site on 10 May 2022 where an unauthorised person may have been given access to the client’s secure site while the Complainant was on duty. The client complained about the matter to the Respondent with the result that the Complainant was immediately placed on paid suspension pending an investigation into the alleged incident. The Complainant had a number of concerns about the provenance of the complaint against him and showed no willingness to co-operate with the Respondent’s investigation. The Complainant also took issue with the person appointed by the Respondent to carry out the investigation and challenged that person’s authority to investigate the incident that had allegedly occurred on 10 May 2022. The Complainant also said that he wished to have legal representation throughout the process.

The Respondent placed the Complainant on unpaid suspension with effect from 21 May 2022 in response to his ongoing refusal to engage with the investigation process. There were a number of email exchanges between the Complainant and Respondent personnel between June and August 2022 in which the Complainant continued to take issue with the Respondent’s procedures which he alleged were not in accordance with its own written policies.

The Complainant a complaint under the Industrial Relations Act 1969 to the Workplace Relations Commission on 9 August 2022. In his Recommendation that issued on 9 August 2023, the Adjudication Officer who heard the matter recommended that:

“… the Complainant engage with the investigation process as proposed by the Employer and that if he wishes to be represented, his representative should be either a work colleague or a trade union official, in line with the Code of Practice on Grievance and Disciplinary Procedures …”.

As stated above, the Complainant had already resigned from his employment prior to the date on which the Recommendation issued. The Complainant appealed from the Recommendation to this Court under the Act of 1969.

The Court’s decision in that matter was as follows:

“The Court does not accept that the Worker was entitled to refuse to co-operate with the Company’s investigation by failing to attend at a scheduled meeting. In circumstances where he had genuine concerns about aspects of the investigation, including the proposed format of the investigation meeting, the proper course of action would have been to attend at the scheduled meeting where those issues could have been ventilated. This would also have afforded the Worker the opportunity to utilise the Company’s internal appeal process and ultimately the State’s dispute resolution machinery if he continued to have concerns.

Likewise, the Court does not accept that the Company took sufficient steps to ally the Worker’s concerns about the conduct of the investigation before placing him on unpaid suspension. No explanation was given by the Company at the within hearing as to why, for example, the Worker was not informed in advance of the investigation meeting about the information it had in its possession – if any – that tended to show that the Worker had in fact committed the security breach as alleged. Furthermore, the Worker’s relatively long service with the Company prior to the events of 2022 appears to have been disregarded in the process.

Having regard to the foregoing, the Court upholds the Worker’s complaint in part and recommends compensation of €5,000.00 be paid to him for the effects of the Company’s inappropriate action of imposing the sanction of unpaid suspension on him. This level of compensation also takes account of the Worker’s contribution to the situation that came about due to his unwise decision not to engage with the Company’s investigation.”

3.The Complainant’s Evidence

The Complainant told the Court that he had effectively been placed on unpaid suspension for a period of 59 weeks although he had never received any formal statement confirming such a sanction from the Respondent. He made a detailed submission in relation to what he perceived to be a denial of his rights to natural justice arising from the manner in which the Respondent had proposed to conduct the disciplinary investigation into the alleged incident of 10 May 2022. According to the Complainant he had not been furnished with details of the allegation against him; was denied the opportunity to be legally represented in circumstances where he was not a member of a Trade Union and no colleague available to him was trained in the use of online technology; the investigation was not being led by the person he believed to be his line manager; and the person actually appointed to conduct the investigation was not independent because the Complainant himself, in his submission, had raised a similar complaint against him some weeks earlier.

The Complainant gave the following evidence in relation to mitigation and loss. He told the Court that he was actively seeking employment elsewhere in 2022 (i.e. prior to his resignation) as he had run out of money and his savings had been exhausted as a consequence of his having been placed on unpaid suspension. He was successful in obtaining an interview with a named security company, was offered a position with it subject to obtaining a satisfactory reference from the Respondent. That offer of employment was subsequently withdrawn. The Complainant said that he had applied for 4 or 5 jobs in total but stopped looking after the aforementioned conditional offer of employment had been withdrawn in 2022. The Complainant gave no evidence of having sought to mitigate his loss following his resignation in July 2023.

4.Discussion and Decision

A complainant in a constructive dismissal case must reach a high bar in terms of demonstrating that it was reasonable for him or her to resign their employment in response to some act or omission on the part of their employer that either goes to the root of the employment or is in itself very unreasonable. In summary, what occurred in this case is that the Complainant sought to determine the process which the Respondent was to follow in investigating a serious allegation against him. The Respondent chose not to accede to the Complainant’s demands in that regard and insisted that the provisions of its established disciplinary procedures would be applied. This led to a stalemate between the Parties that persisted for an extend period of months until the Complainant made the decision to resign his employment. It is the Court’s view that the Complainant’s stance in refusing to co-operate with the Respondent’s investigation was not reasonable. In circumstances where he had genuine concerns about aspects of the investigation, including the proposed format of the investigation meeting, the proper course of action would have been to attend at the scheduled meeting where those issues could have been ventilated.

The longer an employee endures a situation in which they deem their employer to be acting unreasonably or in breach of contract, particularly where the employee is not proactively attempting to resolve the perceived difficulty with the employer and he/she is acting unreasonably themselves, the weaker the justification becomes for any subsequent resignation. The Complainant has given no cogent explanation to the Court as to why he chose to wait for fifty-nine weeks after the Respondent ceased to pay him before resigning and why he resigned before the dispute he had referred under the Industrial Relations Act had been determined.

Having regard to the foregoing, the Court must conclude that the Complainant has not surmounted the high bar referred to earlier; he has not demonstrated that it was reasonable to resign his employment when he did or at all. His appeal, therefore, fails and the decision of the Adjudication Officer is upheld.

The Court so decides.

	Signed on behalf of the Labour Court
	Alan Haugh
FC	______________________
8 September 2025	Deputy Chairman

NOTE

Enquiries concerning this Decision should be addressed to Ms Fiona Corcoran, Court Secretary.