Judge slams Air Malta for leaving part-timers on zero hours while denying it fired them<\/p>\n
Air Malta could not simply stop giving part-time workers shifts and leave them in limbo without telling them they had lost their jobs, the Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The court rubbished the former national airline’s attempt to argue that it had not unfairly dismissed a group of long-serving part-time clerks because their contracts allowed it to allocate them zero hours.<\/p>\n
The five workers had been rostered for regular shifts over periods of up to nine years.<\/p>\n
But when Air Malta wound down its ground handling division in late 2022, they were assigned 0 hours of work a week – and, the court found, no proper notification that their employment had come to an end.<\/p>\n
“Staff have their dignity and must not be used like a switch that you turn on and off when you want, and abandon once served,” Judge Lawrence Mintoff said, as he upheld the Industrial Tribunal’s ruling.<\/p>\n
Allocated zero hours, but not officially fired<\/b><\/p>\n
When Air Malta transferred operations of its ground handling division over to a third-party Italian operator, a group of part-time clerks in the Passenger and Ground Operations Division found themselves out in the cold.<\/p>\n
Instead of issuing formal redundancy notices or registering their termination with Jobsplus, they said Air Malta froze them out.<\/p>\n
On 30 November 2022, their IT access was shut off, and they were asked to hand back their airport security passes.<\/p>\n
The airline insisted they had not been sacked at all, but were simply “casual” workers whose contract allowed them to be allocated between zero and 35 hours a week.<\/p>\n
It said that assigning them zero hours was simply an exercise of its contractual rights, rather than a dismissal.<\/p>\n
The clerks disagreed. They had been working regularly and continuously for 18 hours a week, some of them over nine years. The fact that their contracts were labelled “casual” did not change that reality, the court said.<\/p>\n
“In employment relationships, substance – the real facts – cannot be subordinated to formality,” the court said.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeal also endorsed the Tribunal’s approach of looking beyond the letters of the law to deliver real justice.<\/p>\n
“The hallmark of the Tribunal is not a legalistic one, but an instrument to recognise as far as possible the substance of the case and make every effort to achieve real justice rather than purely legalistic justice,” the court said.<\/p>\n
Workers left to discover they had been fired<\/b><\/p>\n
The airline also argued that the clerks had not been dismissed because it had never registered the end of their employment with Jobsplus.<\/p>\n
The absence of a Jobsplus notification did not mean that the clerks were still employed, Judge Lawrence Mintoff said.<\/p>\n
“It is true that the respondent company did not register the termination of employment with the Jobsplus agency. But that does not necessarily mean that the worker concerned is actually still employed by the company.”<\/p>\n
The court said Air Malta could not leave workers to piece together that they had lost their jobs from a series of events, like removing their access to the Dakar leave system, and asking them to return their airport passes, instead of telling them directly.<\/p>\n
Workers could claim pay-out if they gave up government jobs<\/b><\/p>\n
The airline had rolled out Voluntary Employment Transfer (VETS) and Voluntary Retirement Schemes (VRS) as it wound down its operations.<\/p>\n
The schemes offered full-time employees exit lump sums of up to €80,000.<\/p>\n
But these part-time clerks were barred from applying because Air Malta insisted, they had not been dismissed. In addition, they held primary full-time jobs in the public sector.<\/p>\n
Last October, the Industrial Tribunal ruled that Air Malta had indeed unfairly dismissed the workers.<\/p>\n
The tribunal ordered Air Malta to compensate the workers in one of two ways. Workers who wanted the pro-rata equivalent of the voluntary retirement scheme pay-out would have to resign from their government jobs and accept the scheme’s six-year ban on public-sector employment.<\/p>\n
Those who chose to keep their civil service jobs would instead receive a lump sum in lieu of notice, calculated using their highest weekly hours and basic wage rate.<\/p>\n
Both Air Malta and the clerks appealed the tribunal’s decision.<\/p>\n
The employees argued that the Industrial Tribunal erred in law by conditioning their entitlement to the voluntary retirement scheme payout on their resignation from their primary full-time civil posts.<\/p>\n
They said being forced to choose between their public-sector careers or statutory notice pay amounted to an inadequate remedy for unfair dismissal.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, Air Malta sought to overturn the fact that they had dismissed the employees. They stuck to their guns, arguing that allocating zero hours to the workers was not a dismissal.<\/p>\n
Workers could not pick and choose scheme conditions<\/b><\/p>\n
Judge Mintoff said that the workers could not claim the financial benefits of the scheme while cherry-picking to avoid its restrictive condition of resigning from their civil service posts.<\/p>\n
Allowing part-time workers to receive a state-funded retirement lump sum while retaining full-time government salaries would amount to double-dipping from public funds.<\/p>\n
It would also undermine the purpose of the scheme.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeal therefore upheld the tribunal’s finding that Air Malta had unfairly dismissed the workers, while confirming the conditions attached to the voluntary retirement scheme compensation.<\/p>\n