Taking advantage of a good crisis.

So now that Storm Emma has done its worst, it’s time to count the cost. Usually when you hear about counting the cost you think of lives lost or those injured. You think of damage to homes or businesses.

Until now there was a presumption that if you’d no work it didn’t matter, your income wouldn’t be affected. I was contacted with a query in relation in the last 24 hours. Where do you stand if your employer requires you to work and you can’t get there? Can your salary be docked? 

Most employers shut down for a number of reasons. It can be health and safety in relation to the workplace, it could also be to facilitate their workers getting home safely. In some cases we’re hugely indebted to workers who turn out regardless as they belong to the emergency services but also there’ll be someone in Wexford’s Women’s Refuge, an AA breakdown man on call as well as a Caredoc available. Many go beyond the call of duty at times like this. It’s at times like this we have an understanding of what community means.

So what do you do when your employer requires you to work even though it’s unsafe to go to work? That was the question that was put to me yesterday. I hadn’t thought of it. I presumed an employer might see that it was not worth it to open up if there was no footfall. The overheads of opening but getting nothing at the till would dictate that you’d cut your loses. If it was unsafe for a worker to go in, then it is unsafe for a customer.

The Taoiseach Dr Varadkar says there is no legal obligation on employers to ensure staff are paid if they cannot get to work. Companies will lose significant revenue too, he adds.  Dr Varadkar isn’t quite right on this. The law says where the company is unable to open the premises at which you normally work due to inclement weather or for some other reason outside of the company’s control you will not be entitled to be paid.

However where the company decides that it is possible to open the premises but determines that for Health and Safety reasons or for some other reason that it is impractical, or not reasonable to open the premises then in such circumstances you will be paid.

So if the premises is unsafe then there is a requirement to pay the wage until the workplace is safe once more. In other words if you have a safe working environment then you don’t have an entitlement to pay. If on the other hand the premises is unsafe arising from bad weather they must pay your salary. So a post man or a delivery person for a take away or a door to door salesperson must be paid but a shop assistant does not. It’s got nothing to do with potential loses that a company might suffer.

I’d argue that any employer who valued their workers should pay regardless of what the law might say. It’d be a poor employer who laid little value on their workers in good times who would dock wages when weather got bad. Good will in the workplace takes time to build up but sometimes  can often disappear like snow of a ditch.

Climate change is a reality. It’s likely that red alerts may become part of the future working environment. You don’t hear anymore descriptions of extreme weather events as one in a hundred years. They’re here to stay. What we need is a strengthening of legislation to protect workers incomes into the future, regardless what Dr Varadkar thinks.