Court: Dumont Wins Against Bermuda College
[Written by Don Burgess]
David Dumont won his case against Bermuda College for breach of contract.
Mr Dumont was employed by the College as facilities and security supervisor from February 13, 2012, until May 23, 2017. He claimed the College owed him $62,749.28 plus interest for their refusal to pay him for being on-call outside normal working hours.
The College said Mr Dumont was not entitled to on-call pay because he was never on-call within the meaning of his contract and was not contractually required to be so.
According to the Collective Bargaining Agreement, an employee who is required to remain on-call is entitled to $38.83 per shift and an employee who is called out after normal working hours shall receive a minimum of three hours pay if eligible for overtime payments at the appropriate rate.
Initially, Bermuda Security Group would field the alarms at the College and determine if it was a false alarm or not, but that was later outsourced to an overseas monitoring centre. The monitoring centre notified Mr Dumont via email every time without first assessing whether the alarm was false or not. From July 29, 2015, to May 27, 2017, Mr Dumont was sent 55,132 emails – an average of 83 per day. Mr Dumont was paid when he was called out but never for when he was on-call.
Puisne Judge Stephen Hellman ruled Mr Dumont is entitled to an on-call allowance from February 13, 2012, to June 30, 2016, when he was available to be called out.
However, but was not entitled to on-call pay for the days when he was unavailable to be called out because he was off work even though he was fielding phone calls from Bermuda Security Group. He added the College and Mr Dumont to agree on the days for which an on-call allowance is payable.
He also ruled Bermuda College has to pay Mr Dumont’s costs for the case.
The full judgement follows below [PDF here]:
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