Three swimming instructors who were brought over from the Philippines to teach in Ireland and had hundreds of euro a week docked off their wages for “training costs”, before being let go, have won back their pay.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) found there was “no evidence” to back up a claim by the operator of a swimming school that it had spent €3,000 to train each of the workers.
One of the workers’ former colleagues told the WRC she was hired on the promise of “a better life in Ireland” only to be “forced” into taking a pay cut out of fear of dismissal.
They were among a group of six Filipino instructors to pursue rights claims against the unidentified swimming school, which were heard in Ennis, Co Clare, in November and December last year.
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Five of the workers have now secured a total of nearly €12,000 between them for breaches of the Payment of Wages Act 1991. An allied claim by the sixth worker has yet to be published by the WRC.
All the workers are Filipino nationals. The company’s legal representative said it was “the first European company to obtain a work permit for Filipinos as swimming instructors”.
Two of the six instructors started work for the swimming school in June 2022, then four more instructors were recruited in the Philippines in August 2022 and brought to Ireland in January 2023, the WRC heard.
However, within months of securing work visas and flying in the new instructors, the school’s management moved to shed staff, citing “financial reasons” for terminating the employment of three of the new recruits during their probationary periods.
The employer’s position was it had conducted “intensive” training with the newer instructors for the first three or four weeks they were in Ireland, which had enhanced their skills, and it had paid each of them throughout that period while making no income from them.
The owner of the swimming school delivered the training personally and provided employees with “instructional videos”, the workers told the WRC. The employer’s position was that this had cost €3,000 to provide.
Andrea Montanelli, for the employer, said the company had “highly invested” in bringing the workers from the Philippines, “paying for their work permits, for the visa, flights” and so on.
She said a total of €1,692.38 was taken from three of the workers’ last four pay packets in “instalments” of €641.45, €497.97, €276.48 and €276.48.
The company relied on a training agreement and a deductions-from-pay agreement signed by the three new recruits in the Philippines in August 2022 as the basis for taking the “instalments”.
Under questioning from Elaine Davern-Wiseman, for the group of workers, the employees said these agreements were provided to them in English, without a translation into the Tagalog language, and that they signed them without having an opportunity to take legal advice.
The workers each said they were already qualified swimming instructors when they were recruited and they said the only training they had was in how to teach swimming lessons “the [company] way”.
In her ruling, WRC adjudicator Orla Jones wrote that the employer “did not provide any evidence to support the claim” that the training for the three new recruits actually cost the business €3,000 each. It could not rely on the agreements signed in the Philippines by the workers when they did not have the benefit of legal advice or an interpreter, she said.
She said in her decision that the wording of the training costs agreement was that €3,000 referred to charging €3,000 to each worker if they were to “leave” the employment. Ms Jones wrote that each of the workers had their jobs terminated and had not chosen to leave.
The names of the company and the employees were anonymised in WRC decisions published this week because they were linked to parallel proceedings under the Industrial Relations Act 1969, which must be heard in private.
