The House of Lord has upheld the appeal by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) in relation to equal pension and sick pay rights for over 15,000 part-time retained fire-fighters.
Retained fire-fighters work part-time and are currently excluded from the Firefighters’ Pension Scheme. They also have less favourable rights under the sick pay scheme than full-time fire-fighters. The FBU claimed that this was unlawful treatment and they are treated differently simply because they are part-time workers.
The Part-Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 set out the conditions that must be satisfied in order to determine whether a full-time worker (with whom a part-time worker seeks to be compared) is a comparable full-time worker. One of the conditions is that both workers must be employed by the same employer "under the same type of contract" and must be engaged "in the same or broadly similar work", having regard, where relevant, to whether they have a similar level of qualification, skills and experience.
The House of Lords held that in determining whether work is the "same or broadly similar" it is necessary to look at the whole of the work that both the full-time workers and the part-time workers are engaged in, and to concentrate on the similarities rather than on the differences in the work. This means that if a large component of their work is exactly the same, the key question is whether any differences are of such importance as to prevent their work being regarded overall as "the same or broadly similar".
The case is significant, not just for retained fire fighters, but for all part time workers. The decision suggests that part-time workers can be treated differently from full-time workers only if they have a different type of contract, and not if just the terms and conditions of their employment are different, and that weight should be given to the extent to which their work is in fact the same and to the importance of that work to the enterprise as a whole.
This article was written for Law-Now, CMS Cameron McKenna's free online information service. To register for Law-Now, please go to www.law-now.com/law-now/mondaq
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The original publication date for this article was 15/03/2006.
