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Chinese-owned PPE firm ordered to pay €88,000 to senior manager

WRC makes award in second case against Suirsafe Technologies

Orders were made by the tribunal on foot of multiple statutory complaints against Suirsafe by Barbara Remic, the firm’s former head of products and marketing, awarding her a total of €87,807. Photograph: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

Stephen Bourke
Mon Dec 18 2023 - 16:57

A senior manager at a Chinese-owned PPE firm who had agreed to a 50% pay cut, only to get no pay at all for a year, has won €88,000 for unfair dismissal and breaches of wages law.

Barbara Remic is the second employee of Limerick-based Suirsafe Technologies Ltd to secure a finding of unfair dismissal at the Workplace Relations Commission, with the company now subject to orders totalling over €220,000 for employment rights breaches.

Orders were made by the tribunal on foot of multiple statutory complaints against Suirsafe by Ms Remic, the firm’s former head of products and marketing, awarding her a total of €87,807.

The WRC found that as well as giving Ms Remic cause to consider herself constructively dismissed, the company was in breach of the Payment of Wages Act over the non-payment of salary and the Organisation of Working Time Act over its failure to provide for holiday entitlements.

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Representing herself at a series of hearings in June and August this year, Ms Remic said she had agreed to a reduction in her €180,000 salary in May 2022 – reducing her pay packet from €15,000 a month to €7,500.

The company had told her it had “no budget” for her salary or that of the chief executive.

She stopped getting her salary in July 2022.

She lodged a first set of complaints in December last year seeking her wages and resigned on July 4th this year, considering herself to have been constructively dismissed.

In a decision on the case, adjudicator Ewa Sobanska noted there had been no formal grievance procedure in place at the firm, but wrote that an “extensive exchange of emails” with the company’s owners had been “the only method available” to Ms Remic.

“It is clear that she was entitled to regard the behaviour of the respondent as repudiatory of her contract of employment in respect of the non-payment of wages,” Ms Sobanska wrote.

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Ms Sobanska found the company to be in breach of the Payment of Wages Act from October 2022 to June 2023 and ordered the company to pay the agreed lower salary of €7,500 a month for the period – a total of €67,500.

She also made an order for the payment of €10,384 to cover statutory annual leave entitlements, along with €3,000 in compensation for the breach of Ms Remic’s rights under the Organisation of Working Time Act.

The adjudicator also found the company to be in breach of the Unfair Dismissals Act – but limited compensation to €6,923, a sum approximate to four weeks’ net wages, stating that she regarded Ms Remic’s efforts to secure alternative employment since she left the firm to be “insufficient”.

The total awards against Suirsafe were €87,807.

The company’s management made no appearance at the hearing, with Ms Sobanska noting that she was satisfied it had been properly on notice of all the claims.

In June this year, Suirsafe was ordered to pay €133,000 to its former chief executive, Mario Kistner, on foot of similar findings – the largest single sum awarded this year by the tribunal, including €108,000 for constructive dismissal.

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Mr Kistner told the tribunal during his own case that the owners, Li Sen and Cynthia Ye, told him they could not continue to invest capital in the Irish company owing to a “political/legal situation in China”.

The shareholders took over its bank accounts in the summer of 2022 after he warned staff that he feared insolvency without an immediate capital injection – but that no money ever came.

His lawyers said he was essentially told by the owners he could “work for free or leave without pay” and had been left with no choice except to resign.

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