Complainant

Respondent

Anonymised Parties

A Lecturer

A University

Representatives

Irish Federation of University Teachers

McCann Fitzgerald, Solicitors

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-00022829-001

24/10/2018

The claimant is a university lecturer with twenty-three years’ service.

She claims that she was unfairly denied promotion to the grade of Senior Lecturer on her third application.

Detail was provided to the hearing of the complainant’s academic credentials and track record, including external endorsements of her work.

She has been described as a ‘leader in her field’, ‘a leading scholar in her field’ and as having built ‘a strong national and international reputation’ as a researcher.

Further evidence was provided of other high-level endorsements.

She was not advised of the outcome of the interview process until some ten months after the application.

She raised concern about whether undue weight had been attached to the completion of her application form (which was shorter than the maximum permitted), and queried the fact that other applicants had exceeded the recommended word limit.

She requested and was given feedback, but it was vague and unsatisfactory.

She appealed the decision by means of a formal written appeal which takes the form of a documents review; there is no opportunity to attend and advocate one’s cause.

The appeal did not succeed.

Further meetings attended by her union did not resolve the matter and it was referred to the WRC.

Her union says that she meets all the criteria for promotion set out by the respondent.

In her own direct evidence the complainant criticised the fact that there was no benchmarking of research as happens in other universities.

The respondent says that the promotion process is well established and is very robust.

The position regarding the promotions in this case is that a person will be promoted on reaching a particular standard; it is not a matter of there being a limit on the number of vacancies as is normally the case. Any person reaching the required standard will be promoted.

In this case, out of eighty-four applications, thirty-four were successful.

The complainant was forty third overall.

The promotion board has external participation and the appeals board is guided in relation to the fairness of its procedures by a legal advisor who is a Senior Counsel.

The system involves submission of a written application by the applicant, and this includes an external referee, an input by the applicant’s line manager who also nominates three external referees.

The assessment takes place on the basis of written materials only.

The issue raised by the complainant regarding the word count in her application is not material and played no part in the overall outcome.

The complainant appreciates, no doubt, the difficulty in approaching a third party to seek redress in respect of the matter in hand.

She has worked in the university for twenty-three years and has a good understanding of its internal processes and the promotional system in question. Her complaint is that despite her service and teaching and research credentials she has failed to gain promotion.

Asking a WRC Adjudicator to, in a way, substitute himself for an established university promotions system, requiring him to make judgements on subject areas and related matters well outside his competence is not a realistic option.

The only issue that is within the competence of the adjudicator, indeed it is our almost daily task, is to examine whether some procedural unfairness may have been present in the process that could have resulted in an injustice to the complainant.

This might arise more commonly in a competitive interview process with a limited number of promotional positions, where the issue is the relative merits of the applicants.

In this case the relative merits of the parties are irrelevant, and the only question is whether a candidate reaches the standard set by the university to be appointed to the promotional grade.

This in turn means that the assessment process is a much more technical one; the preserve of experts in the various fields of academic performance and research considered to be relevant.

This does not mean that such a process will inevitably be free of flaws. The point relating to the word count was advanced by the complainant as one possible flaw that resulted in disadvantage to her. I am satisfied that it did not do so.

Nor were there any others. The presence of a Senior Counsel on the appeals board was questioned by the complainant. On the contrary, this is a safeguard for appellants, again in respect of the fairness of the procedure. It reflects the extent to which the requirements of fair procedure are understood to be important in all such processes.

She was critical of the feedback received and there may be some room for improvement there, especially as a key aspect of such feedback is to enable an unsuccessful candidate to identify any weakness that might be worked on for a future application, but that does not go to the heart of the complaint; the decision was made at that stage.

The complainant’s disappointment is understandable, given her acknowledged track record in her area of teaching and research.

However, having regard to the criterion outlined above I can find no basis to intervene in, or upset the outcome of the competition.

For the reasons set out above I do not uphold complaint CA-00022829-001.