Labour Court upholds three working-time complaints, awards Kilsaran worker €8,000

The Labour Court upheld three of Mindaugas Viskontis’s working-time complaints against Kilsaran Concrete Limited and awarded him €8,000 in compensation. It dismissed his public-holiday pay complaint. The determination was signed on 27 January 2017. Viskontis appealed a Rights Commissioner’s decision dismissing his complaints after he did not attend the hearing; the merits were not decided. At the Labour Court, he withdrew a separate complaint under road-transport working-time regulations, while Kilsaran accepted liability for the remaining complaints against it. The Court accepted his unchallenged evidence that he had to remain available for customer calls during breaks, worked an average of more than 48 hours a week and could not predict when his shifts would end. It found that his additional variable hours counted as overtime and were excluded from the calculation of public-holiday pay, so that complaint was not well founded.