Tom Wood obtains £124k judgment
Tom Wood successfully represented a former sales director in an unfair dismissal and race discrimination claim. The respondent is a company specialising in the sale of French property. The parent company is based in France. The claimant was a sales director based in a subsidiary in Great Britain. He said that, after a change of management of the business, he felt unwanted by the new managing director, and he believed that the reason for that was that he did not speak French sufficiently well to be able to communicate with the managing director by telephone. After having been demoted, matters culminated in a meeting between the claimant and managing director, with translation being provided by the claimant’s line manager. It appeared to the claimant that he was being dismissed at that meeting, albeit by virtue of the translation, it might have been the case that that was not what was really intended.
Having successfully applied that the respondent’s response be struck out, Tom submitted that, although the managing director’s comments may have been mis-translated, following the guidance in Omar v Epping Forest CAB, the words heard by the claimant were sufficient to amount to dismissal and all the other circumstances pointed to dismissal having been the intention of the managing director (despite the claimant attending work for three weeks post-dismissal). The tribunal agreed.
The tribunal further agreed that dismissal was because of the managing director’s requirement for employees to be able to speak fluent French with him (albeit it was not necessary in order to carry out the role), and as such, was indirectly discriminatory on grounds of race (accepting that the pool for selection was British and French employees). There were additional incidents of race-related harassment.
The claimant was awarded slightly more than £124,000 made up of a basic award, loss of earnings and pension contributions for almost three years, injury to feelings, maximum uplift for a failure to follow the Acas Code on Grievance and Disciplinary procedures, interest, and grossed up for tax.
