Lecturers’ redundancy payments are trebled

TWO fixed-term lecturers are to have redundancy payments trebled after the Labour Court found they were discriminated against by the Department of Education when it closed a Dublin college last year.

The two are also to be paid compensation of €2,500 each for having been denied their right to equal treatment with their permanent colleagues at St Catherine’s College for Home Economics in Blackrock, Co Dublin.

Helen Maloney and Margaret Moran were employed on fixed-term contracts at the college, and had six and seven years of service respectively when the closure happened in August 2007. But they were only offered a redundancy lump sum equal to their statutory entitlement of two weeks’ pay for every year of service, compared to a number of redundancy options offered to permanent staff.

The Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) took their case to a rights commissioner hearing, but their success there was appealed by the Department of Education to the Labour Court. It has determined that the complaints were well-founded and that both women be offered the option of a severance payment of six weeks’ pay per year of service, to include two weeks’ pay entitlement plus compensation.

The Labour Court said no consideration was given to the need to ensure equality of treatment between permanent and fixed-term staff because of the department’s belief, as set out by Ms Hanafin in a July 2007 letter to IFUT, that ex-gratia payments are not pay and fell outside the terms of the fixed-term worker law requiring equal treatment for non-permanent workers.

This position by the minister was later conceded as unsustainable in law by the department’s legal team.

IFUT general secretary Mike Jennings said of the case: “The department compounded this injustice by engaging a large team of expensive lawyers to fight this case and to drag it out for as long as humanly possible. It’s said that ‘all’s well that ends well’, but it is also true that ‘justice delayed is justice denied’.”