WRC orders hotel to pay woman €10,000 over ‘itinerant’ comment

A hotel has been ordered to pay a €10,000 discrimination award to a woman employee from a Traveller background after a senior hotel manager referred to her as “an itinerant”.

In finding the hotel vicariously liable for the slur, Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) adjudicator Catherine Byrne stated she could conceive of no motive for referring to the woman (21) in public as an itinerant “other than to humiliate and embarrass her”.

Ms Byrne stated “the deputy general manager’s public labelling of the complainant as an itinerant is grossly offensive”.

Ms Byrne also found the deputy general manager’s explanation of his conduct “to be ridiculous, not credible and disrespectful to this investigation”.

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Ms Byrne said she was satisfied that the complainant, who worked as a bartender at the hotel, was subjected to harassment by the deputy general manager and the harassment constitutes discrimination on the ground that the complainant’s family origin is in the Traveller community.

Ms Byrne also found the hotel failed to deal properly with an earlier complaint in 2018, that could have prevented the continuation of the deputy general manager’s disrespectful treatment towards the complainant.

Ms Byrne has also ordered that the hotel to provide professional training to managers regarding the promotion of dignity and respect in the workplace.

She said the context in which the word ‘itinerant’ was used “gives the lie to the deputy GM’s flamboyant explanation that he meant the word as it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary” of a person who travels from place to place.

The complainant started working at the hotel when she was 17 in 2016 and was paid €9.95 per hour.

In the incident at the centre of the discrimination claim, the young woman described how she was talking to photographers at a wedding on August 9th, 2019, at the hotel when one asked where she was from.

She said that when she was answering, the deputy GM allegedly stated “you’re only an itinerant.”

She said that she replied: “I could be an itinerant, so what?” She said she told the deputy GM that she could report him to HR for the comment and she alleged that he replied: “sweetie, I am HR.”

In evidence, the complainant said that the deputy GM’s tone was: “don’t mind you, you’re only an itinerant.”

The complainant resigned from her job in August 2019. In October 2019, she got another job in a cafe and is now in college and working part-time in a hotel in Dublin.

In evidence, the deputy GM gave a conflicting account of the August 9th, 2019, exchange. The deputy GM said that when the complainant answered the question about where she was from, he remarked: “you make it sound like it’s itinerant.”

He said that the complainant replied: “sure I am.”

Counsel for the complainant Mr Michael Kinsley BL – instructed by Ms Geraldine Arthur Dunne of Gorey legal firm Lombard, Cullen and Fitzpatrick Solicitors – put it to the deputy GM that the term “itinerant” is a derogatory term for a member of the Traveller community.

The deputy GM said that he did not agree and rejected that the complainant was treated in the way she alleged and he said that he rated her as “one of the best”.

In her findings, Ms Byrne stated that she found the complainant to be a direct and straightforward witness, telling her story without embellishment.

Ms Byrne also stated that she could find no reason not to accept her evidence that the deputy GM also made sexual comments that she complained of.

However, Ms Byrne stated that it is uncertain when these remarks were made and it is likely that they were made more than six months before she submitted the complaint to the WRC.

In her evidence at the hearing, the complainant alleged that in response to her feeling stressed, the Deputy GM remarked that she “needed a good seeing to”.

In response to her comment that she was on top of her tasks at a wedding, he replied: “I don’t need to know how you do it.”

The complaint resigned from her post in August 2019 and Ms Byrne dismissed her separate unfair dismissal action as the alleged initial alterations with the deputy GM first complained of in September 2018 occurred outside the six-month time frame within which complaints of unfair dismissal must be submitted to the WRC.

Ms Byrne stated that found that the distance between those incidents and the complainant’s resignation is too long to establish on a reasonable basis that they were the reason she resigned.

The complainant did not resign from her job because of the “itinerant” comment on August 9th 2019 because she had already submitted her resignation on August 6th, 2019.

The hotel stated that the deputy GM never used inappropriate nor sexually explicit language with any member of staff and that these claims are without foundation or are vexatious.