The In­dus­tri­al Court has to­day dis­missed a com­plaint of an In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Of­fence brought by the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion against the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) which sought to pre­vent WASA from en­gag­ing in a re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise.

The Court had pre­vi­ous­ly dis­missed the PSA’s ap­pli­ca­tion for an in­junc­tion in March, 2022.

The Court found that its de­ci­sion on the in­junc­tion was suf­fi­cient­ly dis­pos­i­tive of the sub­stan­tive pro­ceed­ings.

It held, in­ter alia, that:

(a) WASA had al­ways in­di­cat­ed an in­ten­tion to con­sult with the PSA at the ap­pro­pri­ate time;

(b) WASA had met with the PSA 115 times al­ready and there­fore could not be said to be act­ing in bad faith; and

(c) WASA and the Gov­ern­ment must be al­lowed to for­mu­late pol­i­cy in­clud­ing a re­struc­tur­ing plan with­out in­volve­ment from the PSA.

The Court there­fore de­cid­ed that fur­ther pro­ceed­ings were un­nec­es­sary in the pub­lic in­ter­est.

WASA said in a state­ment that it is grate­ful to have re­ceived the Court’s guid­ance and now that all le­gal hur­dles have been cleared in re­la­tion to the re­struc­tur­ing, the Au­thor­i­ty re­it­er­ates its con­sis­tent pub­licly stat­ed po­si­tion that it in­tends to and will al­ways com­ply with the prin­ci­ples of good in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions prac­tice through­out the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the re­struc­tur­ing process, in­clud­ing con­sult­ing with the Recog­nised Ma­jor­i­ty Unions in good faith.