A group of more than 50 casual employees in Jurys Ballsbridge Hotel, Dublin, has had a claim over service charges dismissed on the grounds that industrial relations problems were not a matter for the courts.
Mr Justice Paul Butler said yesterday the employees were "casual work" employees of Jurys Hotel Group engaged on a function-to-function basis. They were guaranteed to be paid for at least five hours work.
In three sets of proceedings, the employees' claim arose out of the distribution of the service charge of 12.5 per cent among the staff in the banqueting department of Jurys. There were nine different pools of service charge.
He said it seemed that no full written agreement concerning service charges was ever agreed but a system evolved. Jurys and Siptu operated a closed shop whereby only the union represented employees.
The casual staff complained that the per function award of points to the permanent staff, regardless of whether they worked particular functions, distorted the distribution in favour of the permanent staff.
They contended that only those employees who actually worked a particular function should be paid a proportion of the service charge for it. All parties agreed that as a matter of law the service charge was not the property of Jurys but of the employees. The question at issue was how it should be distributed among the employees, he said.
"It is certainly not a matter for the courts to devise a system of distribution," Mr Justice Butler said. "To do so would be to enter into the field of industrial relations. The court is not a mediator."
In one of the cases it was contended that the fundamental principle was that payment of the service charge should be to the employees, whether casual or permanent, who worked a particular function. The evidence was that the plaintiffs, albeit reluctantly, accepted the method of distribution each time they were engaged.
The permanent staff had a contractual claim over that proportion of the service charge that was distributed to them. The monies were not, therefore, the property solely of the banqueting staff, he said.