Ruling on fiddle player's employment status gives power back to workers 

Matt McGranaghan’s win at the Work Relations Commission may make him the man who gives power back to those in bogus self-employment

Matt McGranaghan took a case against his former employer, MEPC Music, for whom he had played as a fiddler for eight years between 2014 and 2022. 

If you're the sort of person who follows soccer to any extent, and even if you aren’t, you’re probably familiar with the phrase ‘leaving on a Bosman’.

It is when a professional footballer leaves their current club upon the expiry of their contract, with the option of signing as a free agent for another.

Those words are part of the sporting lexicon now to such an extent that they are effectively disconnected from their original context.

Those origins were the early 1990s when players weren’t allowed leave a club when their contract had ended unless said club received a transfer fee for them or sanctioned the move.

A Belgian journeyman footballer, Jean-Marc Bosman’s name likely would have faded from history had he been able to secure a transfer to French club Dunkerque in 1990. His previous club, RFC Liege, refused to sanction a transfer, however, despite his contract having ended.

So Bosman took the situation to the European Court of Justice. 

And, five long years later, he won — in a ruling that reverberates around the world’s richest sport to this day — one where clubs fall over themselves to prevent a player from entering the last year of their contract and therefore, unthinkably, facilitating a situation where a million-pound asset walks away to enrich another team for nothing.

I raise the story of Bosman because, on August 15, Ireland's Workplace Relations Commission delivered a ruling in favour of one Matt McGranaghan, which could see him becoming the Bosman of Irish bogus self employment and the gig economy – the man who gave the power back to workers.

Belgian soccer player Jean-Marc Bosman, flanked by two of his lawyers Jean-Louis Dupont, left, and Luc Misson, right, at the European Court of Justice in December 1995. Picture: STF/AFP/Getty Images

Donegal-based McGranaghan had taken his case against his former employer, MEPC Music, for whom he had played as a fiddler for eight years between 2014 and 2022. 

Despite playing more than 200 gigs a year, he had never been deemed an employee, and had been denied all the benefits — holiday and sick pay, pension entitlements — full-time workers take for granted.

McGranaghan is a unique and hardy soul however. 

In 2018 he first heard tell of the concept of bogus self employment and thought to himself, ‘that sounds very like the situation in which I find myself’.

He approached his employers and said he wanted to be an employee. They made it very clear that would never happen.

So he went to the Department of Social Protection’s employment status unit, known as Scope, and secured himself a ruling in November 2019 that for social insurance purposes he already was an employee.

MEPC appealed that ruling to the same department’s social welfare appeals office (SWAO).

That is where things went off the beaten path. McGranaghan refused to attend his appeal hearing because the department historically had decided such cases using precedential test cases, yet they would not tell him what those precedents — which would decide the fate of his working life — were.

In his absence, the appeal hearing overturned the Scope decision and ruled in MEPC’s favour.

Instead, representing himself with aid from workers’ rights champion Martin McMahon, McGranaghan took his case to the WRC in March of last year, six months after being informed by the band that his services were no longer required.

Karshan judgment

Something very important happened between the lodging of that case at the WRC and the eventual hearing last January — the Karshan judgment was handed down by the Supreme Court in October 2023, which both ruled that Dominos Pizza delivery drivers were full employees and also provided a very streamlined set of tests — five simple questions — to decide whether someone is in fact an employee or a freelance contractor.

McGranaghan’s case is seismic because, while his is not quite the first WRC ruling to take Karshan into account, it is the first to do so in a truly focused manner.

Despite reams of argument from MEPC about why McGranaghan had never been an employee — including the laughable reliance on a Court of Appeal ruling in Karshan, one which was superseded by the Supreme Court verdict — WRC decision maker Caroline Reidy applied the five Karshan questions and concluded immediately that McGranaghan was indeed a worker being denied his rights.

From there, rulings on all nine of the complaints McGranaghan had made —including that he had been denied public holiday pay and, most importantly, that he had been unfairly dismissed —went rapidly in his favour, while MEPC was ordered to pay him almost €44,000 in compensation.

A seismic victory for McGranaghan, but an earthquake of a decision for Ireland’s other cohorts of bogus self employed, from construction workers to Big Tech employees to journalists.

That WRC ruling means the Karshan judgment has now officially entered the mainstream of Irish employment law. It could spell the end of the gig economy in Ireland as we know it.

This could spell a lot of trouble for many bodies — from RTÉ to An Post, but also for the Department of Social Protection’s appeals office and the Revenue Commissioners, which together with the WRC preside over Ireland’s network of workers’ rights.

The implications for Revenue are particularly interesting, given it was that body which appealed the Karshan case to the Supreme Court in the first place. Yet, as recently as last January, Revenue’s chair Niall Cody told the Public Accounts Committee that the ruling “doesn’t change the law”.

Except, now it seems that it effectively does.

RTÉ will be the next key battleground. The broadcaster has an abysmal record of employing workers on freelance contracts, often for decades, while expecting them to perform the duties of full-time employees.

RTÉ is currently the subject of a torturous Scope review — one projected to take well over a decade to complete — of nearly 700 of its workers who were employed with the station between 2018 and 2020 — about 150 of those reviews have taken place, and roughly 100 of them have gone in favour of the worker.

The precedent has now been set for workers to go to the WRC and have their case heard with Karshan as the sole arbiter as to whether or not they are an employee or not. And whether or not they were an employee historically.

RTÉ is currently the subject of a Scope review — one projected to take well over a decade to complete — of nearly 700 of its workers who were employed with the station between 2018 and 2020. File picture

That comes with the possibility of compensation — something RTÉ has steadfastly refused to countenance to date in the context of its own historically bogus self employed workers. Previously, director general Kevin Bakhurst put the potential liability from the bogus self employment probe at €20m.

Should RTÉ’s historical freelance workers now start to assert their rights, that figure could be dwarfed.

Which makes the scale of McGranaghan’s achievement difficult to overstate. After six long years, he has done himself justice, and then some.

He may well have achieved the same justice for thousands of others while he was at it.