ABSTRACT
Seniority may be relevant to employment benefits in a number of different ways. For example, incremental pay systems mean that greater seniority may be associated with higher pay; total accumulated seniority profoundly affects pension entitlement; priority for promotion or other benefits may be dependent on seniority as may access to fringe benefits; and reverse seniority – last-in, first-out – remains an extremely common method of selecting employees for redundancy. In the USA, where employment benefits are even more dependent on seniority than in the UK, many indirect discrimination cases have arisen where a prior pattern of direct discrimination prevented black people from acquiring the seniority which at a later date might be crucial for the allocation of benefits, even though s 703(h) of the Civil Rights Act 1964 provides a specific defence for ‘bona fide seniority systems’.168
