EMPLOYMENT – HOLIDAYS ON TOP OF HOLIDAYS

If you only have two weeks of your annual leave left and you go on a two week holiday to the sun and you get food poisoning while on holiday and you are in bed for three or four days, once you have the relevant medical certificates, you are entitled to insist that your employer give you a further three or four days annual leave in lieu.

The entitlement to paid annual leave is set out in the Working Time Directive (2003/88/ECJ).

The thinking behind this is that employees deserve annual leave and the purpose of annual leave is to enable the employee have some time for relaxation and leisure. If he spent some or all of that time ill then he or she should not lose out as a result and the European Court of Justice decided that they are entitled to further leave to make up for the time lost while sick on holidays. This decision was made some years ago. Although it does not appear to be widely known, this right already existed in Irish law.

If therefore you are sick while on annual leave, get a medical certificate to prove that you were ill and the length of time you were ill, you can then insist that your employer give you a further period of annual leave to make up the time lost.

Kevin Brophy

Brophy Solicitors

DO YOU HAVE TO BE SICK TO TAKE SICK LEAVE?

A client called to me recently and as she was leaving the office, I asked her if she had taken a day’s holiday leave from work in order to see me and she said that she didn’t as she had taken a sick day. I said I didn’t realise she was unwell and she said she wasn’t but that she was entitled to take 10 sick days a year without explanation and she still had 4 or 5 days left. 

This put me in mind of a couple of recent New Zealand employment cases where the employers were seeking court orders to compel employees to handover details from their Facebook pages because there was a suspicion that they had taken sick leave in order to facilitate some social activity and that they were not genuinely sick. 

This has created concerns in relation to privacy and one argument was that they wouldn’t be allowed to search the employee’s homes on demand and therefore they should not be allowed to ransack their online lives “looking for dirt” against them. 

So many people seem to think that a Facebook entry is a private correspondence between them and their friends. In many cases, the entries on Facebook are open to the world and they are public knowledge. The basic rule is that if you take sick leave and you are not sick, you are in breach of your contract of employment and you could be sacked.

Kevin Brophy

Brophy Solicitors