Hotel wage rate dispute settled on technicality

AT A cost of hundreds of thousands of euro to the State, the Irish Hotels Federation and the Labour Court settled their High Court dispute over wage rates for hotel workers on a technicality yesterday — and agreed to revert to an agreement hammered out several weeks before the court even sat.

The Labour Court must pay its own considerable court costs as well as those of the Irish Hotels Federation while the 25,000 provincial hotel workers, who were eligible for higher pay under the wage rate increases, must wait even longer for their payout.

At the end of last year, an independently chaired Joint Labour Committee, comprising representatives of the hotel industry and worker unions, hammered out a set of wage increases that they brought to the Labour Court for ratification.