A Polish construction company has claimed the trade union Siptu tried to "destroy" it and caused it to pull out of Ireland. Siptu rejected the allegations last night.
Format Industrial Construction Ltd was sub-contracted to carry out work on the Dublin Port Tunnel in 2004. The company became involved in controversy in February 2005 when Siptu claimed that Format's Polish workers were not being paid for hours worked and that the company was breaching labour laws.
It denied the allegations and an industrial dispute, which involved the picketing of the site, continued for several months.
Format's president, Wojtek Mikulecki, appeared at the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) in Dublin yesterday to appeal against a recommendation made by the Rights Commissioner in the case of two former employees, Sylwester Gurminski and Tomasz Gurminski.
Last October, the two men won a pay-related case they took to the Rights Commissioner. They have since left Ireland and the EAT was unable to contact them to inform them of Format's appeal against the ruling. The case could not go ahead because of their absence, but the EAT said it would try to contact the men to reschedule the hearing.
Speaking through an interpreter, Mr Mikulecki said he had come from Poland for the case because it was about a lot more than the €2,000 at issue. He said Siptu had "commenced a big action. The point of this action was to destroy this company".
He said articles had appeared in newspapers and he claimed the company's contractors were "blackmailed" by Siptu to stop giving work to Format. Mr Mikulecki said many of its contractors advised Format to leave Ireland. The company had no economic activity in Ireland since 2005, he said.
He claimed the fact that the former employees did not appear at the tribunal was part of Siptu's plan to cost Format as much money as possible. "The trade union is deliberately causing costs for our company," he said.
Mr Mikulecki claimed the dispute and knock-on effects had cost the company €500,000, while €4,000 had been accumulated in tribunal expenses.
However, Siptu said it "firmly rejected" the claim that it had set out to destroy the company.
Noel Dowling, Siptu's national industrial secretary, said it would never set out to run a company out of Ireland. "But what we would do is to ensure that companies are paying their workers and operating within the law," he said. "There are legal minimum standards set out."
Mr Dowling said some foreign companies tried to implement poorer pay and conditions here that were acceptable in their own countries.
This was exploiting their own workers and was having an negative impact on Irish companies which were paying proper wages to their workers, he added. He pointed to the recent European Court of Justice case that found trade unions had the right to take industrial action to compel companies from other member states to pay their workers the same wages as domestic workers.
