A massage parlour worker who was sacked after refusing to provide “sexual services” to her male boss has been awarded a record €91,000 in compensation for whistleblower penalisation at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
It is the first case where the tribunal has ordered a whistleblower receive five years’ pay in compensation for penalisation – the maximum jurisdiction under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014.
Awards for further employment law breaches in the case bring the total compensation package to €102,550 – the second-highest sum awarded to a single claimant before the WRC this year.
The worker, who was represented by barrister Céile Varley BL on the instructions of solicitor Wendy Lyon of Abbey Law, said that soon after she started work at the massage parlour in 2019, she found that its clients were asking her for “additional services of a sexual nature”.
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The couple running the parlour took her to dinner and explained that she could indeed do as the clients were asking, she said.
They also identified specific “services” and told her what price she could charge.
Her wages at the salon amounted to €70 a day in cash, she said.
The managers, an Irishman and a non-Irish woman, told her she “could say no” – but they “could assure her that she wouldn’t get more clients” if she refused, the worker told the WRC.
After their conversation, she “began to provide limited sexual services” but came under “pressure” to go further despite telling her bosses she didn’t want to do it, the worker told the tribunal.
In fact, they pressured her to “expand” her “range of services”, the worker said.
The male manager also “routinely” made her give him free massages and would “push the boundaries” – pressuring her to “touch him intimately or provide him with sexual services”, the worker said.
The worker said she refused his demands but that in response, the woman manager became “rude, dismissive, and derogatory” towards her and rostered her for less work. Eventually, her bosses refused to pay her unless she saw at least four clients a day – leaving her unpaid on “multiple occasions”, she said.
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She returned from a fortnight’s holiday in early 2022 to discover she was off the roster, being told by her bosses there was no more work for her and that she “could find another job”.
Her former employers made no appearance when the WRC called on the worker’s case for hearing in July.
Her barrister, Ms Varley, pointed out that sex work was no longer an offence since the passage of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, but that it was still a crime to run a brothel or to “compel or coerce a person into providing sexual services, and to profit as a result”.
That point was echoed by adjudicator Michael McNamee in his decision on the case, published on Friday, in which he noted further that the worker’s job contract was “to provide massage therapy and nothing more” and was “perfectly legal”.
“The concern as to wrongdoing does not require proof that wrongdoing was actually committed, and for the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this decision should be construed as making any such finding,” the adjudicator wrote.
Mr MacNamee was satisfied there was a direct link between the worker’s refusal to provide sexual services and the acts of penalisation and said the male manager’s persistent demands for sexual services were “of even greater concern”.
The adjudicator said he could only reasonably conclude that the man’s conduct was “further penalisation in the form of coercion, intimidation, harassment or unfair treatment” of the worker for making her protected disclosure.
He also noted the employee was a non-European Union national who was working to support her studies and did not speak English as her first language – calling her an “exceptionally vulnerable worker”.
“In the present most exceptional case, I find that the nature and extent of the penalisation were of such an egregious nature as to merit an award of compensation at the maximum level permitted by the Act,” Mr MacNamee wrote.
He ordered the massage parlour to pay €91,000 as a tax-free compensation lump sum equivalent to 260 weeks’ gross wages for the worker – some five years’ worth of pay.
Mr MacNamee also awarded the worker €7,000 for loss of earnings following her sacking under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977; €1,400 for the failure to provide a contract in writing in breach of the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994; €700 in compensation for dismissal without notice in breach of the Minimum Notice and Terms of Employment Act 1973; and €2,450 for the non-provision of paid annual leave in breach of the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997.
Lawyers acting for the worker said at a hearing in July this year that the massage parlour was still trading at that point. It cannot be named by order of the adjudicating officer.
