A SIKH priest paid £50-a-week through voluntary donations by the faithful has won a victory in his fight to prove he was a worker entitled to the national minimum wage.

Tejinder Singh, who served as Granthi, or priest, at Bristol's Sikh Gurdwara in Eastville for seven years until 2009, faces claims from the temple's elders that it flies in the face of Sikh scripture for him to be treated as a worker or employee under minimum wage legislation.

But a top judge has now ruled he can renew his case against the temple's managers before an employment tribunal after pointing out that he had to be available to worshippers for a fixed number of hours every day and was given free accommodation.

The temple's management committee argued that the £50 Mr Singh was given weekly from donations, as well as extra cash from worshippers for performing prayers and blessings, were purely voluntary in nature and did not make him a worker.

No tax or national insurance were deducted from the donations and the temple's management insisted that, to treat him as a worker, would conflict with religious principles of "voluntarism and a traditional interpretation and application of the Sikh scriptures".

As a religious office bearer, the management committee argued Mr Singh had agreed to give voluntary service and to "work without remuneration or any other personal gain".

But, ruling in Mr Singh's favour, Mr Justice Beatson said yesterday that, a Bristol employment tribunal that dismissed Mr Singh's claim last year had "fallen into error" when it decided that he did not fit the definition of a worker under the National Minimum Wage Act 1998.

"Arrangements between a church and its ministers should not lightly be taken as intended to have no legal effect," he told the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

The judge ordered a full re-hearing of his case by the same tribunal on a date to be set.