The roads are clear again – for now – but the questions the disruption raised about pay, annual leave, safety and GDPR are not going away, writes Crystel Robbins-Rynne, CEO of HRLocker.
With the fuel protests now behind us and roads, depots and public transport largely back to normal (for now at least), it is tempting for employers to file the last couple of weeks under “disruption” and move on. I would not recommend it.
For a lot of Irish businesses, what happened was, in effect, a live stress test of how they manage their people and a very public audit of whether handbooks, policies and absence records were actually fit for purpose. For many, the honest answer was that they were not.
“Disruptions like fuel protests expose the cracks in how businesses manage their people processes”
In the space of a few days, I fielded the same questions from SME owners across the country. Do I have to pay staff who cannot get in? Can I require them to take annual leave? What if they want to join the protest? And what should I put on the absence record?
Most of these have clear answers in Irish law. The fact that so many employers did not know those answers is the real lesson, and the one worth acting on now, before the next disruption arrives.
Here is what I would want every Irish employer to know.
-
The pay question is simpler than it feels
The first question is always about pay. Do I have to pay someone who cannot get in? Under the Payment of Wages Act 1991, the answer is no, not where the employee is unavailable for work and their contract does not require payment in those circumstances. There is no unlawful deduction if no wages were properly payable in the first place.
But the legal minimum is not always the smartest course of action. In practice, most employers pay for a genuine one-off event, and I would encourage that approach. The cost of a single day’s pay is almost always less than the cost of a grievance, a dip in morale, or the loss of trust that comes from being seen to penny-pinch during a crisis. What matters far more than whether you pay is that you apply the same decision consistently across your team. At the WRC, inconsistent treatment is the thing that gets employers into difficulty, not the disruption itself.
-
Annual leave cannot be imposed at short notice
Some employers instinctively reach for annual leave as the solution. You can ask an employee to use a day’s leave, but you cannot compel it without their agreement or a clear contractual basis. The Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 requires reasonable notice for annual leave designation, and a one-day unplanned event does not meet that threshold.
If your contracts and employee handbook are silent on how travel disruption is handled, that gap is worth closing now!
-
Remote working is not automatic
Since March 2024, employees have had a statutory right to request remote working under the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023. This is a right to request, not a right to work remotely on demand. Where remote working is already agreed, the employee works from home and is paid normally. Where it is not, there is no obligation on the employer to accommodate it on an ad hoc basis.
I would add a word of caution here, though. If your business has been allowing informal remote working without a written policy, that practice can become an implied contractual term over time. A disruption day is not the moment to discover you have no remote working framework in place.
For roles that cannot be done remotely, e.g. drivers, warehouse operatives, production staff, the options are more limited. The absence is recorded and the employer and employee agree how it will be treated, be it paid leave, unpaid leave, time made up, or annual leave by consent.
-
Do not ask people to travel into danger
This is the one area where there is no room for ambiguity. Under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, employers have a duty to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of their employees as far as is reasonably practicable. That duty does not end at the workplace door.
If a blockage involves crowd activity or any genuine risk of confrontation, tell affected employees not to travel. If you require someone to drive through an active blockage and they are injured, your legal position is significantly weaker than if you had simply told them to stay home. Your safety statement should be reviewed to confirm it covers civil disruption as a foreseeable travel risk. Many do not.
-
Understand the difference between civil protest and industrial action
This distinction matters more than many employers realise. A fuel cost protest is a civil protest. It is not industrial action within the meaning of the Industrial Relations Act 1990.
The practical consequence is that the protections available to employees engaged in authorised trade union industrial action do not apply here. An employee who absents themselves during working hours without authorisation to attend a civil protest can be treated as absent without leave. Again, I’d encourage proportionality here; a single absence of a few hours is not grounds for dismissal, and should be handled through your normal absence process.
Equally, an employee who participates in a lawful protest in their own time, outside working hours, is exercising a constitutional right under Article 40.6 of the Irish Constitution. You cannot penalise them for that. And no employer can require employees to join a protest.
Also, if your business decides to close for a protest day, employees are still owed their normal pay. You cannot require them to use annual leave to cover a company decision to close, not without their consent.
-
Be careful what you put on the absence record
Here is a compliance risk that many employers are not even aware of. Political opinions are special category data under Article 9 of the GDPR and the Data Protection Acts 1988 to 2018. So, if you record on an absence file that an employee was absent because they attended a protest, you may be processing special category data without a lawful basis.
The safe approach is to simply record the absence as unplanned or unauthorised. Do not record the political reason. Keep records proportionate and retain them for at least three years, as required by the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997. And make sure your employee privacy notice actually covers how absence data is processed. Our research found that many SMEs have gaps in exactly this kind of documentation. These kinds of gaps are entirely preventable with the right processes in place.
-
Communicate before, during, and after
If you have staff in delivery or customer-facing roles, contact affected customers before the scheduled time, not after someone calls in from a blocked road. Check your commercial contracts for force majeure clauses. A road blockage caused by civil protest will typically qualify.
And do not treat a missed customer appointment caused by a blockage as a performance issue for the employee. Record the reason, reschedule, and move on.
The bigger picture
Disruptions like fuel protests expose the cracks in how businesses manage their people processes. The employers who navigate them well are not the ones with the biggest HR teams, but they are the ones who have clear policies, consistent practices, and records they can stand over.
If you haven’t already done so, review your employee handbook and check that it covers travel disruption, protest participation, and company closure. Confirm your remote working policy is in writing. Make sure your absence records are clean and your privacy notice is up to date.
-
Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here
-
For support in challenging times, click here
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
