Air cargo company Swissport has been ordered to pay over €44,000 to a compliance manager after its failure to follow “anything approaching fair procedures” when it accused him of misleading a State inspector and sacked him.
The Workplace Relations Commission ruled that Nicholas Collins, a veteran of nearly two decades’ “unblemished” service with Swissport, was unfairly dismissed in December last year after the company failed a security inspection by the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) two months earlier.
The complainant told the tribunal he was subject to a disciplinary process after learning that Swissport had sent a significant amount of cargo through a facility during a 24-hour period when it was unvalidated by the Authority.
The tribunal was told that a Swissport facility in Dublin for which Mr Collins was responsible for regulatory purposes was subject to a full inspection on October 3rd last year – two days before its validation was due to expire.
The complainant said the inspection “went well” – except that when the inspector asked to see written confirmation of security clearance for workers at the site, there were “issues” with eight employees.
The inspector then told him that she could not revalidate the business, Mr Collins said.
To deal with the situation and stay in compliance, management at the firm decided to stop dispatching cargo from the facility on Wednesday, October 4th at five minutes to midnight, in advance of the expiry of the IAA validation.
A second IAA aviation security inspector agreed to come back to the facility and carry out an inspection on Friday, October 6th, and concluded “everything was in order”, including the eight staff security clearances, Mr Collins said.
However, during a warehouse walkabout, the inspector queried some cargo items. Mr Collins said he believed that no cargo had moved during the hiatus and told the inspector so. His evidence was that he believed the decision to call a halt to shipping had been “properly communicated” to the staff responsible.
He found out the following Monday on foot of a further query by an inspector that seven flights had gone out carrying cargo during the time the operation was out of regulation, he told the Commission.
In email correspondence the following Monday, the first inspector asked for information about cargo sent during the 24-hour period of the operation being out of validation, Mr Collins said.
He said he passed the query on to senior managers, sought out documentation, and received “a bundle of forms which indicated that [Swissport] had sent a significant amount of cargo during the period when [it was] unvalidated”.
Mr Collins said it came as a surprise that any cargo had been dispatched and that he escalated the information to a senior manager – who told him “not to send any response to the IAA” and informed him the company would reply “in due course”.
A series of meetings followed over the next eight days to discuss the operation’s failure in the revalidation inspection, Mr Collins said, stating that he had been asked to come along “to have a chat” as part of what he believed to be a “fact-finding exercise”.
He said he had “no knowledge” of how the cargo was sent out, but that he was told he “should have known” there was cargo going out the door during the hiatus because he had looked at certain logs.
He showed one of these logs at a hearing and said there was “no reference on those logs to any flight numbers or any record of the cargo having been booked on to a flight”. He said that process was done by clerical staff and that he had “no role or responsibility” in it.
Mr Collins added that if he had been told at the time that he was personally under investigation, he would have sought legal advice, since it was a “criminal offence” to give incorrect information to an aviation inspector.
His solicitor, Claire McGuigan of Smyth & Son, told the tribunal her client received no documentation in advance of a disciplinary meeting early last December. Mr Collins stated he was never told his job was at stake.
It was put to Mr Collins at the meeting that there had been a “breakdown in communication between the senior management and the cargo operations team” and that he “should have been aware the shipments left the warehouse”.
The disciplinary panel chairman took the view that Mr Collins “acted wrongly and knowingly and misled the senior aviation inspector”, the tribunal was told, and Mr Collins was sacked on the grounds of gross misconduct, a sanction upheld on internal appeal.
Ms McGuigan, argued the process was “fundamentally flawed” as her client had been completely unaware he was the subject of an investigation and never received the investigation report which led to the disciplinary hearing.
Adjudicator John Harraghy noted that the representatives sent by Swissport to the WRC hearing last month stated that they had “no knowledge” of what happened other than what was stated in the dismissal letter issued to Mr Collins.
A HR manager, Kelly Porter, said the staff responsible for the investigation were “no longer working” for Swissport and “were not willing to attend the hearing”. She said the disciplinary officer and the appeals officer were still employed, but gave “no explanation for their non-attendance”, Mr Harraghy noted.
He wrote in his decision that Swissport “did not afford [Mr Collins] anything approaching fair procedures” and “failed in its duty” to afford him his rights during the investigation and disciplinary process.
Mr Harraghy found the company in breach of the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 and awarded Mr Collins €40,000 in compensation.
The tribunal awarded a further €4,443.60 – four weeks’ pay – in compensation for the failure to provide Mr Collins with a written statement of terms and conditions of employment upon his promotion to compliance manager in 2018. The breach of the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 was conceded by the employer at hearing.
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