Employee

Employer

Anonymised Parties

A Shop Assistant

A Charity Shop

Representatives

Not represented 

Did not attend the hearing

Act

Dispute Reference No.

Date of Receipt

Industrial Relations Act 1969, section 13

CA-00040673-001

29/10/2020

Commencing on October 14th 2019, the employee was on a 12-month work placement as part of a return-to-work initiative sponsored by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.  She had spent many years caring for her parents and then for her brother and she was ready to return to the workplace.  She was assigned to a job in a charity shop.  She worked there until January 7th 2020, when she told her team leader in the sponsoring organisation that she wasn’t happy in the shop.  At the end of the month, her team leader found her a new placement.

This dispute was submitted to the WRC on October 29th 2020.  On December 10th 2020, a member of the HR department in the organisation overseeing the charity shops wrote to the WRC to inform us that it was not the employer.  in March 2022, when the hearing was scheduled, the HR manager wrote again to inform us that they were not the employer.  The HR manager enclosed a letter from the team leader in the placement organisation, in which she said that they were the employee’s former employer.

At the hearing, the employee outlined her dissatisfaction with how she was treated when she worked in the charity shop.  I asked her if she talked about her concerns to her team leader in the placement organisation when she visited the shop to see how she was getting on.  The employee said that she felt that she couldn’t say anything about how unhappy she was.  I asked her if she had been given a grievance procedure, which outlined a process for dealing with complaints or problems in the workplace and she said that she wasn’t aware of such a procedure.

As the employee has mistakenly assumed that the charity overseeing the shop where she worked was her employer, I cannot make a full enquiry into her grievance, because her former employer has not been given an opportunity to respond.  I explained the employee’s options regarding this matter, and I encouraged her to contact the placement organisation to discuss her grievance about how she was treated.

I recommend that the employee contacts her team leader in the placement organisation where she sought assistance with finding a job, to discuss the reasons her placement didn’t work out.  I recommend also that an employee on a placement is given a copy of the grievance procedure, to provide clarity about the relationship between the employer and the job placement, and so that grievances can be resolved at the level of the enterprise.  

Work placement, grievance