A High Court judge has ruled 27 Portuguese workers who worked in Ireland on a road project are entitled to recover damages, estimated at some €1.5m, plus interest, over breach of their employment contracts with three Portuguese companies that traded as the RAC Éire partnership. The Court ruled that there should be no ‘race to the bottom’ where rights and conditions of workers are concerned. Among several findings, the firms engaged in ‘systematic and deliberate’ under-recording of hours of work, leading to underpayment of the workers. The Court also found the defendants were not entitled to deduct €17.50 daily (€520 monthly) from the workers' wages for accommodation of a ‘deplorable, even dangerous’ standard.
English: http://www.rte.ie/news/2016/0318/775882-portugal-workers-pay/
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Willy De Backer wdebacker@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. Since June 2013 readers can consult our archive and search through all articles in our database at www.cbnarchive.eu. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.
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