A garden centre which had an autistic job applicant work an unpaid trial shift without asking the same of other candidates has been ordered to pay €5,000 for disability discrimination at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
The WRC found that the worker was left “confused, humiliated and excluded” by the experience, which has had a “lasting negative impact on his confidence and self-worth”.
The WRC ordered the unidentified business to pay the compensation on foot of a complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998, in a wholly anonymised decision published on Friday.
The worker, a 27-year-old man with autism, told the WRC at a series of hearings in Cork earlier this year that he applied for a job as a retail assistant in May 2024 via an agency that assists people with disabilities in finding employment.
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He said that he had “worked successfully” in both retail businesses and in the care setting. He said his adviser at the agency, Mr A, had suggested the garden centre job would give him a chance to “contribute productively in a small local business”.
At interview on 10th May, 2024, he met the garden centre’s manager and its accountant, and said he was led to believe on the basis of their discussion that he had been hired.
“They said it would be €12 an hour. Then one of them asked when I could start. I said tomorrow, and they said: ‘Great, we’ll see you then,’” the complainant recounted.
He reported for work the next morning, Saturday 11th May, but said he was “left waiting” until another employee emerged from an office and said she had been told to “keep an eye” on him, he said.
The complainant said he was instructed to water plants and carry bags of compost, and had “no instruction or supervision for most of the day”.
Having arrived at 9am for work, he continued until 6pm, and believed he had finished his first full day as an employee, he said. However, nobody told him whether he was meant to come back the next day, or what his roster would be.
The following week, he got an email saying he was “not the right fit”.
“I couldn’t understand it. Nobody told me it was a test,” the worker said.
His sister-in-law, who had dropped him off in the morning, said that when she came to collect him in the evening, the complainant seemed “tired and confused” after spending the day “watering plants and moving compost in hot weather”.
The complainant said that when he asked about his wages, he was told he would get a €100 voucher “as a thank-you”, he added. His case was that he was “misled into working an unpaid ‘trial day’”.
“I felt humiliated. I worked a full day. I was treated like I wasn’t worth being paid properly,” he said. “If they didn’t want me, they should have said so politely, not let me come in and work like that,” he said.
He said the experience left him “anxious, confused, and reluctant to apply for further work”.
Questioned by the company’s representative, Aoife Walsh of Tom Smyth and Associates, about whether he had been told the work would be physically demanding, the complainant said: “Nobody said that. I was ready to work. I’ve done lifting work before.”
He said he needed no special accommodations. “All I needed was someone to explain clearly what to do. That’s all.”
The company’s owner and managing director had accepted in his evidence that no one had been assigned to monitor or evaluate the complainant’s performance, the tribunal noted.
The complainant, the tribunal noted, had applied for the position via an agency “that assists persons with disabilities find a job”.
However, the company’s HR consultant maintained in her evidence that the agency’s representative never told her that the complainant was autistic or required any special assistance. She “assumed there were no disability related issues”, she said.
This position had been echoed by the company’s managing director, who said there had been no disability disclosed, and by the store manager who interviewed the complainant, who said he had “no knowledge” of the complainant’s disability.
When this was put to the job agency representative, he said: “I told her [the HR consultant] the complainant was autistic, and she said that was fine.”
He added that the agency did not become aware of the trial until he read an email sent the preceding Friday the following Monday, and accepted the situation “arose from miscommunication”.
However, the witness said the garden centre’s management should have taken more care to “communicate clearly” – adding that the offer of a voucher in place of wages was “not acceptable practice”.
In his decision, adjudicator Thomas O’Driscoll said the agency rep’s evidence was “more credible and persuasive” than that of the garden centre’s HR consultant.
He found, on balance of probabilities, that the garden centre “was on notice of the complainant’s disability from the outset”.
The business’s recruitment practices were “informal, unstructured and poorly co-ordinated” with “no written procedures, evaluation forms or objective criteria”.
“The so-called trial was unpaid, lacked any defined parameters and was conducted without proper supervision or assessment,” he wrote – noting that the worker was left “largely unattended”, was given “physical tasks in hot conditions” and got “minimal direction or feedback”.
“The requirement that the complainant alone undertake an unpaid ‘trial’ constituted a differential and disadvantageous condition of access to employment not imposed on other candidates,” Mr O’Driscoll wrote.
“In the context of disability, this disparity was inherently discriminatory,” he added.
He noted that the experience left the complainant “confused, humiliated and excluded” and had “a lasting negative impact on his confidence and self-worth”.
“Their failure to make even minimal inquiries or adjustments represented a serious disregard of their legal obligations and of the dignity of a person with a disability,” he wrote.
He awarded the complainant €5,000 in compensation, and made a direction under the Employment Equality Act 1998 to the business to review its hiring practices to ensure compliance.
