Complainant

Respondent

Parties

Stephen  Clare

Manpower Ireland

Representatives

Olivia O'Connor IBEC

Act

Complaint/Dispute Reference No.

Date of Receipt

Complaint seeking adjudication by the Workplace Relations Commission under section 6 of the Payment of Wages Act, 1991

CA-00063718-001

26/05/2024

The Complainant worked for the Respondent from June 2013 to June 2014. He was contracted to work for a large multinational. That multinational appears to have paid their own staff more than the agency staff, in contravention of the Protection of Employees (Temporary Agency Work) Act 2012 and in 2023 carried out an exercise to make amends for this.

The Complainant is disputing the payment he received from the Respondent in 2024 which resulted from that exercise.

The Complainant provided evidence under oath.

He has two issues with the payment received by the Respondent earlier this year. Firstly, he does not know fully how it was calculated and submits that the WRC can presume, in the absence of further evidence from the Respondent, that it is not accurate and is an underpayment.

Secondly in the Summer of 2014 he left the Respondent to go traveling in Asia. If he was paid what he was owed then, he would have been taxed much less as he didn’t work the rest of the year. He doesn’t see why he should be out of pocket for the timing of their underpayment.

The Respondent submits that they have paid these sums based entirely on information provided to them by their former client and as far as they can know they are accurate payment to recompense him for any loss of income 10 years ago.

The Respondent respectfully submits that these matters are out of time and that the tax deductions cannot be the subject of a Payment of Wages Act dispute.

The Complainant is genuinely aggrieved that he was underpaid and that he is now being put at a disadvantage in the taxation of those underpayments. In fairness to the Respondent these issues appear to have been beyond their control and related to rates of pay of workers paid directly by their client.

In any event this case is well outside my jurisdiction. If these different rates of pay could be treated as deductions under this act then those deductions occurred 10 years ago.

Section 41 of the Workplace Relations Ac provides at subsection 6  Subject to subsection (8), an adjudication officer shall not entertain a complaint referred to him or her under this section if it has been presented to the Director General after the expiration of the period of 6 months beginning on the date of the contravention to which the complaint relates.

Subsection 8 goes on to state:  An adjudication officer may entertain a complaint or dispute to which this section applies presented or referred to the Director General after the expiration of the period referred to in subsection (6) or (7) (but not later than 6 months after such expiration), as the case may be, if he or she is satisfied that the failure to present the complaint or refer the dispute within that period was due to reasonable cause.

As outlined above I have a maximum jurisdiction of 12 months from the date of the complaint. This complaint was referred to the WRC on the 26th of May 2024. The alleged contraventions of this act occurred in 2014.

I find that the complaint is not well founded.