A call centre company that showed “a complete lack of understanding” towards its female staff by demoting a manager on her return from maternity leave has been ordered to pay her €31,000 in compensation.
Ruling on the case, a Workplace Relations Commission adjudicator wrote that it was clear the firm, run by businessman Jim McCoy, “simply does not understand its duties to its female employees” under the Maternity Protection Act.
The woman’s job had been “disappeared” while she was gone – leaving her “demoted and side-lined” on her return, the tribunal concluded.
The findings were made as the WRC upheld a complaint of maternity-related gender discrimination under the Employment Equality Act 1998 by Mandy Hurley against Mr McCoy’s firm call centre firm Eazy Connections Ltd, trading as Complete Outsource Solutions.
A bid by the company to have the names of the parties redacted from a written decision on the case published on Tuesday was rejected.
Ms Hurley’s case was that she found herself excluded from a management group Mr McCoy called the “brain trust” on her return.
In her evidence, Ms Hurley described reporting to a new building where she knew none of the people around her and being left to wait for two weeks for passwords to access computer systems.
She said that while she had previously reported directly to Mr McCoy, she returned to report to another manager who had previously been at the same level as her in the organisation, she said.
The manager, Jason Murphy, sought a list of Ms Hurley’s responsibilities before comparing her “unfavourably” against the productivity of contact centre staff in answering emails, said the complainant’s solicitor David Pearson said.
The duty was more relevant to a more junior employee, counsel submitted.
Correspondence from Mr Murphy to the complainant in May 2021 read: “The company has continued to pay you for the last number of months for what we feel is very little in return in terms of work.”
He then told Ms Hurley she had completed 113 emails in March when most staff at the firm “would have done over 1500″.
When the email was put to him, Mr Murphy said: “I didn’t know her job title. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
Asked by Mr Pearson why he had compared the complainant to a call centre agent, Mr Murphy replied: “Calls are money.”
In his evidence, Mr McCoy said: “She was to define her role. “How in the name of God could we know what her role was until we knew what she was [going to do]?”
He said the company had grown “exponentially” in the time the complainant was on maternity leave – comparing the time she returned with the time she left as being the difference between “Manchester United and Dunfermline”.
He sad Ms Hurley was a valued employee he was glad to have back, as the firm had “gone nuts” and he needed “good people to drive [it] on”.
Mr McCoy said his door was “always open” but there was “a wall going up” from Ms Hurley – accusing her of having a “formal, legal, my rights” approach.
The businessman denied under questioning by Mr Pearson, for the complainant, that he would not permit Ms Hurley to work from home “because she had a child”.
Mr McCoy said he generally needed senior people on site rather than working from home because his firm relied on a pool of “young, transient” workers with “very little loyalty” who he wanted “monitored”.
“Whatever role she felt comfortable in, whatever slice and sliver, I was quite happy for her to go for it,” he said.
“Every employee… has experienced changes to their duties and responsibilities during this period so as to ensure that the respondent company adjusts,” argued counsel for the respondent Denis Collins BL, appearing instructed by McCoy Solicitors.
He argued there had been no diminishment of the complainant’s position and no discrimination.
In her decision on the case, adjudicating officer Lefre de Burgh found that Ms Hurley had made reached the bar to raise a presumption of unlawful discrimination on gender grounds for her employer to disprove – which it had failed to do, she wrote.
She said Ms Hurley’s “cogent, credible evidence” that she had been the office manager prior to her leave was backed up by documentation from the company and that the complainant had been “demoted and side-lined on her return from maternity leave”.
Ms de Burgh considered the suggestion Ms Hurley was asked to “define her own role” when she arrived back from maternity leave to be “ludicrous”.
The suggestion that this was an accommodation to the complainant showed there was “a complete lack of understanding” towards female staff coming back to work after a period of protective leave.
“Some of the comments passed at the complainant – including by the owner of the respondent company – to the effect of that the complainant had obviously not been in attendance at management meetings while she was on maternity leave, and had not been around when the changes were happening reveal the fact that the respondent company simply does not understand its duties to its female employees,” Ms de Burgh added.
“I find that the complainant’s role was disappeared, that her reporting line was disappeared, and that her job was directly threatened in writing by a person who – insofar as any reporting structure can be discerned – was much more akin to a peer prior to her going on maternity leave,” she continued.
Upholding Ms Hurley’s equality complaint, Ms de Burgh ordered the company to pay €31,000 in compensation – a tax-free award equivalent to 12 months’ salary – for the effects of discrimination.