Complainant

Respondent

Anonymised Parties

A General Operative

A Manufacturing Company

Representatives

SIPTU

IBEC

Act

Dispute Reference No.

Date of Receipt

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

CA-00011432-001

19/05/2017

The complainant has been employed by the respondent since October 2000. The dispute arises from the non-payment to him of a ‘Stand-in’, or acting up allowance.

The respondent created a new position for which the complainant applied in 2012. He was unsuccessful.

However, he says that in practice he carried out what he put at sixty per cent of the higher level functions.

In due course the same position became vacant again but was only advertised when the complainant raised a formal grievance on that point. He was unsuccessful again. He also became aware that a rival candidate had access to the interview questions in advance.

On the next occasion the position became vacant he had to again object to the fact that it was not advertised and he was not interviewed for it.

All in all he spent about five years discharging these higher level functions without any additional remuneration. The company management was aware of this and acquiesced in it.

He raised a grievance about the matter which concluded that he was not in fact in a ‘Stand in’ position and therefore not entitled to an additional payment.

This was upheld on appeal by the HR Director.

He seeks payment for the ‘Stand in’ period.

The respondent says that the complaint arises mainly because the complainant was disaffected as a result of not being successful at interview for the ‘Stand-in’ positions.

In order to qualify for a ‘Stand-in’ payment a person must either be appointed to, or fully engaged in the role which the usual incumbent discharges. There will always be overlaps in job content and responsibility but this will not be sufficient to ground a claim for a ‘Stand-in’ payment.

Also, the respondent operates a procedure for claiming the ‘Stand-in’ allowance which requires a weekly return which must be approved by the claimant’s manager. This was a system well known to the complainant; he had many years’ service with the company, had acted as a shop steward and had operated and been the beneficiary of that system on previous occasions.

In addition, he failed to raise the matter contemporaneously but continued to work the system, despite being familiar with the requirements for making a claim.

The company is a very large one and could not operate ad-hoc arrangements in relation to its rewards systems.

The respondent says that it dealt fully at an internal level with the non-advertising of the posts and that this should not arise as a separate matter now. The accessing of the interview questions by a rival candidate was not a result of them being given to him by a manager but was an accident.

At the heart of this complaint is the fact that the complainant undertook what he saw as significant additional duties (about sixty per cent according to him) at a higher level than his normal job description requires. This is disputed by the respondent but it seems clear that here was some element of acting at a higher level.

There are two significant obstacles to his claim.

In cases taken under the Industrial Relations Act, for obvious reasons related to the name of the legislation, good industrial relations practise must play a significant part in assessing the validity of the complaint.

In this case, the failure of the complainant to raise a contemporary complaint about his working arrangements seems especially curious given his length of service with the company, and his clear knowledge of how the system is supposed to operate.

He spent, according to his own account, some five years in the position and while he did complain about the failure to open the position to interview he raised the substantive matter of the payment only after he had been unsuccessful in the competition which was advertised in October 2015. He was notified of this on November 4^th 2015.

By this time the complainant had been in the disputed position since 2012.

It was only after this that he appears to have raised the more substantive grievance which was adjudicated on and communicated to him on August 17^th 2016.

In that he was advised that the decision maker had concluded that he had not carried out ‘all’ the roles and responsibilities of the post.

This raises the second obstacle to the complaint.

The respondent made it clear that performing part of a job will not suffice; there must be a full substitution into the role. Even taking the complainant’s assessment of that he describes it as being 60% he falls short of this. This assessment was disputed by the respondent and it seems likely that it was somewhat below 60%.

But again, fatal to the complainant‘s case is that at no time did he raise this as a grievance. The appropriate place to have the matter, including the precise degree of his deployment on the higher level duties was at the workplace. A WRC Adjudication Officer is in no position to carry out an evaluation of such detail related to job responsibilities.

According to the respondent the complainant would have faced an uphill task in getting an ad hoc deal for such portion of his work as was at a higher level but it was surely a better chance than seeking it from and Adjudicator five years after the matter first arose.

For these reasons I do not find the complaint well founded.

For the reasons set out above I do not uphold complaint CA-00011432-001 and it is dismissed.

Industrial Relations Act, need for compliance with local procedures.