39 operatives at the Castlefarm Dairygold site have been unsuccessful in their bid to retain an annual payment of €1,500 in a dispute at the Labour Court.
The Castlefarm site operates a processing plant for milk and whey.
In 2020, Dairygold entered into a series of meetings with the 39 workers at the site to agree a number of operational changes. An agreement was reached between the two parties and each worker signed to that effect.
According to the Labour Court, there was no direct engagement with the workers’ trade union (SIPTU) in relation to the matter and it was clearly agreed that the workers would be paid two once-off payments of €1,500 each.
Those payments were made to the workers in April 2020 and April 2021, respectively.
Dairygold operatives want to retain payment
The workers sought an ongoing payment of €1,500 per year for 2022 and 2023 and into the future along with a review of the grading structure for operatives at the Castlefarm site.
This dispute could not be resolved at local level and was the subject of a Conciliation Conference under the auspices of the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).
As agreement was not reached, the dispute was referred to the Labour Court on June 24, 2024 and a hearing took place in recent weeks.
The workers’ union argued that the matter before the Labour Court was related to an agreement between the union’s members and the company that “has not been fully honoured”.
The payment of €1,500 in two phases in 2020 and 2021 was understood to be an interim arrangement until such time as the company and the union resolved the payment deficit in the company grade structure, SIPTU said.
However, Dairygold, which was represented at the Labour Court by IBEC, said the agreement “explicitly calls out the €1,500 gross payments (processed in September 2020 and May 2021) as one-off payments – thus, there is no basis for ongoing payments”.
The union submitted that the arrangement arrived at locally in 2020 did not constitute a collective agreement in circumstances where it had not been balloted on.
It also maintained that the workers’ understanding was that the annual payments of €1,500 would be ongoing until such time as a review of their grading structure had been carried out.
Dairygold submitted that, as all 39 workers in question had signed the document in which the operational changes had been outlined in 2020, there was no requirement for a ballot on the matter.
It further submitted that the two payments of €1,500 each were intended to be one-off ‘goodwill’ payments in 2020 and 2021 respectively and it had made no commitment to continue those payments beyond 2021.
The company also said that it cannot look at grading structure for operatives on one single site in isolation and that this was an issue that was more appropriate to address as part of the company-wide pay negotiation process currently underway.
Labour Court recommendation
In the Labour Court’s view, the agreement reached in 2020 between Dairygold and the 39 workers who are the subject of this dispute was not a ‘collective agreement’ in the sense that that term is normally used in an industrial relations context.
However, the court acknowledged that it is an agreement, and stated that its terms should be respected by both parties.
The Labour Court found that the agreement did not commit the company to make an ongoing annual payment of €1,500 to each of the workers and therefore recommended that this aspect of the workers’ claim not be conceded.
The court also recommended that the issue of reviewing the workers’ grading structure should not be considered in isolation, and should form part of the ongoing company-wide pay negotiations in which context grading issues relevant to all comparable workers can be discussed.