If you are concerned about employment law in Ireland, either as an employer or as an employee, you will have a considerable body of law, regulations, EU directives, contract law and so forth to wade through.
And there is an enormous amount of legislation, regulations, and so forth to wade through and be mindful of.
The wide range of problems that arise under the head of employment law ranges from
- Unfair dismissal
- Constructive dismissal
- Redundancy entitlements and calculations
- The termination of employment
- Workplace safety
- Working time and rest periods
- Negotiating the contract of employment
- Transfer of undertakings
- the contract of employment
- And so on.
I recommend http://EmploymentRightsIreland.com as an excellent resource for free information in relation to employment law in Ireland.
If that is not enough to be dealing with as an employer or employee there is the confusing situation as to where and how you make a complaint in respect of your employment.
Do you go to the Rights Commissioner, the Employment Appeals Tribunal, the Labour Relations Commission or go to Court?
And recently we have the introduction of the new service and website called the workplace relations service together with the attempt to simplify much employment dispute resolution with one form for all into a single complaint form.
Employers under economic pressure
As employers in Dublin and Ireland are under increasing and considerable pressure because of the financial and economic state of the country many employers are succumbing to the temptation to cut corners and ignore many employees rights. Issues like inadequate rest breaks, unannounced changes to the contract of employment, late payment of wages, failure to pay minimum rates of pay or overtime are becoming quite common.
Unfortunately employees are feeling the economic pinch also and feel pressurized to putting up with an erosion of their employment rights and stay quiet to continue paying their day to day living expenses and mortgage.
Unfair Dismissal/Constructive Dismissal
Understanding the difference between an unfair dismissal and constructive dismissal is very important for the employee and employer. To sustain a successful claim for constructive dismissal the employee would be well advised to fully exhaust the internal grievance procedures in the first instance.
From an employers perspective the critical thing that they need to be concerned about when terminating employment is that fair procedure is followed as many successful claims are made against employers principally because they failed to follow fair procedure and natural justice.
Dealing with foreign born employees who may not have perfect English requires particular caution in the light of some recent employment cases where it was held that a failure to translate certain documents into the language of the employee led to a successful claim against the company.
Redundancy
Redundancies in Dublin and Ireland are all too commonplace in 2012 and for the employer there are a number of key areas to be careful about such as
- Selection for redundancy-it must be fair
- Redundancy calculations and employees’ entitlements
.
Clearly these are key issues for employees also along with the problem of the employer going bust and not paying at all.
Transfer of Undertakings Regulations (TUPE)
The TUPE regulations are another area of difficulty, particularly for the person or company that is buying an existing business, and can lead to significant headaches and potential liabilities for the purchasing undertaking if not carried our correctly by careful negotiations during the negotiation phase.
As can be seen from the above employment law in Dublin and Ireland can be a bit of a minefield and you do need to be careful as an employer that you do not run into costly difficulties. For the employee you also need to be vigilant to safeguard your employment rights while at the same time recognising the difficult economic conditions that prevail on both employees and employers in Ireland in 2012.