When Lorna Rooke’s NHS colleagues entered her personality traits into a light-hearted online quiz to gauge which Star Wars character she most resembled, they had no idea this apparently innocent piece of workplace banter would lead to a court hearing and ultimately cost the taxpayer £30,000.
But then the blood donation worker was told she allegedly bore most similarity to Darth Vader. Ms Rooke decided it was no laughing matter and took her bosses to an employment tribunal.
Last month, following three years of legal action and associated fees incurred by the health service, a judge ruled that comparing a colleague to the supreme baddie of Star Wars was a ‘detriment’ – meaning it caused harm or had a negative impact on Ms Rooke – and ordered her former employer to pay compensation for ‘injury to feelings’.
Judge Kathryn Ramsden, who has been an employment tribunal judge in south London since 2023, concluded that having a personality compared to the Sith Lord was ‘insulting’ and ‘upsetting’, as he is widely known as a ‘legendary villain’.
She awarded Ms Rooke £12,000 for this grievance, and a further £17,000 over a failure to allow her to rescind the resignation she handed in after the incident.
Remarkably, the seemingly spurious case of Lorna Rooke – she said she was made to feel ‘unpopular’ as a result of the Star Wars quiz – is far from an anomaly.
Last week alone, there was the case of the autistic children’s centre worker Nicholas James who was awarded £17,154, including £15,000 for injury to his feelings, after his boss called him a ‘weirdo’. There was also the executive who complained about her male boss’s use of the word ‘lads’ when discussing the performance of a female colleague in a mixed-sex group. Although the judge said there was no intention to discriminate or cause offence by the use of that word ‘lads’, she warned that such language might be ‘perceived’ as offensive.
The truth is the employment tribunal system is at breaking point, dealing with an ever-increasing tide of workplace grievances many of which appear on the face of it utterly absurd.
Lorna Rooke took her bosses to an employment tribunal after an online quiz she did with her colleagues said Darth Vader was the Star Wars character she is most similar to
A Daily Mail investigation has found that there is currently a backlog of 50,000 cases and a shortage of judges to hear them. In the three months to December last year alone, 11,000 claims were accepted to be heard.
The number of claims has risen steadily ever since the trade union Unison challenged, in the Supreme Court, the fees of £390 to £1,600 charged to claimants to have a tribunal hearing or appeal. In 2017, in a landmark victory for the union, the justices agreed, ruling that the fees were inconsistent with the common law right to access justice and they were scrapped.
The fees had been introduced four years earlier by the then-justice secretary Chris Grayling and had a stunning impact on the number of cases launched by disgruntled ex-employees – in the wake of the legislation, the number of cases brought by individuals dropped by almost 70 per cent.
Now it is once again free to take an employer to a tribunal, the current backlog of 50,000 cases is up from less than 9,500 for the same period a decade ago. A whopping 426 per cent increase.
The current open caseload is the highest it has been for 15 years, barring a brief spike of around 50,200 cases in 2021 when the Covid pandemic led to a slew of lay-offs and subsequent court actions.
Before being ousted last year, the Conservative government had planned to introduce a £55 fee for bringing a case, in an attempt to cover the running costs of the tribunals.
However, the new charge was opposed by a number of trade unions who said it could prevent access to justice for those who could not afford it and ‘gives a green light to bad employers to exploit their workers’. Labour is yet to decide whether it supports the introduction of fees.
But what is clear following an analysis of some recent employment tribunals is that they have become something of a legal free-for-all, with claimants – many representing themselves to avoid paying legal fees – taking their employers to court over the most speculative and, occasionally, downright bizarre allegations of discrimination, harassment or unfair dismissal.
Gemma Spencer sued her employer for race discrimination and harassment after she was asked ‘what she was smoking’ – which she took to be a reference to her ‘Rastafarian hairstyle’
And with a succession of softly-softly judges being asked to dissect what often appear to be nothing more than the sort of day-to-day goings-on to be found in any workplace, are we now in a situation where public money can be used to assuage even the most trivial and fleeting hurt feelings?
The Government is currently attempting to push through the Employment Rights Bill, which will make it easier for employees to claim for unfair dismissal by removing the two-year qualifying period.
Given that this could well trigger a deluge of new claims, Labour is now rapidly attempting to hire some 1,000 judges and tribunal members – at considerable cost to the public purse.
With the new legislation’s potential cost to businesses put at up to £5billion by Labour’s own bean-counters, here, the Mail examines a number of the recent employment tribunal cases that have been clogging up our courts – so you can decide whether the system is ripe for reform.
It’s ‘racist’ to ask if a black person has been smoking
Contracts administrator Gemma Spencer sued her employer, Schneider Electric, for race discrimination and harassment after she was dismissed.
In 2020, she was told her boss had asked ‘what she was smoking’ after he blamed her for figures in quarterly reports that were said to be incorrect.
Ms Spencer, who is black, believed the comment related to the fact she had her hair in braids – what she described as a ‘Rastafarian hairstyle’ – and claimed it was racial in tone.
At the tribunal, her employers claimed she was ‘hypersensitive’. Ms Spencer’s manager told the tribunal that he may have told a colleague the figures were so wide of the mark that bosses may ask if he was ‘smoking crack’ but did not imagine his colleague would relay a similar phrase to the complainant.
Following last year’s Birmingham hearing, however, where Ms Spencer represented herself while her employers instructed lawyers, Judge Rachel Wedderspoon ruled that Ms Spencer did indeed face harassment because of her race.
She concluded that asking ‘were you smoking’ was ‘based on a stereotypical view of a black person with dreadlocks smoking drugs’.
The judge added: ‘The claimant was offended. A reasonable person would be offended.’
In April, Schneider Electric was ordered to pay Ms Spencer £35,109 for the ‘injury to feelings’ she suffered.
Birthday card costs taxpayer £25,000
Most people might be expected to view a greeting card from a well-wisher as an act of kindness.
Not Kani Toure. The former customer services officer for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), based in Croydon, south London, was on sick leave with work-related stress and had told her employers she did not wish to be contacted. She had even emailed her boss to say that she didn’t want to celebrate her birthday.
Kani Toure was awarded £20,000 for injury to feelings after her bosses sent her a birthday card despite her being asked to be left alone
But her bosses did contact her repeatedly and sent her a birthday card, nonetheless.
Judge Adam Leith, at a hearing in Croydon last year, concluded that sending her a card and contacting her while on sick leave amounted to ‘unwanted conduct’.
He noted that contacting Ms Toure 11 times in three weeks had created a ‘hostile and intimidating atmosphere’ for the employee and the company should instead have complied with her wishes.
Ms Toure – who represented herself at the tribunal and spent four days giving evidence – made a total of more than 70 allegations against her employer, ranging from harassment to race and disability discrimination.
Ten of her claims of race and disability harassment and discrimination were backed by the tribunal and in March she was awarded £25,251 in compensation, including £20,000 for injury to feelings.
Missed work meeting to supervise gardeners
Since the pandemic, working from home has become an important and, to many, treasured aspect of a successful work-life balance.
But as employers increasingly expect to see more of their employees in the office or face-to-face for big meetings, the do’s and dont’s of WFH are increasingly being aired in employment tribunals.
Indeed, the explosion in cases in recent years can partly be put down to increasingly different expectations on the part of employers and their workers since the pandemic.
This divide was graphically illustrated in the case of IT director Ben Wicken, who resigned from his job with IT services company Akita Systems and then took his former employer to court for constructive unfair dismissal.
A tribunal sitting in south London in February heard that Mr Wicken was asked by managing director Christophe Boudet to attend a meeting to resolve a disagreement.
However, Mr Wicken asked if he could instead attend remotely via Microsoft Teams ‘as he needed to work from home for the rest of the week because he had work being done on his garden and so he would need to be there’.
Mr Boudet was said to be ‘very disappointed’ with this and said it appeared that Mr Wicken was not taking the process ‘seriously’.
In a follow-up mediation meeting, an external HR professional questioned Mr Wicken’s decision to work from home and, after initially ‘not understanding what he had done wrong’, Mr Wicken conceded he should have attended in person.
Ben Wicken was awarded more than £30,000 for unfair dismissal after his boss was left ‘very disappointed’ when he asked to work from home to supervise gardening work
But Judge Lisa Burge said he did not contribute to his dismissal, as his actions, including prioritising the gardener over the mediation meeting, did not constitute ‘culpable or blameworthy’ conduct.
Mr Wicken was awarded more than £30,000 for unfair dismissal.
DWP worker ‘harassed’ over Stephen Hawking jibe
In any office, there are foot-in-mouth moments when someone says something they quickly realise they perhaps shouldn’t have.
But ‘enhanced work coach’ Alison McRobbie was determined not to let a civil service colleague off the hook when she made a jibe of which she disapproved.
Ms McRobbie, who has a disability after being injured in a motoring accident in 2017, requested an adapted chair from her employer, the Department for Work and Pensions.
When it was delivered in 2022, a colleague spun around in the chair and said she ‘felt like Stephen Hawking’ – the late wheelchair-bound physicist.
Trans bus driver Amanda Fischer claimed she was discriminated against on gender reassignment grounds
At an employment tribunal in Southampton last year, Judge Catherine Rayner noted that the colleague had no intention of offending Ms McRobbie and ‘most people would not find this to be offensive’.
However in her judgement handed down in January, she concluded that, because the complainant was ‘very sensitive’, it amounted to harassment in relation to her disability.
Ms McRobbie, who is now a social media influencer, is due compensation which will be decided at a later date.
While some of these successful claims are fanciful enough, analysis of some unsuccessful actions, which can take up years of court time as well as the resources of employers affected, makes for equally interesting reading.
Transgender bus driver called w*****
A transgender bus driver who claimed she was discriminated against on gender reassignment grounds when a colleague called her a ‘w*****’ lost her case – when a tribunal ruled that the incident didn’t even take place.
Amanda Fischer, who represented herself, sued London United Busways saying she was treated less favourably owing to her ‘protected characteristic’ of gender reassignment.
She said that on one occasion, a bus driver drove ‘millimetres’ from her, leaving her fearing for her safety, and on another she was called a ‘w*****’ by a fellow driver.
Owing to the evidence presented at the 2023 tribunal, Judge Kathryn Ramsden and a panel concluded the incident did not actually take place – but said, had it done so, Ms Fischer would have had a case for discrimination because it is not a ‘gender-neutral insult’ and is normally applied to men.
Ms Fischer’s case against the bus company was dismissed.
