Labour Court rejects union’s compensation claim over power station outage

The Labour Court recommended against compensation for loss of earnings sought by the Services Industrial Professional Technical Union after a four-month outage at ESB’s Lough Ree Power Station. The recommendation was signed on 17 April 2012. The union said workers lost access to overscale allowances, overtime and pay-by-result earnings while working under protest during the outage. Bord Na Mona said it consulted employee representatives, offered redeployment and imposed no compulsory lay-offs or short-time working. The Court said management made every effort to find alternative work and mitigate workers’ losses, when the alternative would have been lay-off or short-time working. It found no merit in the compensation claim and recommended against it.