The 2012 Annual Report of the Employment Appeals Tribunal has highlighted some astounding statistics

  • According to Chairperson Kate T O’Mahony’s foreword “there are presently approximately 5,000 cases awaiting a hearing, of these 37% are unfair dismissals cases”
  • According to the Chairperson’s foreword, “In its appellate jurisdiction the Tribunal deals with disputes about matters occurring during the course of the employment relationship. A notable trend in recent years has been the steady increase each year in the percentage of the Tribunal’s appellate work which, significantly doubled from 12% in 2011 to 24% in 2012.”
  • In 2012, employees had some sort of additional representation at the hearing before the Employment Appeals Tribunal on 1,917 occasions- employers, however, only had representation in 1,116 cases. It is clear that unfair dismissal cases see the highest level of representation but it is interesting to note that employee parties had representation in 1,071 cases and employer parties only had representation on 740 occasions.
  • In 2012, the Employment Appeals Tribunal received 5,623 cases.
  • The number of appeals against the recommendations of the Rights Commissioners received in 2012 was 1,349- this number represents a 38% increase on the previous year and a staggering 81% increase on the 2010 total.
  • The top 3 categories of cases referred to the Employment Appeals Tribunal in 2012 were Unfair Dismissal (1,742), Redundancy (1,239) and Minimum Notice & Terms of Employment (929).
  • In 2012, the Employment Appeals Tribunal awarded almost €7million in 377 Unfair Dismissal cases. The average compensation awarded was more than €18.5k. *96 claimants received more than €25k
  • The number of Payment of Wages cases disposed of in 2011 was 154 – this number rose by 164% to 407 in 2012.
  • The number of Maternity Protection Acts appeals rose from just 2 in 2011 to 11 in 2012.