Ireland: Retail workers laid off by Debenhams amidst pandemic picket stores for redundancy pay & statutory entitlements
“The Debenhams picketers: ‘We are like a little family’”, 19 September 2020
On April 9th … Debenhams announced it was placing its 11 shops in the State into liquidation. Some 1,000 staff and a further 1,000 working in concession outlets in the shops lost their jobs…
Since then, many of the former employees have been picketing the shops on an ongoing basis…
The Debenham workers are seeking redundancy terms of two weeks’ pay per year of service plus statutory entitlements of two weeks per year of service…
The workers’ trade union, Mandate, has tried to reach an agreement with the liquidator that would have seen workers share a €1 million allocation on top of statutory entitlements ... shop stewards said they would not accept it, leading to an intensification of industrial action including occupation of stores.
Madeline Whelan
“We are on the picket line because of the treatment we received after all the years of working, and also the way we were told, via a generic email to all staff. There is no trust between us and them now.”
Suzanne Sherry
“We lost our jobs in the middle of a pandemic … Surely there was a duty of care to employees to know if people were okay. We were in the middle of a lockdown. Some people were living alone, some were on maternity leave, some had sick parents.
“The restrictions of lockdown meant we were denied our usual network of support from other staff. We couldn’t have union meetings, or meet up ourselves.”