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Several polish employees were successful in their recent Equality Tribunal case against their former employers. The workers claimed that they had been racially harassed by their former employers. The employer had sent several Polish employees to work for a third party company. While the employees were working for this particular company, they were subjected to verbal abuse by their supervisors.

One of the supervisors, a Ms. A, consistently spoke to her Polish colleagues using derogatory language, referring to them as “animals” and that they were lazy. One of the Polish claimants admitted to the Tribunal that he was afraid to go into work because of Ms. A's behaviour. The former employees submitted that they had informed on numerous occasions a Polish-speaking work colleague, Ms. C, of their grievances. However, the respondent company never investigated these complaints.

The Equality Officer, Gary O'Doherty, acknowledged that while respondents could not intervene in the third party company, they were aware of the harassment occurring. Mr. O'Doherty further stated that they sent in a further 3 Polish employees into that workplace, despite knowing of the harassment that was occurring. The Equality Officer said it was “unacceptable” that one of the Polish claimants, Mr. Kowalski, had been subjected to over 4 months of racial harassment and that the respondents were fully aware of this. Most of the Polish claimants were awarded approx €4,000 in compensation. However, Mr. Kowalski, because of the length of time which he suffered racial harassment, was awarded €10,000 in compensation.

What is harassment?

Harassment has been given a broad definition under section 14 of the Employment Equality Acts 1998-2004. Harassment is defined as where there is any form of unwanted conduct, or verbal or physical contact. If a person is humiliated or degraded on any of the 9 discriminatory grounds under the Acts (e.g. race), this will also be considered to be harassment.

Employer's Liability

Under section 14 of the Acts, unless the employer has acted to prevent harassment as reasonably practicable, then they may be liable for co-workers and even client's actions. In order to prevent this occurring, an employer should include a bullying and harassment code of practice within their employee's contracts. The employer must also ensure that there is a proper grievance procedure provided for in the employees' contracts or in an employee handbook.