Two Irish women yesterday won a landmark ruling in the European Court of Justice which will copper-fasten the rights of job-sharers and may cost the Government tens of millions of pounds in claims from similar workers.
The case involved two women, Ms Kathleen Hill and Ms Ann Stapleton, who both work for the Revenue Commissioners.
The EU's Luxembourg-based court found that the practice of awarding service increments to job-sharers on the basis of hours worked rather than years served - in effect half as fast as full-timers - was in breach of EU equality regulations because the bulk of job-sharers are women.
The decision will have major cost implications for the civil service, where there are some 2,500 job-sharers, with about 7,500 more in the rest of the public service. Retrospective claims have been costed at up to £10 million and and the continuing cost of higher increments at £2 million. Pensions will also be affected.
A Department of Finance spokeswoman said the Department's legal advisers were examining the situation. Following the court's ruling, which confirms the earlier non-binding opinion of the court's advocate-general, the matter now returns to the Labour Court for a ruling on the substantive issue.
Union and legal sources were confident that the women's case would be upheld. The general secretary of the union which backed the case, the Civil and Public Service Union's Mr Blair Horan, welcomed the decision as a "major victory for equality", which he said "should contribute to the move to greater equity in the sharing of responsibilities in the home as well as more justice for women in the workforce".
A spokeswoman for the union said they would have to await the final verdict before discussing the potential for a class claim for the 15 per cent of their members who are job-sharers.
A source in the European Commission said that the ruling confirmed the court's jurisprudence in two important areas of the law - that the equality of men and women extends to part-timers, and that workers involved in non-standard forms of work should not lose out compared to those in regular work.
Ms Hill had been recruited as a clerical assistant in 1981 and began job-sharing in 1988. Ms Stapleton was directly recruited to a job-share post in 1986. They shared a job for two years. While the regulations stated that, for the purposes of calculating service-based increments, each job-share year was to be regarded as a half-year's service, the women were in fact "in error" allowed increments on the same basis as full-time staff. The "error" was discovered only after they reverted to full-time work. The women complained under the Anti-Discrimination Pay Act that the regulation effectively meant that their aggregate pay and conditions package was less than that of a full-time worker and that such discrimination was sex-based because 98 per cent of job-sharers were women.
The Government claimed in its defence that the provisions were not discriminatory as the increments were based on a simple pro rata formula. The women and their union, the CPSU, were backed by an equality officer, but on appeal in the Labour Court the question of whether pay could be defined in this way was referred to the ECJ. The court found that the increment rule represented a diminution in the pay package of the jobsharer and that the use of the criterion of actual time worked rather than years served failed to take account of the fact that the worker was in continuous service and could gain the same degree of experience as the full-timer. Such a provision therefore constituted discrimination in breach of Article 119 of the EU Treaty which prohibits pay discrimination and defines pay as the full package received from an employer.
The ECJ said that such discrimination could be justified only "by objective factors unrelated to any discrimination on the grounds of sex."
