A supermarket manager has been awarded €27,000 by an Employment Appeals Tribunal after a row about allowing a worker to break the workplace smoking ban in the canteen led to him being sacked.
The tribunal found that Paul Collins, Tournore Court, Dungarvan, Co Waterford, was unfairly dismissed from his job at the Tesco store in Cork's Douglas Shopping Centre.
Mr Collins began working for Tesco in 2003 and was promoted to night shift manager, which meant he was responsible for health and safety in the store.
The smoking incident occurred at 2am on November 4th, 2004, when Mr Collins was in the canteen with a security officer and a member of the staff who began to smoke. There were no- smoking signs in the store's corridors and in the canteen.
Mr Collins did not ask the worker to stop smoking. When the security man asked him to stop, he moved to the window and continued to smoke out the window.
The security officer said he would have to report the incident and Mr Collins asked him not to.
There was an argument about how Mr Collins had handled the incident. Subsequently, he did not mention the matter in his shift report but the security officer did.
As a result, Mr Collins was suspended on full pay for a week pending further investigation.
At meetings with store managers, Mr Collins admitted he had allowed the worker to smoke in the canteen "because of his personal circumstances". The man's father was very ill. No one else smoked in the canteen in his presence. He had not reported the incident because he wanted to deal with it himself and had later got the man to stop smoking.
The store manager said he decided to dismiss Mr Collins "because he had wilfully allowed another employee to smoke, which was serious misconduct and a breach of trust". Allowing the worker to smoke had exposed Tesco to the risk of prosecution.
Mr Collins had appealed his dismissal but Tesco's employee relations manager had upheld the decision to dismiss him for "gross misconduct".
In a determination issued yesterday, the tribunal found that Mr Collins had not realised the seriousness of the situation until the disciplinary process started.
The tribunal said it was not satisfied that Tesco "gave the weight a reasonable employer would have given to these facts" when it considered the matter.