Derek Achong
The Public Services Association (PSA) is seeking to have the National Library Information System (NALIS) held in contempt of court over its failure to reinstate a worker after being ordered to do so by the Industrial Court.
The trade union brought the contempt application last week as it sought to have NALIS’s appeal over the Industrial Court’s decision struck out.
The application currently before the Court of Appeal relates to legal action taken by the PSA on Ryan Martinez’s behalf after he was terminated in September 2016.
Martinez joined the public service in October 1997 and was transferred to NALIS in 2002. In 2013, he was promoted to Library Assistant II.
In 2017, the PSA filed a trade dispute challenging Martinez’s firing.
On July 27, three Industrial Court judges ordered that Martinez be reinstated and directed that he be paid the salary and benefits he would have received had he not been terminated.
The panel found that NALIS had failed to prove that Martinez had committed acts of gross misconduct and ruled that the behaviour for which he was terminated amounted to “intemperate expressions of frustration” over an unresolved salary issue.
The judges also found that the disciplinary process used to fire Martinez was procedurally defective and the outcome was disproportionate.
NALIS appealed but did not initially obtain a stay of the ruling from the Industrial Court or the Court of Appeal.
In late August, the PSA’s lawyer Richard Jaggasar wrote several letters to NALIS and its lawyer requesting that arrangements be put in place for Martinez to return to work.
Martinez reportedly reported for duty on September 1 but was allegedly stopped from working.
NALIS’s corporate secretary Brahma Beharrysingh wrote to Jaggasar claiming that it (NALIS) sought a stay from the Industrial Court and was wrongfully blocked from making submissions on the reinstatement order.
In the contempt application, Jaggasar suggested that NALIS’s lawyers were to blame for non-compliance with the order and suggested that they (the lawyers) did not properly inform NALIS of what transpired in the legal proceedings and the outcome.
“It is apparent that the actors guilty of non-compliance are the attorneys-at-law involved in the case,” Jaggasar said.
He suggested that there is a continuing failure to give effect to the order each day that Martinez remains unreinstated.
“The Court is therefore invited to treat this application not merely as an application concerning a historical default but as an urgent application to bring continuing non-compliance to an immediate end,” Jaggasar said.
“The appropriate response is to require immediate compliance and, if necessary, to impose a sanction sufficient to secure obedience,” he added.
In the parallel application to strike out the appeal, Jaggasar claimed that NALIS had not raised any valid grounds capable of overturning the Industrial Court’s ruling. He claimed that NALIS was seeking to challenge the panel’s factual findings instead of raising issues of law.
“The Industrial Court heard the evidence of the parties’ witnesses, considered the documentary exhibits, heard the attorneys for both parties and delivered a reasoned judgment identifying both substantive and procedural deficiencies in the disciplinary process,” Jaggasar said.
