A company that unfairly made a worker redundant, then cost her another job by refusing to fill out a reference questionnaire in time, must now pay \u20ac40,789 towards her extended losses.<\/p>\n
The worker, Shulammite Awotundun, spent 14 months out of work, after being let go from her job as a travel consultant at Brendan Vacations Ireland Ltd on Christmas Eve 2024, despite getting a job offer before the end of February last year.<\/p>\n
Brendan Vacations had told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) that Awotundun\u2019s redundancy had nothing to do with \u201cany personal characteristic, conduct or performance\u201d.<\/p>\n
The firm cited a drop-off in online booking inquiries when figures from March 2023 were compared to August 2024 \u2013 an approach described by a WRC adjudicator as \u201cbizarre\u201d in view of the seasonal nature of the industry.<\/p>\n
Adjudication officer Breiffni O\u2019Neill ruled in the company failed to show a \u201cgenuine\u201d case for redundancy and declared the dismissal unfair on substantive and procedural grounds. <\/p>\n
Awotundun\u2019s losses would have been limited to just three-and-a-half months\u2019 pay if not for her old employer\u2019s \u201csilence and lack of engagement\u201d about why it was refusing to complete the reference questionnaire asked for by her new company, O\u2019Neill found.<\/p>\n
Brendan Vacations had told the WRC its policy on references was to issue only a statement of service and state the reason for the worker\u2019s employment coming to an end. O\u2019Neill stressed in his decision that this was an \u201centirely legitimate\u201d policy adopted by many employers.<\/p>\n
But because of the firm\u2019s \u201cfailure to communicate that position clearly and in a timely manner\u201d, the new company was \u201creasonably entitled to draw adverse inferences\u201d, he wrote. <\/p>\n
The WRC heard Awotundun\u2019s new company wrote to her two nominated referees at Brendan Vacations on March 24th last year and asked them to fill out what the WRC noted to be \u201ca brief questionnaire\u201d \u2013 but neither replied.<\/p>\n
Instead, the company\u2019s operations director emailed back at the end of the week with a response \u201cconfined to issuing a statement of service\u201d and the reason for her departure, O\u2019Neill recorded.<\/p>\n
The new employer again asked that the questionnaire be filled out on April 3rd last year, but let Awotundun start work the following Monday anyway, O\u2019Neill noted.<\/p>\n
His view was she had done so believing \u201centirely reasonably\u201d that all the pre-employment checks were finished.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe requested questionnaire was not completed, nor was any explanation provided for its non-completion,\u201d O\u2019Neill said.<\/p>\n
She learned this on April 28th, the last Monday of the month, and wrote to the director of operations at Brendan Vacations asking for the reference to be finalised, the adjudicator noted.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill wrote that while Awotundun did not \u201cexplicitly spell out the urgency\u201d of the situation, the \u201cforeseeable consequences of continued silence should have been obvious\u201d.<\/p>\n
Three days later, she was left jobless for the second time due to \u201cunsatisfactory\u201d reference checks, the tribunal heard.<\/p>\n
Awotundun wrote again to the former operations director at Brendan Vacations the following week asking for an explanation, asking specifically whether there was \u201cany issue\u201d about her conduct or performance, the tribunal heard.<\/p>\n
She was by then \u201cvery concerned\u201d about her old employer\u2019s view of her, the tribunal noted.<\/p>\n
Brendan Vacations finally sent the completed questionnaire six weeks after it was asked for, but by then the new job was gone, O\u2019Neill noted.<\/p>\n
When Awotundun told the operations director what happened, the senior manager wrote back: \u201cIt\u2019s disappointing to hear that. I really wish they had followed up with me again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The adjudicator wrote: \u201cThat response demonstrates an incredible lack of insight into the respondent\u2019s own role in the sequence of events.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill found that the acts and omissions of Brendan Vacations in relation to the reference process were a causative factor in Awotundun\u2019s ongoing financial losses from the unfair dismissal.<\/p>\n
He held Brendan Vacations liable for all of Awotundun\u2019s losses from December 2024 to April last year, and 75 per cent of her losses for the period of 10-and-a-half months she found herself out of work again after May 2025.<\/p>\n
In all, the travel agency was ordered to pay its former employee \u20ac40,789 for unfair dismissal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A company that unfairly made a worker redundant, then cost her another job by refusing to fill out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60,1962,6465],"class_list":["post-459559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-work","tag-workplace-relations-commission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}