The Labour Court allowed Wallace Myers International Limited’s appeal and set aside the adjudication officer’s decision in an unfair-dismissal case brought by Mr Sean Fitzgerald. The Court’s determination, dated 8 November 2022, found that Fitzgerald’s redundancy dismissal was not unfair. The amount of the earlier award is not stated in the source.
Fitzgerald worked as a recruitment consultant, earning a basic annual salary of €45,000 plus commission. The Court accepted that a significant business downturn after the pandemic began created a genuine redundancy situation, and found that the employer consulted with the affected team before making Fitzgerald and one colleague redundant. It said the last-in, first-out selection criterion should ideally have been disclosed earlier, but found that no substantive unfairness resulted. Fitzgerald had argued that he proposed a salary reduction as an alternative to redundancy. He later began alternative employment at an annual starting salary of €47,000 and claimed €18,898.62 in lost earnings.