The Employment Tribunal judgement surrounding the FBU’s claim that employees contracted to the Retained Duty System (RDS) should be treated as Part-time workers was finally delivered yesterday (11 March 2008).

Naturally the RFU welcomes the judgement that those working the RDS will now be treated the same as their Wholetime counterparts. Indeed it was the RFU that submitted thousands of claims shortly after the FBU in 2000 which covered a wider spectrum of points whereby Retained personnel were treated differently to their detriment.

Since the original applications in 2000 some of these issues have been overtaken by events, for example since 6 April 2006 RDS personnel have been able to enter into a new National Firefighters Pension Scheme (NFPS) and within the 2003 pay agreement RDS staff receive the same hourly rate of pay as Wholetime personnel.

Now that the judgement has been released the RFU will be seeking legal advice to ascertain what this actually means for all current and past RDS employees. As with most legal judgements of this size it is not necessarily obvious as to what exactly the implications are, needless to say we will be advising our members and local officials in the near future when the ramifications of the judgement are made clear.

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