ADJ-00006067

Complainant

Respondent

Parties

A Social Care Worker

A Health Service Provider

Act

Complaint/Dispute Reference No.

Date of Receipt

Complaint seeking adjudication by the Workplace Relations Commission under section 13 of the Industrial Relations Act, 1969

CA-00008378-001

25/11/2016

The complainant was re-deployed on an temporary basis pending the investigation of certain complaints against her.

The re-deployment was on less favourable terms to the extent that it involved her travelling to work on a greater number of days than in her previous position.

She claimed travel expenses for these additional journeys.

The claimant says that she was given a commitment by the respondent that travel costs over and above those incurred by her in her normal place of work would be reimbursed to her She is out of pocket to the extent of about €3,000.

This commitment was given at a meeting with the respondent HR officials and her union would not have agreed to the transfer without this commitment being in place.

In addition the duration of the transfer, as a result of delay in completing the investigation was unacceptably long; adding to her costs.

The respondent says that provisions in the complainant’s contract allow for redeployment around its multi-site campus and where this has happened in the past it has never reimbursed additional costs of travel.

It is an organisation which operates within the public service financial control framework and this would set a precedent for the future both in its own and other organisations.

In any event while the discussions with the complainant did address some aspects of maintaining her income through loss of shift premia, even in respect of shifts she was not required to work but this did not extend to travel expenses.

Further, at no stage during the period of the complainant’s re-deployment did she raise the matter, or more critically actually claim the expenses to which she now lays claim.

The respondent says it treated the complainant fairly and in accordance with her contract of employment and that no claim arises.

Even on the basis of the complainant’s oral evidence at the hearing there was no case made out of a commitment by the respondent to pay travel expenses.

She stated that the HR Manager said (although he denied that he did) that he would ‘look at’ the question of travel expenses ‘later’.

This is quite some way from a commitment to actually pay them. The respondent said, and I accept, that its only commitment was in respect of maintaining the complainant’s remuneration, which it did.

When pressed as to why she did not make ongoing claims as they arose she cited the stress of the investigation. It is not to diminish in any way the stress caused by such an exercise to say that this is an inadequate explanation, and in fairness to her she accepted that she should have done so.

At the very least it would have ’flushed out’ at a very early stage the precise status of the claimed agreement and opened up whatever limited options there may have been for dealing with it contemporaneously; perhaps in relation to accelerating the investigation.

I find that there was no commitment on the part of the respondent to reimburse travel expenses and that it would probably be outside the terms of the public service rules to do so.

While the complainant’s representative said that the complainant would not have agreed to move if she had known this, the circumstances in which an employer may act in the context of such a complaint must be determined on an ad hoc basis having regard to the nature of the allegations and the employee’s contract.

Nonetheless, there is something left to be desired regarding the length of time taken to conduct the investigation. The complainant was re-deployed from the end of September 2015 until early June 2016; a period of some eight and a half months.

While investigations of this nature can take a long time a particular onus falls on an employer to ensure that such investigations are brought to a timely conclusion where a person who may ultimately be exonerated (and was in this case) is placed at a material disadvantage.

For that reason only I make the recommendation below as compensation to her for that delay, but not in respect of travelling expenses.

For the reasons outlined above, and strictly on the basis of that reasoning as it applies to the facts of this case I uphold complaint CA-00008378 in part and I recommend an award to the complainant of €650.00.

Key Words: Investigation, re-deployment, travelling expenses, compensation