Complainant

Respondent

Parties

Catherine  Fisher

Beaumont Hospital

Representatives

Daire Ferguson of Ibec

Act

Complaint/Dispute Reference No.

Date of Receipt

Complaint seeking adjudication by the Workplace Relations Commission under section 6 of the Payment of Wages Act, 1991

CA-00071078-001

23/04/2025

The Complainant is a team leader in the catering department in the Respondent voluntary hospital.

Up until 2013 team leaders in the catering department had been paid an 8% allowance while remaining graded as a catering assistant. This allowance was removed for new applicants to the role under the Haddington Road agreement.  

The Complainant obtained the team leader role after being invited to apply in 2017. She did not receive the 8%.  In 2023 SIPTU obtained regrading of the team leaders to band 2.

The Complainant’s case is that she did not receive this pay associated with this regrading until the beginning of 2024 and she is seeking the backdated 8% from 2017 to 2024. She lodged her claim with the WRC on the 23rd of April 2025.

The Respondent has raised a number of preliminary issues regarding her claim, the first being that the WRC does not have jurisdiction to consider the claim because the alleged contravention of the act occurred more than 12 months before the complaint was lodged.

The Complainant attended the hearing and gave detailed evidence under affirmation. She outlined her persistent attempts to obtain the payment which many other colleagues received for performing the same work.

She did not refer the matter to the WRC earlier as she was engaging with the Respondent’s grievance procedure which progressed extremely slowly.

The Respondent’s HR team and General Services Manager attended the hearing represented by IBEC. They submit that they were bound by public sector pay regulations and that the removal of the payment post-haddington road was not something that they had control over. They were pleased to see the issue resolved collectively however they could not pay the Complainant outside of the pay structure prescribed by the Government. 

Subsection 6 of Section 41 of the Workplace Relations Act of 2015 states:

(6) Subject to subsection (8), an adjudication officer shall not entertain a complaint referred to him or her under this section if it has been presented to the Director General after the expiration of the period of 6 months beginning on the date of the contravention to which the complaint relates.

Subsection 8 states:

(8) An adjudication officer may entertain a complaint or dispute to which this section applies presented or referred to the Director General after the expiration of the period referred to in subsection (6) or (7) (but not later than 6 months after such expiration), as the case may be, if he or she is satisfied that the failure to present the complaint or refer the dispute within that period was due to reasonable cause.

As outlined above I am prohibited from considering a complaint of a contravention of this act which is alleged to have occurred more than 12 months before the date the complaint was submitted to the WRC.

The entirety of the Complainant’s claim is outside this time limit.

The Complainant has raised the significant work she has undertaken in trying to resolve this matter internally via the Respondents grievance procedure. This process took a long time and far exceeded the timeframes set out in the policy. However the fact remains that the legislation does not provide any exceptions past the 12 month mark and I do not have jurisdiction to consider the complaint. 

 I find the complaint not well founded.