Fifty-five former workers with TEAM Aer Lingus have won a seven-year legal battle to be treated on the same basis as comparable Aer Lingus staff who remained with the national airline.

The five-judge Supreme Court yesterday overturned a High Court decision limiting to four years the period for which, from their return to Aer Lingus in 1998 following the collapse of TEAM and its sale to FLS, the workers were entitled either to be put on maintenance work or given its monetary value.

Giving the court's judgment, Mr Justice Brian McCracken said the purpose of Aer Lingus management giving guarantees to Aer Lingus workers being seconded to TEAM in 1989 and 1990 was to reassure them they would remain in exactly the same position as if the maintenance of the fleet had never been transferred to TEAM.

This commitment could only make sense if it was unlimited in time, he ruled.

He could not see how it could have been the intention of the parties to the agreement - reached between Aer Lingus and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions after lengthy negotiations and balloted on by Aer Lingus workers - that matters such as seniority, status, working conditions, rights and privileges, including pension entitlements, could possibly be limited in time.

The judge stressed the guarntees given to the Aer Lingus employees seconded to TEAM did not amount to any special privileges but rather put them in the same position in which they would have been had TEAM never existed.

To limit the guarantees would place the workers in a worse position than those Aer Lingus employees who had not transferred to TEAM, which was what the lengthy negotiations between the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Aer Lingus had sought to avoid in the late 1980s, he said.

The judge noted the workers accepted that, on any construction of the agreement or guarantees given to them, they could be in no better position than they would have been if they had not been seconded.

Should there be a need for redundancies or redeployment, they would be on the same risk as if they had always remained working in Aer Lingus.

The workers' concern, the judge said, was that, if the four-year limitation period on their entitlements stood, they would no longer have the benefit of the guarantees given to them and could be effectively demoted.

He would allow their appeal.

The workers had claimed that, when they returned to Aer Lingus, they should have been put on work equivalent to what they did when they left and were also entitled to the same pay and conditions of employment as their Aer Lingus peers who had not left to go to TEAM under FLS ownership.