Grafton Street store security man was on just €4 an hour amid ‘wage theft’ at firm, WRC told
A security company paid a worker just €4 an hour to guard a high-end clothes shop on Dublin’s Grafton Street, a tribunal has heard. BGS Security Ltd (BGSS) was accused of engaging in deliberate and systematic “wage theft” before it collapsed last year.Security guard Michael Ehigiato is pursuing multiple employment rights complaints against the business, now in liquidation, including for non-payment of wages, excessive working hours and racial discrimination. Ehigiato was rostered for an average of 54 hours a week during his roughly three months working at BGSS – and was on shift for 71 hours one week, the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) was told on Thursday. READ MOREIf Ireland addresses domestic weaknesses, multinationals are set to continue investing MacBook Neo review: Apple’s fresh take on budget laptopsNew platform aims to revolutionise how live music is booked AI’s war on reality: what now when you can’t even trust your own eyes?Despite that, he told the tribunal, he only received €3,000 cash-in-hand from the company. Ehigiato’s trade union rep, Nicola Coleman of the Siptu Workers’ Rights Centre, said it amounted to just €4 an hour for the hundreds of hours her client spent on duty at shops in Dublin – less than a third of the legal minimum pay for a security worker. He was rostered to work at Spar, Mace and Centra convenience stores across the city, as well as the upmarket North Face shop on Grafton Street, she said. Coleman quoted multiple texts from Ehigiato to his supervisor chasing arrears of wages. He said some €2,800 was outstanding. “I hardly complain, but today is different, I worked many hours . . . I don’t have a penny with me. I’m totally broke, owing debts,” Ehigiato wrote in one text. “You promised to send me my money. Please, I really need to know when; I am in a lot of debt,” the complainant wrote in another. “I will not lie to you. Currently I am left with €5 in my bank account,” Ehigiato wrote in a third message.“This was a man working 70 hours a week,” Coleman said. Ehigiato received “repeated and false assurances” which induced him to continue working, she added. On March 18th, 2025, Ehigiato received a text from the company telling him the money “will be sorted by next week”. The text went on to say: “There are a lot of old workers making up rumours about the company.”At that time, 14 former BGSS staff had brought claims for non-payment of wages to the WRC and had won their cases. “We just need our employees to have trust in what we are doing so we can keep going,” the text read. “If you could please stay working and have some trust and loyalty . . . things will get better,” it added. ‘Humiliating’Ehigiato said that on one occasion, when he was working in a shop in Tallaght and went to take a break to eat, his supervisor arrived and told him he was not allowed to use the staff canteen. His boss told him to eat at the CCTV station on the shop floor and refused to let him take a chair out with him. Ehigiato said it was “humiliating” to have to eat his meal like this. The company continued to hold a Private Security Authority licence to operate static security guards until July 2025, when it was revoked by the regulator. The High Court appointed a liquidator, Tom Musiol of Musiol Advisory, to liquidate BGSS last November. A representative of the liquidator, Steven Gyurko, told the WRC he had been unable to speak with “any officer or former officer of the company”. Company director Hugh Downes had sold his home in Dublin in August 2025. “We are hearing rumours that he’s actually abroad. He hasn’t engaged with us on any level,” Gyurko said. Ehigiato is one of nine ex-BGSS staff being represented by Siptu in the latest tranche of complaints before the WRC, and the third whose case has been heard. Coleman said they were among 20 staff who met her at Siptu’s offices last year. The other 11, she said, were so “fearful” that they opted not to pursue cases. BGSS was “an operation based on free labour” which systematically targeted vulnerable migrant workers, Coleman said. She said treatment of the workers amounted to racial discrimination. “This systematic and deliberate wage exploitation could not, would not and did not happen to an Irish person,” she said. She characterised it as “collective wage theft”. She said the number of cases brought against BGSS on similar grounds showed “the gravity and the deliberate nature of the respondent’s conduct”. BGSS had cut its labour costs to “almost zero”, gained an “unlawful competitive advantage” over other employers adhering to the employment regulations for the security business, undermined conditions for “every worker in the sector” and “distorted fair competition”, Coleman said.
