Lidl worker suffering from depression wins €16,000 at WRC

A Lidl worker suffering from depression who was disciplined in absentia and sacked after missing emails that claimed he had failed to send in sick notes has won €16,000 for unfair dismissal.

Defending Kamil Goljanak’s unfair dismissal claim before the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), the supermarket maintained it had “no contact” from him during an “unexplained” two-month absence before it launched a disciplinary investigation.

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After it was ordered by the tribunal to produce any sick certs it had on file, however, it emerged Lidl Ireland had possession of a medical note which was not mentioned anywhere in the investigation report that led to Mr Goljanek’s sacking.

Mr Goljanak’s claim under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against Lidl Ireland Gmbh was upheld in a decision by the Workplace Relations Commission published on Friday.

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Sales operations director for Lidl, Darren Devine, the only witness to appear for the company, said there had been “no response” from Mr Goljanak in May 2021 to inquiries from the company’s former sales operations manager, Paul Dixon, about his absence.

Mr Dixon gave Mr Goljanak a deadline of 7th June, 2021, to reply, before starting an investigation into alleged failure to follow the company’s absence notification process and alleged gross misconduct for failing to contact the sales operations manager as requested, Mr Devine said.

Mr Devine said the complainant failed to appear for either an investigation meeting or a disciplinary hearing in July 2021 and that he sent him a notice of summary dismissal in August that year.

After Mr Devine said in evidence he “could not recall” whether hard-copy letters had gone out to Mr Goljanak, however, the company admitted in a legal submission that there was “no log of telephone calls or letters” – stating that it had “adapted” its communication procedures during the Covid-19 pandemic to send such notices by email after having them read aloud to the recipient at work.

In evidence to a hearing in January, Mr Goljanak said that because of his ill health and because he argued it was “unusual” to get correspondence by email from his employer, he was not monitoring his company email address from 19 May 2021, when he went out sick.

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He said he had met a former colleague, deputy store manager, Anna Seredyn, on a number of occasions during his absence to give her sealed envelopes containing his medical certs.

Ms Seradyn, who confirmed accepting the envelopes, said that she would ordinarily have opened them and faxed the documents to Lidl’s HR department.

She told the WRC, however, that when she got the first one, she was instructed by the district sales operations manager, Paul Dixon, “not to send them to HR”.

Instead, she was to leave them in a locked box for the store operations manager, she said.

Scott Jevons, a Lidl employee relations manager, said in a legal submission the company had made “exhaustive efforts” to engage with Mr Goljanak – accusing him of a “blatant disregard” for the supermarket’s policies which had led to an “irreparable breach in trust and confidence”.

Mr Goljanak said he would have looked at any letters posted to him by the firm but that he received none – saying he did not engage with the disciplinary process because he was “completely unaware” of it.

He said he was left on payroll until the following February, in what the company said was an administrative error and only discovered the emails when the firm stopped paying him and he made inquiries.

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The WRC, ultimately, made no ruling on the evidence of the store manager and deputy store manager, with adjudicating officer Michael McNamara finding that the existence of the April 2021 sick note “undermines the reliability and accuracy of the investigation report and the formulation of the reasons for the case to answer [for the complainant]”.

The tribunal found Mr Goljanek, who represented himself as a lay litigant, had given evidence with “frankness and candour” on the effects of his condition and that it was reasonable that he had not been monitoring his inbox when the messages came.

“No reasonable employer in the circumstances of this case would have dismissed the complainant and accordingly, I find that the dismissal was unfair,” Mr McNamara wrote, awarding €16,000 in compensation.