An employee of a black warehouse has won a race harassment claim for £ 3,000, when a fellow worker wrote the word “slave” on a piece of machinery.
Seed Phofana, a former employee in Window Widget GlosterWho deal with plastic and metal parts for windows, was the only black worker in the warehouse. He originally demanded £ 500,000 in compensation after resigning a month after seeing the phrase written on a hubtex machine.
The term was not aimed at racial solution, but a comment on the working conditions of the warehouse, a employment tribunal heard. Another activist, Tony Bennett wrote variants of the word on many machinery items in protest in the event of work.
The employer, who removed all the graffiti built by Mr. Bennett, was found to be the final, derogatory piece, found that the tribunal was created “hostile, insulting and aggressive environment”. Bristle,
The tribunal found that it could seem “rigid” to find in favor of the complainant, the presence of highly-charged phrases had to warrant the punishment.
Judge David Hughes said: “This is because the word ‘slave’ will be, we find, in contemporary English speakers increase the slavery of black people. All the right thinking people consider slavery to be a demonic.
“Mr. Fofana, a clearly proud black person, feels the evil of slavery. It makes sense and respectable. We accept his feeling of injury in frescoes.”
He said: “Frescoes can tolerate many meanings. It can take the meaning [the colleague] intended. It can be understood as a comment on obedient machinery … instead of human labor, or on human relations for machines.
“But when a word listens to slavery, in this decade, English speakers in this jurisdiction will probably think about the slavery of black people by the first white people.”