California employment laws, which allow for so-called “voluntary” employment, have shaped the culture for much of Silicon Valley’s tech industry.
While this brutal code doesn’t apply here, where worker protections are much stricter, the reality is that employees here can be emailed overnight by their employer to never return to the office.
The big difference between Ireland and the US is that a solvent company cannot terminate an employment relationship without notice.
So employees at a tech company may have their access to email and their workspace without notice, but their employer must continue to pay them until the end of the notice period in their employment contract.
For highly qualified jobs, this can often take up to three months.
Another significant difference is that it is illegal to target people in a layoff here. A company is free to eliminate roles and teams, but personal factors cannot play a role in deciding whose job to eliminate.
According to Aileen Fleming and Evelyn Gilson, solicitors at Dublin law firm Daniel Spring & Co.
In theory, the employer is obliged to try to match vacancies with redundant employees. But in a case where half of all jobs are lost, that won’t be a real problem.
Employers are not obliged to offer high severance payments. Although it is common practice in some industries to pay an agreed number of weekly wages per year worked, the statutory severance pay that companies must pay is two weekly wages per year worked plus one week, up to a maximum of €600 per week. That’s 6,600 euros for someone who has been in a job for five years.
In cases where many people are released at once, additional protective measures should take effect.
Loughlin Deegan, a partner in the labor law team at law firm ByrneWallace, says that in mass layoff cases, employers have greater obligations if the employer proposes to lay off more than 30 people in a 30-day period. They include a so-called protection period during which employees must be warned of planned redundancies and an obligation for the employer to inform the State Secretary for Economic Affairs of the planned redundancies.
It is an offense to carry out a mass redundancy without giving 30 days’ notice to the Minister and staff. For very large companies, however, the penalties are not particularly dissuasive – they range from a fine of €250,000 if the minister is not notified in time, to a fine of up to €5,000 if employees are not notified.
