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A POLISH WOMAN who was expected to work 70-hour weeks while heavily pregnant has won compensation of €55,000 from her former employer following a judgement by the Equality Tribunal.
Ewelina Gacek took a case against the €uro 50 store in Dublin’s Ilac Centre, her former employer, to the Tribunal on grounds that she was victimised and discriminated against in her work with regard to her race, her gender, and her family situation.
Gacek commenced work with €uro 50 in the Ilac Centre in 2011 as a sales assistant on minimum wage. Within three months her role changed to that of trainee manager. The following month, December 2011, she was unofficially promoted to de facto branch manager.
Her hours at this time saw her working 60-70 hour weeks for a salary of €22,000 – significantly less than both her previous salary and the Irish minimum wage of €8.65 an hour.
Once she became pregnant in February 2012, her employer’s attitude towards her became exceptionally harsh. She was instructed to take all ante-natal classes outside working hours. Toilet breaks were discouraged. The following email excerpt between Gacek and her employer was submitted as indicating the working conditions she was subject to:
Also I know that you are using public transport to get to the store. Sometimes though you are in the store 1.5hr before opening. I hope that you are not counting this additional time to your daily work time.
I can understand that you are pregnant but I can still show you time sheets of other managers that were pregnant and still were doing 60-80 hrs a week and worked till the last day. Only last year two managers nearly got their baby in the store, they finished in the afternoon and in the evening they were in labour. Also their stores are much more difficult than yours. This is the commitment they are giving to us, we didn’t ask them.
Gacek was informed that she would be given a raise in line with her managerial responsibilities when she returned from maternity leave – this failed to materialise. In fact, she found that she had been effectively demoted when she returned in favour of someone who had previously been junior to her.
When she aired her grievance she was told that she was a trainee manager only, and that this was the role she had returned to.
When she photocopied an internal manager-handover form to support her grievance she was suspended for a breach of the Data Protection Act.
In its defence, €uro 50 store claimed that Gacek was simply initially disappointed that somebody at the same level was promoted ahead of her.
One crucial witness aided Gacek’s case, an Irish woman who had worked for €uro 50 store as a trainee manager at the same time Gacek was the de facto store manager and left as “she was not willing to put up with the dreadful working conditions”.
This woman submitted that the store’s approach was to make anybody with a strong work ethic a Trainee Manager as it saved them money on overtime in the long run.
The Tribunal concluded that Gacek had been:
The Tribunal ordered she be compensated as follows:
He’s right we are witnessing the end of an era. He ran a great site but the craic is gone, all the best An fear Rua.
Too many keyboard warriors out there now.
Was a great forum but was ruined by a small number of trolls and the usual shite stirrers in recent years! Saying that it with will be sadly missed. Many of the posters had a great insight in Gaelic games.
Not-so-subtle lesson for The Journal here perhaps with regard to trolls.
It’s definitely become a major headache for forums – there are, after all, many examples of forums that should remain anonymous.
Maybe though, it’s time to reexamine the whole concept of defamation in Irish law, because right now it’s as broken as copyright law is after Sean Sherlock’s SI. If you have money, or can bluster and threaten without any scruples, then the law is perfectly suited to you; if you’re conservative about conflicts, or don’t have the money to have a legal team, then the law basicly lets others use the SLAPP approach to veto what you can and cannot say – whether or not you own the site.
I kinda see the difference between when a site starts up and a year or so after when the anonymous names start turning up and antagonising the forum. Early adopters are by and large decent people, but once a site gets popular, all multitude of people turn up either to push their worldview, have a rant, or deliberately try to “get a rise” out regular & new posters.
You see it on every comment section on every forum on the web. the prevalence of it is only controlled by the moderators & website proprietors
sorry to see this site go. Thanks An Fear Rua for all the news and insight over the past 12 years
I can understand what he means about earning revenue from the site, saying he never made more than €10,000 a year. I run a few sites one which is global, with american traffic I get an average ad click every 9 page views, for my Irish traffic I get an ad click about every 100 page views.
Do you not realise that if you click on an ad your identity and bank details are automatically stolen?!
cheers Brian, thanks for helping us publishers in the recession :-) not!
That was meant to be a joke making your point paddy!
The wider problem of the demise of online anonymity is exacerbated not so much by the presence of open identity forums but the rampant rise in usage of the internet.
When you go from 16 million users, to whom using some sort of handle was almost required, to 2 billion users in about 15 years then the understanding of self policing and responsibility vanishes.
If users can’t be responsible and self policing then they have to be made to be responsible and be policed and policing costs money. Small online fora can survive this without much expenditure, larger ones can’t unless people grow up.
On a wider scale this means that rather than bringing people together the Internet stratifies people, blowing some of the earlier ideals of the Web right out of the water.
A major pity that AFR is gone. Goes to show, the trolls always win. What began with informed, diverse discussion, was recently ending in acrimonious and often nonsensical arguments, much of it legally dubious. Good luck to Liam in his future ventures. Goes to show, the web is a dangerous platform, especially when people can post the most bizarre stuff anonymously. Some of the stuff in relation to the Limerick hurling scene was really out of order.
Doubt it has anything to do with anonymity. If this site was making say $10m a year instead of approx 10k I doubt it would have been closed. The real issue is creating web sites that only appeal to a very small niche audience (with apologies to GAA fans, it’s not a worldwide mass audience)
Bit of a whinger. The problem is the legal culture here. We need a free speech bit in constitution.
it’s his site. Free speech means you can set up a site of your own.
No such thiing as free peech on another person’s web forum.
Ever.
You enjoy your freedoms as the website owner allows you to.
Remember that. We are all guests.
But why should free speech extend to making outlandish allegations against people who aren’t going to be able to defend themselves, or shouldn’t have to? I’m not saying that’s what happened on the site, but it’s what does happen. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ might apply in the courts, but it doesn’t apply in people’s minds — and a smear campaign, with little or no accountability, can do untold damage.
Free speech is precious and needs to be protected, but so too do innocent people.
Informed discussions ending in non sensical argumentative debates , I’m pretty sure I see that happening somewhere else lately , now where was it again…..
I think people should have to register with real name , photo and identity for online activity and when they are giving opinions , no matter how off the wall , they at least shouldnt be anonymous but I know that’s just personal opinion and not gonna happen any time soon.
I agree completely with his reasoning. Small online publishers are directly in competition with anybody who sets up a group on Facebook or other social media site on the same interest. They can tap into a huge membership whereas we have to struggle for every eyeball. Advertising / sponsorship for niche sites in practically impossible to find. I’ve been running Archiseek.com since 1996 and I reckon I’ve probably been approached half a dozen times in those years by a potential advertisers, and I’m proactive in trying to find them. In the same period, I’ve had lots of contact from lawyers about comments on the forums. It’s the main reason we turned off P45.net – it was costing money.
If I didn’t love it, I would have pulled the plug a decade ago.
As a regular reader and extremely rare poster I’m sorry to see this go. However, so many threads descended rapidly into name-calling. Any upcoming Limerick or Clare hurlers in particular should be glad to see it go – the amount of abuse directed at young amateur sportsmen was unreal at times. Real pity as there was some decent debate there too if you could find it. Some enjoyable random non-GAA stuff too – such as this thread about Limousin cattle
We were part of a very large site in the south east that was as big and had to shut down about 3 years ago for the same reason (Liam was a member).
To be honest, groups on Facebook kind of took over. Not worth the legal risk
Have to say the comments on Journal are a total dose lately. Almost like youtube. Seems a lot more relxed in the score section but still
It’s a pity the site has closed, I hope that an archive of the posts exists somewhere, there was a lot of funny stuff there. The trolls had begun to dominate on AFR of late, but the site itself was somewhat responsible for this, moderation wasn’t always consistent, lots of multiple aliases on the site, where trolls were banned they could re-register and post again in minutes.
Odd decision to just close it. With over 10,000 members he could have sold the site, it would be worth 5 to 10 grand at least.
Upgrade the site, improve the design and you could have a nice little earner for someone.
Good marketing Opportunity for Paddypower now. They should step in and save it :)
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