TRADE UNION Impact has claimed that the Government is facing the possibility of having to pay over €100,000 in compensation as well as an undisclosed level of back money to a group of civil servants following a ruling by the European Court of Justice yesterday on the conditions of employment for staff on fixed-term contracts.
The judgment found that, under an EU directive, fixed-term staff were entitled to the same pay and pension entitlements as comparable colleagues on permanent contracts.
The union said that the ruling would also mean that the State would have to pay both employer and employee pension contributions for the staff going back seven years.
The case dates back to a ruling of a rights commissioner in 2005 who found that various Government departments had discriminated against 91 staff who were employed on fixed-term contracts over a number of years.
The staff were awarded nearly €220,000 in compensation and around €110,000 has already been paid out. Impact had maintained that the staff concerned, who were mainly technical and professional personnel employed on renewable contracts, had been denied benefits that permanent colleagues in the civil service had enjoyed, including pay increases, contributory pensions and access to sick pay, training and annual leave.
The Government introduced legislation in 2003, based on an earlier EU directive, to provide contract staff with the same pay and pensions as full-time workers. However, the union contended that the Government should have transposed the directive into Irish law two years earlier and that the equal pay and pensions provisions should have been backdated to 2001.
The rights commissioner, in her ruling in 2005, found that the staff concerned were protected by EU and Irish laws governing the rights of fixed-term workers and awarded compensation totalling €217,500. The highest individual compensation awards were worth €40,000, although most were worth between €2,000 and €7,000.
The State had argued, among other issues, that the rights commissioner's jurisdiction was confined to adjudicating on complaints based on domestic law.
The Department of Finance appealed the ruling to the Labour Court which, in turn, had referred various legal aspects to the European Court of Justice.
In its ruling yesterday, the European Court of Justice found that "article 10 EC, the third paragraph of Article 249 EC, and Directive 1999/70 must be interpreted as meaning that an authority of a member state acting in its capacity as a public employer may not adopt measures contrary to the objective pursued by that directive and the framework agreement on fixed-term work as regards prevention of the abusive use of fixed-term contracts, which consist in the renewal of such contracts for an unusually long term in the period between the deadline for transposing Directive 1999/70 and the date on which the transposing legislation entered into force".
The case will now return to the Labour Court for a final determination. However Impact national secretary Louise O'Donnell said that the Department of Finance should drop its appeal.
