Bosses under pressure to cut costs at schoolbook publisher Gill decided last year that the “sparse” population of Donegal, Leitrim and Sligo, meant it wasn’t worth having a dedicated salesman there, a tribunal has heard.
That meant the end of over a decade’s service for its longstanding rep in the region, James Higgins, whose complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against MH Gill & Co ULC was heard earlier this week at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
Mr Higgins was Gill’s sales rep for Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon, Leitrim, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan from March 2014 until June last year. The publisher said it was it was necessary to make him and another sales rep redundant after the company started incurring losses.
The tribunal heard the company now markets books in Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim with a mix of telesales and roadshows and has no dedicated sales rep there.
RM Block
Gill’s chief executive Margaret Burns said on Monday that profits at the publisher “declined sharply” between 2021 and 2023 – going from €1.4 million in profit to a loss of “nearly €300,000”.
She said the plan had been to notify Mr Higgins and the other sales rep whose position was being extinguished “simultaneously” and that she and Gill’s sales director Colm Hyland intended to drive to Sligo to deliver the news to Mr Higgins on Tuesday, June 25th last year.
The tribunal heard Mr Higgins was expecting to have his annual review that Wednesday and go on annual leave until the start of the next school term that Friday.
Mr Higgins told the WRC he had just tested positive for Covid-19, and told his bosses he was too sick to meet them at a hotel in Sligo as planned, or to dial into a videocall on the Tuesday.
He said he was still “very sick” the following morning and “couldn’t even talk”.
“I asked my wife to call Mr Hyland. She tried multiple times… Mr Hyland duly proceeded to text my wife, saying I had an important email, which started a chain of events that led to her reading an email to me in my sick bed to the effect that I was being made redundant,” Mr Higgins said.
He said he was “devastated” by this turn of events, as he had gone from having “no fear for my position whatsoever to my wife reading my dismissal to me”.
Cross-examining the CEO, Cillian McGovern BL, appearing for the complainant instructed by Dan Quinlan of Crushell & Co Solicitors, put it to her that his client was “shocked” to get the news in the way he did.
Ms Burns accepted this and said: “It really wasn’t the way we would have liked to have done it.”
“Do you accept it was fair?” he asked.
Ms Burns said: “In fairness, the email was sent as well because out of the reps, somebody else was involved in the redundancies and we wanted to let everyone know the situation for their own peace of mind.”
Mr Hyland said in his evidence that the decision to make Mr Higgins and the other sales rep redundant was taken “probably mid-June” by the company, but he was unable to give the exact date.
Mr McGovern put it to the witness that he had only emailed his client with notice of the new Tuesday meeting at 4.20pm the afternoon before and that the agenda had only referred to “realignment of the northwest territory” and a “sales focus change”. He admitted that it did not refer to redundancy.
“You said you were aware of your duties pursuant to the Redundancy Payments Act, so how come you haven’t told him that redundancy is on the agenda?” counsel asked.
“I can’t remember at the time… we felt we wanted to talk to him face-to-face, to put that in an email would have been very blunt,” Mr Hyland said.
“Well, you did that the following morning,” Mr McGovern said.
“We had to,” Mr Hyland replied.
“Do you accept it looks a bit like an ambush?” Mr McGovern asked.
“No,” Mr Hyland said.
Mr Higgins said there was €160 million “working its way back to publishers” under the State’s school book programme and questioned how Gill could “make claims they couldn’t afford to give the same level of service” to the schools he covered in the northwest.
Mr Higgins said the school book trade was “not a hard sell type business” but “about trust”, and that being the publisher’s rep was to become “nearly like a public-facing figure” and “part of your identity”.
“The swiftness of the way I was cut had huge implications,” he said. “I was cut off from all communications on 25 June. I’m still working in the education sector for a food supplier. I had sales in the pipeline that needed to be finalised; I had people looking for samples,” Mr Higgins said.
He said he knew “hundreds, if not thousands” of teachers, whom he would encounter in public, and said he had experienced “sarcastic” and “snide” remarks referencing his job loss.
“The damage is palpable and very real,” he said.
Brian Curtin, a senior manager who presented the case for Gill, said: “We try to act in good faith in running a redundancy process, but we were in a situation where the company was losing money.
“It was quite a difficult position for all involved. Our view is we made a reasonable redundancy settlement. It wasn’t an unfair dismissal. it was based on genuine financial commercial decisions,” he said.
Adjudication officer Patricia Owens closed the hearing on Monday, and will give her decision in writing at a later stage.
