MANDATE is to take legal advice on a Labour Court decision in the largest equal pay claim ever lodged in the Republic.
The court has determined that 550 female workers at Penneys stores in the Republic are not being discriminated against by the company.
The union can appeal the decision to the High Court and, ultimately, the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The Labour Court ruling was given yesterday and it will be some days before Mandate decides whether to appeal.
If Penneys had lost, it would have cost the company more than £500,000 in back pay to 1991, when Mandate first sought equal pay.
Mandate represents 550 sales and clerical staff. It was seeking parity with the company's 11 male warehouse and stores staff, who are members of SIPTU.
The union had appealed to the Labour Court an earlier ruling made in favour of the company by an Equality Officer in 1994. In its determination the Labour Court described the case as "very ". It conceded the validity of some of Mandate's arguments but upheld the decision of the Equality Officer.
The court found that female staff were performing work that was of overall equal value to the men but added that the differential enjoyed by the men was based on a productivity deal negotiated between the company and SIPTU.
"The claimants' and the comparators' rates of pay have been achieved by different industrial routes and are in fact both unisex rates, even if one group is predominantly female and the other predominantly male," the court ruled.
However, a recent ruling by the EU Court of Justice says that women doing work of similar value to men should not be discriminated against simply because their pay agreement was negotiated separately.
The nub of Mandate's case was that the differential between the male warehouse workers and female sales and clerical staff was historical, and that the productivity deal was designed to protect that differential.