Cleaning firm Bidvest Noonan must pay a former staff member €20,000 over failure to address real safety fears after colleague's murder. Photograph: iStockA former colleague of murdered office cleaner Urantsetseg Tserendorj has won a €20,000 claim for statutory redundancy after her bosses dismissed her concerns about being out on the streets of Dublin’s Docklands late at night after finishing work.
Her colleague, Ms Tserendorj, had been coming home from the same office when she was fatally stabbed across the river at Custom House Quay, Dublin 1, in January 2021 and died later in hospital. A teenage boy, who cannot be named, is now serving a life sentence for her murder.
“She had been attacked 10 years ago in the same area. When she brought this up in the consultation process, her concerns were ignored,” he noted further. Liliana Nastas, an account manager with Bidvest Noonan, told the WRC the company “wanted to retain staff” and that a taxi service was available for Bidvest Noonan employees at State Street. But she said she did not know whether this was ever offered to Ms Buga.A memo referring to a July 2022 consultation meeting with Ms Buga, which was opened to the tribunal, recorded a senior human resources adviser for Bidvest Noonan referring to the complainant raising her concerns.
In his decision, the adjudicator wrote that the meeting referred to in the memo was “roughly a year and a half after an employee of the respondent was murdered in the IFSC area while on her way home from work”.