A former sales adviser in the food section with Marks and Spencer Ireland Ltd in its Killarney store says he was unfairly dismissed from the company and claims it was “impossible” to check date-expired food in the time allocated.
Seán Daly, Cahernane Meadows, Killarney, has claimed staff were being bullied into signing off on having checked food when they had not.
Mr Daly wrote directly to the chair of MS, Sir Stuart Rose, claiming to have found food items on sale which were out of date – in the case of one item four weeks out of date – and that it was “humanly impossible” to complete a check in the time allowed.
Mr Daly also known as John Daly, a former teacher, began work in the general merchandise section of the Killarney store in March 2008 and, in September 2009, moved to the food hall. His pay was €473 .31 gross a week.
Date-expired food
His employment ended in February 2011. He is seeking reinstatement. Ten or 11 colleagues had been disciplined for missing items of date-expired food in Killarney, he claims.
MS agrees Mr Daly was dismissed, but it denies he was unfairly dismissed and said it would be its case that Mr Daly was dismissed following “a series of breaches of standards”, an employment tribunal was told on the opening day .
Store manager Paul Daly, answering MS counsel, said identifying date-expired food was one of the most important jobs with MS and was carried out daily. Food delivery got priority over all other merchandise. Expired food “must be removed by law” and failure to do so could result in him personally being fined or imprisoned, the store manager said.
Staff used hand-held terminals to check each item individually. Each staff member had a certain number of sections to check and then cross-checked their colleague’s sections and vice versa. They then signed documentation to say the section had been completed and out-of-date products removed, said the store manager.
Mr Daly consistently failed to complete his allocations of checking out-of-date goods within the two hours allotted.
All M&S stores
The time-line was that used in all M&S stores and his work colleagues reached those standards, the store manager said.
An error by Mr Daly led to the loss of over €2,515 of food when frozen food was allowed to thaw out.
His personnel file in April 2010 notes said: “Seán is saying what we are asking is an impossible task, within two hours or even three hours”. He was retrained five times, but said this retraining bordered on harassment and was embarrassing and humiliating.
A HR manager warned him aggressively that he was not completing his checks.
“He felt other staff were not fully checking but were being bullied into signing,” according to notes in his file read to the tribunal.
The hearing will resume in September.