Portuguese road workers set for €1.5m award

A High Court judge has ruled 27 Portugese workers who worked here on a road project are entitled to recover damages, estimated at €1.5m, plus interest, over breach of their employment contracts with three Portugese companies that traded here as the RAC Eire partnership.

There should be no “race to the bottom” where rights and conditions of workers are concerned, Mr Justice David Keane said yesterday. Among several findings, he ruled the firms engaged in “systematic and deliberate” underrecording of hours of work, leading to underpayment of the workers in breach of their employment contracts.

He also found the defendants were not entitled to deduct €17.50 daily (€520 monthly) from the workers’ wages for accommodation of a “deplorable, even dangerous” standard.

That accommodation, for up to 150 workers over 12 months, was an “unacceptably cramped” prefab “work camp” on a slip road near the N7 Nenagh-Limerick project, with “sub-standard and inadequate” sanitary facilities and no drinking water.

The workers were entitled to recover the full sums of underpayment of wages, plus sums deducted for their accommodation, laundry and for “benefits in kind”, plus interest from the date of their cause of action to now.

The 27 workers sued three Portugese companies — Rosas Construtores SA, Construcoes Gabriel AC Couto SA, and Empresa Deconstrucores Amandio Carvalho SA, trading as RAC Contractors and/or RAC Eire Partnership. RAC Eire traded here as a contractor or sub-contractor to a consortium, Bóthar Hibernian, comprising three companies — Mota-Engil (Portugal), Michael McNamara and Company, and Coffey Construction Ltd.

The case arose after Limerick County Council awarded Bóthar Hibernian the contract to design and build the N7 Nenagh to Limerick dual carriageway.

The workers — 26 construction workers and one cleaner — were employed under contracts with the defendants between 2007 and 2009. The contracts involved deductions of €15 daily for board, €17.50 for lodging, and €3.75 daily for laundry.

The judge found the workers were not paid in accordance with the contract for all the hours they worked. He also ruled the firms were not entitled to deduct €17.50 daily for accommodation or €3.75 for laundry services.

The case was adjourned to April 8 to allow the sides consider the judgment. The exact sum of damages will be decided later. Three similar cases are pending.