Jurys Hotel Group is being sued by banqueting waiting staff who claim that service charges collected from customers are being distributed among all banqueting staff instead of being allocated to those staff working at the particular function involved. The dispute concerns the group's hotel at Ballsbridge, Dublin.
At the High Court yesterday, Ms Justice Carroll decided that three separate actions against the hotel group should be heard together.
The dispute goes back to 1990. SIPTU, the union representing the workers, has been joined in two of the three actions.
Mr Eoin McCullough SC, for Jurys, said the central issues in all three cases was how service charges paid by customers were distributed to casual banqueting staff at the Ballsbridge hotel. The claim was that the service charges collected in the banqueting part of the hotel ought to be distributed only to those working at the banquet and not put into a pot and distributed between all banqueting staff.
Mr McCullough said Jurys' position was that the present arrangement was reached between Jurys and SITU many years ago and it could not be changed by Jurys without SIPTU's agreement. All the workers involved were SIPTU members.
SIPTU, as he understood it, was substantially in agreement with the current arrangement and believed the hotel was bound by it.
Mr Frank Callanan SC, representing 35 workers in one action, said his clients did not wish to have SIPTU brought into the proceedings. The dispute not only concerned service charges but customers' tips or gratuities being effectively diverted from the workers.
The 35 workers allege the hotel has converted the service charge monies by applying the bulk of those to the senior permanent staff in the banqueting section (head waiters, head porters, banqueting porters and bar manager), whether or not these staff had been on duty.
The workers alleged they only receive a small portion of the monies, frequently as low as a quarter of the total.