A banking professional who moonlighted for nearly 30 years “pulling pints” at a Dublin pub has been awarded €25,000 for the “heartless” and “completely unlawful” way he was dismissed by the family he had first come to work for in the 1980s.
The worker, Alan Ecock, said he kept up his work at Kavanagh’s of Aughrim Street in Dublin 7 despite starting a career in banking in 1994 because he was trying to provide for his mother after his father passed away.
He told the tribunal in October this year that he spent 28 years working at AIB by day and as a part-time barman by night until he was dismissed for “cost-cutting” reasons in April. He said his co-workers at the bank knew nothing of his second job.
“I was the eldest boy of two – that’s why I accepted the position and worked as hard as I did to ensure my mam had stability in later life,” he said.
He kept the same hours up when he signed a full-time contract with AIB in 1994 – only cutting back to two nights a week when he got married in 2013, he said.
“I was trying to earn as much money as I could to ensure I had as much money later in life,” he said.
The WRC heard that the original owners of the pub, Noel Peacock Sr and his wife Rose Peacock, had been forced to retire from the trade as part of a remortgaging arrangement with Bank of Ireland, yielding control of the hospitality group they founded to their four adult children.
The pub operating company, Pundit Ltd, a subsidiary of N & Peacock Ltd, denied all of Mr Ecock’s complaints, arguing he had been forbidden from holding a second PAYE role when he joined AIB and that Mrs Peacock had adjusted his tax credits accordingly, at Mr Ecock’s request.
Company director Patrina Peacock told the WRC that, despite selling two pubs – the nearby Hynes’s of Prussia Street and The Tap on North King Street – there were “not enough significant cost savings without looking at staffing”. She said that Mr Ecock’s €250-a-shift pay made him the best-paid worker on an hourly basis at Kavanaghs after her sister Louise, the manager, who was also a proprietary director of the firm.
“So you’re saying none of the common-sense, non-financial commercial information ... where someone said: ‘We can’t let Alan go, sure he’s an institution inside in the pub’ – that was never discussed at your directors’ meeting?” the complainant’s solicitor, Setanta Landers, asked her in cross-examination.
“I don’t have the luxury of common sense. I have to keep the mortgage paid and keep Revenue paid so my decisions have to be strictly financial,” Ms Peacock said.
In a closing submission, the pub group’s solicitor Bríd McCoy said Mr Ecock was “well aware” that he was self-employed and therefore not entitled to make any employment rights claims.
“He’s working in AIB, he’s a ‘focused career banking professional’ in his LinkedIn profile,” she submitted.
Mr Landers said the Peacock family’s argument that Mr Ecock was self-employed was a “parade of fiction” which they had been unable to support with evidence.
“It’s expensive to pay an employee statutory redundancy who’s been there for 34 years. They just didn’t want to pay him – it’s as simple as that,” he said. “It is totally undignified, it is totally transparent, and the WRC should take a very firm view on it,” Mr Landers added.
In his decision, adjudicator Pat Brady wrote that even if he accepted the respondent’s claim that Mr Ecock’s status changed to self-employment when he joined the bank, it was “no defence whatsoever”.
The law required an examination of “the realities of the situation” to determine employment status, and Mr Ecock “ticks all the boxes” making him an employee according to the Revenue code of practice on determining employment status, giving him legal standing to pursue the claims, Mr Brady wrote.
He wrote that the complainant showed “an admirable if somewhat naive loyalty to the enterprise ... or at least to the previous generation of the family”.
The younger directors failed to apply even the “rudimentary” processes required in a redundancy situation, such as a consultation process or any exploration of alternatives, and were “guilty of a quite egregious breach of the [Unfair Dismissals] Act]“, Mr Brady wrote.
“The respondent apparently did not consider it necessary to grant the complainant the courtesy of having the news of his dismissal conveyed to him in person. All he got was the briefest of telephone calls,” Mr Brady wrote.
“Having regard to the complainant’s long and loyal service, the manner in which it was effected was especially heartless, to say nothing of being completely unlawful,” he added.
He awarded Mr Ecock €22,750 for unfair dismissal, €2,000 for the employer’s failure to give the required notice, and €1,000 for the failure to provide a written statement of core terms of employment – a total awards package of €25,750.
He dismissed further claims for wages and redundancy, the latter being provided for in the unfair dismissal order.
The complaints were brought under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, the Redundancy Payments Act 1967, the Payment of Wages Act 1991, the Minimum Notice and Terms and Conditions of Employment Act 1994 and the Organisation of Working Time Act 2004 against the pub’s operating company Pundit Ltd, a subsidiary of N & Peacock Holdings Ltd.
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