The High Court has overturned a Labour Court decision allowing ten civil servants to pursue out-of-time equality claims arising from the civil service job-sharing scheme introduced in 1984.
Under Circular 3/84, job-sharing staff could compete for promotion on the same basis as full-time staff, but each year spent job-sharing counted as only six months of full-time service for promotion requirements. The judgment records that the vast majority of civil servants participating in the scheme were women.
The position changed after the European Court of Justice delivered its Gerster judgment on 2 October 1997. That decision held that reducing the value of part-time service in calculating seniority could amount to indirect sex discrimination unless objectively justified.
The civil service scheme was amended in February 1998. Job-sharing service was thereafter credited on the same basis as full-time service for the relevant purposes, with the change applying to appointments made from the date of the Gerster ruling.
Trade unions representing about 500 civil servants subsequently referred equality claims. Ten were selected as test cases on the preliminary question of whether their claims, lodged outside the six-month limit in section 19(5) of the Employment Equality Act 1977, could proceed because there was "reasonable cause" for the delay.
The Labour Court decided in July 2004 that Gerster provided sufficient reasonable cause and directed that the ten cases proceed for investigation.
Ms Justice Laffoy disagreed. She held that ignorance of the legal significance of known facts, or waiting until a later court ruling indicates that a claim is likely to succeed, does not ordinarily amount to a justifiable excuse for missing a statutory limitation period.
The Gerster decision could explain why the claimants acted when they did, but it did not satisfy the statutory requirement of reasonable cause. The Labour Court's 2004 decision was therefore set aside. The High Court did not determine whether the underlying job-sharing arrangements were unlawful in the individual cases.