Cities may owe more than they think – are your 24-hour schedules compliant?
Massachusetts Appeals Court clarifies military-leave pay: forty non-consecutive 24-hour days count; HR should align tracking, CBAs, and pay practices.
On November 21, 2025, the Massachusetts Appeals Court reversed a lower court and clarified how public employers must pay eligible employees on military leave under G. L. c. 33, § 59(a). In Robert Driscoll v. City of Melrose (No. 24-P-1114), the court held that employees are entitled to full civilian pay for up to forty 24-hour periods of qualifying military service in any federal fiscal year, and those days need not be consecutive. For employees who work 24-hour tours, such as firefighters, a single 24-hour shift counts as one “day,” even if a collective bargaining agreement divides it into day and night segments.
The dispute arose from Melrose’s handling of firefighter Robert Driscoll’s military leave. Driscoll served as a city firefighter from 2002 until his retirement in October 2022 and concurrently as an officer in the Air National Guard. By agreement, the department’s 24-hour tours ran from 7 a.m. to 7 a.m. and were internally split into a 10-hour day segment and a 14-hour night segment for certain leave purposes. Between October 2019 and 2021, Driscoll missed multiple 24-hour tours for training and an extended active-duty deployment. After exchanges over pay, the city compensated him for twenty 24-hour tours per federal fiscal year.
Driscoll...
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