A bar manager is challenging his dismissal from a Dublin hotel after its management decided he was “defrauding customers” by adding 10 per cent to the bills of smaller tables that it would not normally ask to pay a service charge.
Ryan Boodhun’s position is that the accusations were “unfounded and untrue” and that the process that led to his sacking from the Schoolhouse Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, “flies in the face of natural justice”.
He has brought a statutory complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against Schoolhouse Hotel Ltd, which is denied by the business.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) heard that Mr Boodhun was suspended in June 2023 after an allegation was made against him, and later sacked after a company investigation and disciplinary process concluded that he had committed gross misconduct.
The WRC was told that the hotel’s policy was to add a service charge of 10 per cent to bills given to tables with eight patrons or more, but that this would be taken off a bill if the party objected to it.
A former general manager at the hotel, Geoffrey Cronin, told the WRC that other workers told him that Mr Boodhun was putting tips on customers’ bills without their knowledge.
He said the allegation was first made to him in June 2023.
Mr Boodhun’s representative, Ken O’Connor, put it to Mr Cronin that when he had looked for advice on the matter from the hotel’s owner, Karen O’Flaherty, she had advised him to have an “informal” conversation with the complainant.
Mr Cronin accepted that Ms O’Flaherty told him in an email: “The main issue is the perception that we are stealing from the customer and that the team feel they too can follow this procedure if the manager can do it. What message does he think this sends?”
Continuing to quote from the email, Mr O’Connor said Ms O’Flaherty then gave a “fairly damning instruction” to Mr Cronin to the effect that whether Mr Boodhun’s response was to deny knowledge of the rule, deny doing it at all or say it only happened occasionally, that “any reply is unacceptable”.
Mr O’Connor said there was “an analysis that he’s basically defrauding customers” in the email.
“The other team members had come to me saying Ryan had instructed them to apply service charges to tables. Other accusations came to me against Ryan … I acted upon it,” Mr Cronin said.
Ms O’Flaherty said she and her husband, the owners of the hotel, had “concerns about implementing service charges” in regard to “what was tolerable for the customer”. She denied giving Mr Cronin a “direction” in regard to how the matter should be handled.
Human resources consultant Sean Stokes gave evidence of his role in an investigation process which concluded that Mr Boodhun was “fully aware he was implementing the service charge wrong”.
Having been dismissed on a finding of gross misconduct, Mr Boodhun was offered an appeal to Ms O’Flaherty, who upheld the decision to dismiss, the tribunal heard.
Mr Boodhun told the tribunal he was simply told that he was facing “serious allegations” before being suspended on June 22nd, 2023, and spent a weekend “in the dark” before any mention of the service charge claim was made.
Claiming unfair procedure, Mr O’Connor, for the complainant, submitted that the dismissal of his client was based on the “unfounded and untrue accusation that customers were being defrauded”.
Mr Bailey, for the employer, said Mr Boodhun was “dismissed for gross misconduct following a thorough process” throughout which his rights were fully respected.
Adjudicator Orla Jones gave a fortnight for further submissions on Mr Boodhun’s efforts to mitigate loss of earnings and closed the hearing.
