Cantillon: Clerys workers still waiting for answers

Six months on from its sale, Clerys remains shuttered while its new owners work on redevelopment plans. But the shoddy manner of the sacking of its staff ensures the story won't go away. What might be its next chapter ?

The Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation this week rejected a proposal from Patricia King of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to force all companies to give employees 30 days' notice of an intention to make them redundant.

“Another Clerys should not be allowed to happen again,” she said.

Such a provision already applies to most companies, but not bust ones. In a meeting with Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton in July, Ictu's general secretary suggested it should be extended to all firms.

Directors who disregard it, she said, should be disqualified for five years with immediate redundancies declared void.

Therese Walshe, the Minister's private secretary, wrote back to King that such a change to the law wouldn't help the Clerys workers.

“It would be difficult to keep employees in their jobs and expect them to work, merely to serve out a 30-day notice period, when the [bust] employer has no resources to pay them,” she wrote.

Walshe said that doing so would only deprive workers of access to their P45s for the 30 days, as well as delaying the process of gaining social welfare. It would be a “meaningless exercise”, she said. Bust employers are simply unable to pay.

Ictu criticised the response because it effectively regards the Clerys closure as a normal insolvency.

The union grouping’s not unreasonable point is that Clerys was abnormal because an allegedly “contrived”restructuring into a profitable property arm and an insolvent retail arm deprived workers of access to assets. This resulted in the taxpayer footing the entire bill through the Insolvency Fund, King said.

But it wasn’t just the fact that Clerys was split this way that deprived staff of their redundancy cash, but rather the way it was done.

Here’s a couple of simple questions for the next chapter of the Clerys story that, if answered, might go some way towards explaining why staff and concessionaires were left high and dry. What bills were paid from the operating company’s accounts in the run-up to its liquidation and which entities benefited from those payments?

Perhaps the KPMG liquidators, who have told the courts they are investigating certain matters, can dig up the answer.