The High Court dismissed Arnoldas Ruskys’s appeal against a €1,000 Labour Court compensation award for breaches of working-time rules by his employer, Gem Pack Foods Limited.
Mr Justice Birmingham delivered judgment on 21 May 2014. The appeal followed a Labour Court determination issued on 2 May 2013. The court disallowed the appeal, leaving the Labour Court award undisturbed.
Mr Ruskys began work as a general operative on the national minimum wage on 7 April 2011. He complained to the Rights Commissioner Service that Gem Pack Foods had breached provisions of the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 and had failed to provide a written statement of employment terms required by the Terms of Employment Information Act 1994.
The Rights Commissioner rejected the complaint under the 1994 Act but upheld part of the working-time claim, awarding €2,500. Mr Ruskys appealed to the Labour Court, which found one occasion when he had only eight hours between shifts, rather than the required minimum of 11. His claim about Sunday work had been withdrawn at the hearing, and the Labour Court said there was no evidence he had worked on a Sunday.
The Labour Court also concluded that he probably worked an average of 49.7 hours a week, above the statutory 48-hour limit. It found that he received three weeks of annual leave during the leave year from April 2011 to March 2012, with one week extending into the next leave year. The court accepted that leave had been allocated when he requested it and that he was paid for carried-over leave when his employment ended.
The Labour Court found breaches of sections 11, 15 and 19 of the 1997 Act. It considered the rest-break and annual-leave breaches minor and technical, and the weekly-hours breach at the lower end of seriousness. It awarded €250 for each of the first two breaches and €500 for the weekly-hours breach, totalling €1,000.
In the High Court, Mr Justice Birmingham said the awards for the single rest-break breach and the annual-leave breach could not be challenged on the circumstances before him. He described the €500 award for the weekly-hours breach as modest, but said the Labour Court was particularly well placed to assess the seriousness of the breach. Its finding could not be interfered with, and the award based on that finding could not be disturbed.