A Sikh NHS worker has twice failed to convince a tribunal she was subjected to racial discrimination when a colleague compared her nimble execution of a fly to a scene from 1980s martial arts flick Karate Kid.
Narinderjeet Kaur Dhillon squashed the bug while leading a training session with Karl Ward at the Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust, Yorkshire in October 2017.
Six months later she lodged a bullying claim with HR in which she claimed Mr Ward had reacted by comparing her to Mr Miyagi, who famously achieved the same feat with just a pair of chopsticks.
Ms Dhillon said the joke had prompted laughter from both the trainees and herself, and the claim did not lead to any disciplinary action.
After being sacked for ‘misconduct and poor performance’ in November 2018, including turning up late on 13 days in a 14-day period, she launched four claims against her former employer.
This led to a ‘lengthy’ string of employment tribunal hearings which she repeatedly lost.
One of the claims said she had been victimised by the trust for making earlier complaints against her manager.
In March this year, two weeks before the first hearing of the claim, Ms Dhillon asked the tribunal to add a claim of racial discrimination.
She said the joke was racist because it ‘compared her to an old Chinese man, and because there is a separate and distinct martial arts culture within her own Sikh tradition’.
The Mr Miyagi character is depicted as a Japanese man, while the American actor who portrayed him, Pat Morita, was born to Japanese immigrant parents.
Ms Dhillon’s explanation for failing to lodge the claim earlier was that she had only seen the film for the first time on TV two weeks ago, and had not realised the meaning of Mr Ward’s joke at the time.
But the tribunal ruled there was ‘no reasonable prospect’ that the comment could be seen as discriminatory, that it was ‘made because of [her] race’, or that she had been treated unfairly as a result.
Employment Judge Lancaster also rejected Ms Dhillon’s excuse for being ‘substantially out of time’ to make her claim, which came more than three years after the typical three-month window for such complaints.
He accepted the comment might have counted as harassment ‘related to race’ but added: ‘This too would be extremely tenuous.’
He added: ‘Moreover at the time the claimant’s own perception was not in fact that this violated her dignity, or created an intimidating, hostile, degrading , humiliating or offensive environment for her.
‘The comment was clearly not purposed or intended to have such an effect and objectively nor would it be reasonable in the circumstances to find that it did.’
The claim was rejected ‘in its entirety’ in April, with the tribunal upholding the trust’s decision to sack Ms Dhillon.
She attempted to overturn the decision in June, but her appeal was rejected for being ‘mostly incomprehensible and irrelevant to the actual issues’ in the case.
Ms Dhillon’s other unsuccessful claims included unfair dismissal, unauthorised deductions from her wages and disability discrimination related to ‘root canal treatment’, ‘pre-cancerous cervical cancer’ and a recurring cyst.
All three were lodged more than seven months after her sacking.
The tribunal rejected her arguments that she had not able to meet the three-month time limit for the first two.
It decided to make an exception for her disability discrimination claim, but after a further three months a second employment judge ruled that her ailments did not make her disabled at the time.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
from News – Metro https://ift.tt/Q4eUK6l
0 Comments