A waiter who said he was threatened with sacking after complaining to his employer that he had been denied thousands of euro worth of cash tips is to receive €7,000 under the terms of a tribunal recommendation.
The Workplace Relations Commission urged the payment of compensation for unfair dismissal and withheld tips in an anonymised decision published on Monday over an industrial dispute raised by the worker concerning his service at a hotel restaurant in the midlands between March and July 2023.
The worker, who was getting a base hourly salary of €12.50 across a 35- to 40-hour week, said his customers were “generous with tips” and that if he had been allowed to retain the cash handed to him, he would have more than doubled his weekly wages.
However, he said he had been directed to hand over all cash tips and was receiving nothing. Upon complaining to his employer’s human resources manager, he said the hotel’s general manager called him in and threatened to roster him for only an hour or two a week.
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He later received two sums of €100 and €49 – which he said amounted to just a “small fraction” of the “thousands of euros” he got in tips at the hotel.
The worker said his life was made “intolerable” by a “very abusive manager” while working at the hotel. His solicitor, Susan Doyle, submitted that the claimant was suspended from work when a manager wrote a letter claiming she felt unsafe working in the same premises as her client.
The worker said claims made in the manager’s letter were “untrue and baseless” and that he had reported it to gardaí. He said his suspension from the job was “another form of abuse” meant to get him to quit – and that he had to do so in the end because the hotel stopped paying him.
Danny Ryan, appearing for the employer, told the tribunal that he “would not respond to the worker’s claims”, adjudicator Catherine Byrne noted.
Ms Byrne wrote in her decision that the hotel management “did not contradict” the worker’s account of the events. She accepted that the waiter “had to leave his job” and found his actions had been “reasonable”.
She noted that the employer had produced nothing to show that it was displaying the required notice on the distribution of tips and gratuities at the restaurant.
Based on the worker’s statements to the hearing, Ms Byrne said it was reasonable to assume he had earned about €500 a week in tips over the 16 weeks he was employed at the establishment, or €8,000 in total.
This was on the basis of the waiter serving 10 tables a day and receiving a €10 tip from each table, Ms Byrne wrote.
She estimated that once the tips had been shared with kitchen staff in line with “generally accepted practice”, the worker “would have taken home around €5,000 in tips”.
“In compensation for the employer’s failure to pay the worker the tips he earned, and for his unfair dismissal, I recommend that the employer pay him €7,000,” she wrote.
Ms Byrne also urged the hotel’s management to give “serious consideration” to its obligations on tips and gratuities under the 2022 amendment to the Payment of Wages Act.
Under the legislation, employers are required to place notices that are easily read in two locations and where customers pay for a service stating whether tips and gratuities are distributed among employees.
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