A cleaner has won her Employment Tribunal claim for racial harassment after being left “deeply offended and uncomfortable” when racial slurs were used in an equality and diversity training course that she participated in.
Cardiff Employment Tribunal ruled unanimously in favour of Theresa Georges. You can read the full judgment here.
Georges worked as a cleaner for housing association Pobl Group, in Swansea. As part of her induction she attended equality and diversity training. Following this she alleged that a facilitator in the company’s learning and development team wrote ‘the N-word’ in full on a flipchart and ti was repeated three times by colleagues in the context of a training session on discriminatory words. Delegates were asked, in this session, to “shout out the most derogatory and offensive words that they could think of” so that the trainer could write them in full on the board.
Georges, the only black person in the room, told the tribunal she “felt under pressure to say the N-word but instead offered the word ‘cabbage’.” The trainer told the Tribunal that the exercise was introduced and concluded with an explanation that it was designed to show that some people found specific discriminatory words offensive, when others did not. Georges, however, told the tribunal she felt in a “state of shock” and requested annual leave using an online system before she left the training. The leave was not authorised, but Georges did not come into work the following day.
Georges complained to her line manager about the use of the term in the training and filed a complaint with the HR department. She was signed off sick with stress.
The complaint was investigated by a senior HR business partner for learning and development, but the grievance was not upheld. Georges appealed against the grievance but was unsuccessful. She then took her case to the tribunal, claiming the use of the word in the training environment amounted to racial harassment.
The Tribunal found that she had suffered racial harassment by her former employer.
Judge Frazer said: “It was not reasonable to expect people to shout out full discriminatory words in a group context, even in circumstances where they had been given a ‘trigger warning’, so to speak. [Pobl] had warned delegates that the words could not be used under any circumstances but was prepared to allow its employees to be ‘trigger happy’ with discriminatory words in a group context.”
