Senior trade union official Brendan Ogle has lost the case against his employer, Unite the Union, in which he had alleged the organisation had removed him from his job because he was absent for a period being treated for cancer.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) had previously found that his redeployment by the union was unconnected with his illness and, following two days of hearings in July, the Labour Court has now upheld that decision.
Mr Ogle had said he was removed from the union’s most senior role in the Republic of Ireland and offered what was in effect a demotion after being off sick with an aggressive form of throat cancer between July 2021 and July 2022.
When he returned, he said, he was told the union’s new UK-based general secretary, Sharon Graham, had ordered that a new strategic plan for Ireland should be drawn up and Mr Ogle should be excluded from it. The union official he alleged had said this, Tom Fitzgerald, denied it.
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The union’s position was that the new general secretary wished to shift the emphasis of the union’s work towards workplace issues and away from the more political, campaigning ones in which it suggested Mr Ogle specialised.
This, it said, impacted on a number of roles but it denied that Mr Ogle had been victimised or penalised in any way, and the intention was that he would retain his grade.
At the WRC, the adjudication officer had acknowledged the extent of the differences in the two sides’ accounts of events but had suggested she preferred Mr Fitzgerald’s evidence.
In its decision, released to the parties but not yet published, the Labour Court said “most facts in this case were disputed even down to the role the complainant carried out prior to going on sick leave”.
It said Mr Ogle “believed that his job had changed and nobody from senior management had sat down and discussed this with him. He was sceptical of the suggestion that the union, following the election of a new general secretary, had changed focus and that any change to his role arose from the consequences of that.”
It found, however, that he had been unable to establish a link between his illness and the changes he was subjected to.
In relation to a Facebook post in support of him by his wife, herself a Unite member and branch chair, the court said “the complainant may well have had a genuine grievance about the fact that he was being held to account by elements within the respondent’s organisation for a social media post he did not post. However, that does not constitute discrimination on the grounds of disability and therefore his complaint must fail.”
