The High Court has sent a Tesco Ireland pay dispute back to the Labour Court after finding that it had not properly assessed the wages a worker was entitled to under the Payment of Wages Act.
Mr Justice MacGrath allowed Marek Balans’s appeal on that ground in a judgment delivered on 31 January 2020. The appeal concerned a Labour Court decision of 21 January 2019. The judge rejected two other grounds of appeal, concerning a weekend premium and an extension of time to bring a complaint. The case returns to the Labour Court for determination; the High Court did not decide what Mr Balans was ultimately owed.
Mr Balans, a night worker at a Tesco distribution centre, had a 2015 contract stating a basic hourly rate of €11.87. Tesco paid him €10.29 an hour from June 2015. The company said the contract figure resulted from an administrative error: it had included a 20% premium for unsocial hours in the basic rate. Mr Balans argued that the written rate was binding and that paying him less amounted to an unlawful deduction.
An adjudication officer found the €11.87 rate was properly payable and that the shortfall was a deduction under the Payment of Wages Act 1991. The Labour Court overturned that decision, finding that the contract rate arose from a computational error and was not properly payable.
On the statutory appeal, the High Court said the Labour Court had conflated the question of what wages were properly payable with whether a shortfall was exempt as a computational error. The judge also held that a drafting error in a contract was not, in the circumstances, equivalent to a computational error under section 5(6) of the 1991 Act. The ruling does not determine the merits of Mr Balans’s pay claim. The Labour Court may reach the same conclusion after reconsidering the matter, and the judgment expresses no view on the claim’s substantive merits.
The dispute also concerned a 20% premium for hours worked “between Saturday and Sunday”. Mr Balans argued that this covered early Saturday hours from midnight Friday. The High Court found there was sufficient material for the Labour Court to conclude that the wording did not cover those hours, and identified no error of law.
Mr Balans had also challenged the refusal to extend the six-month time limit for his complaint to the Workplace Relations Commission. The High Court found adequate material for the Labour Court to uphold that refusal, agreeing with the adjudication officer’s reasoning that the internal grievance process had not prevented him from referring the complaint. The court said nothing in its judgment affected any rights or remedies the parties might have in another forum.