A call centre worker dismissed by phone after 23 years as an employee of the State’s NCT testing contractor after falling ill has won €13,200 in compensation for workplace rights breaches.
Anne Doyle won the award on foot of complaints under the Employment Equality Act 1998 and the Payment of Wages Act 1991 against Applus Car Testing Ltd.
The company made no response to the complaints after being put on notice by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), and failed to attend the hearing earlier this year.
Ms Doyle told the commission she was dismissed from her job as a call centre agent on February 7th, 2024, three years and two months after she went absent due to illness in December 2020.
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She had been there since April 2001 and earned €420 a week for a 30-hour week, she told the WRC.
Ms Doyle said she first had to go absent from work on December 4th, 2020 after taking a fall getting off a bus, and then underwent medical investigation and treatment for “one thing after another”.
She was seen by the company’s occupational health consultants three times between October 2021 and September 2023. They concluded she had a “complex medical condition with lower back pain that prevented her from walking and hand tremors that affected her dexterity”.
James McEvoy of Work Matters Ireland, who appeared for Ms Doyle, said the last occupational health report his client had received, dating from March 2022, held that she was “unfit for work”.
Ms Doyle told the tribunal she had spoken to her former line manager about the possibility of going back to work on shorter hours and of doing some work from home. She said the latter option was ruled out.
On February 7th, Ms Doyle said, a company human resources manager phoned her and said her employment was terminated.
She appealed the decision and explained to the appeals manager at a meeting that she had made progress in regard to her health condition and had lost weight – and that she hoped to be passed fit for work.
She said she had brought medical documents with her but was not asked for them, and called the appeal meeting “a joke”.
Adjudicator Catherine Byrne said she was satisfied that Applus’s solicitor had failed to enter an appearance before her after being sent notice of the hearing and that she had ruled on the case “solely on the evidence of Ms Doyle”.
Ms Byrne acknowledged that it was “upsetting and difficult” for Ms Doyle that she had been dismissed, but that it was “not unreasonable” given that she was “unable to come to work and to fulfil her contract”.
However, Ms Byrne said she was “certain” that a worker facing a redundancy or conduct-based dismissal “would not have been dismissed in a phone call confirmed by letter the same day”.
“It is my view that the complainant was dismissed in this perfunctory manner because she was absent due to illness,” Ms Byrne added.
As there was an inference that Ms Doyle “was discriminated against because of her disability” which her ex-employer had failed to rebut, Ms Byrne upheld the complaint of disability discrimination and awarded the worker €11,000.
She awarded a further €2,200 in compensation to Ms Doyle after ruling that Applus had failed to pay the worker in full for untaken accrued annual leave upon termination – bringing the total awarded in the case to €13,200, tax free.
