A delivery driver who swore at a colleague during an argument at work has won his unfair dismissal case and is now in line for compensation.
Robert Ogden, who worked for wholesale provider Booker, called a female employee a ‘f****** m***’ while they were discussing weight loss classes and doughnuts.
After she complained to her bosses, Mr Ogden was later sacked, but is now set to receive a payout after a tribunal found that such behaviour was commonplace in the “toxic, dysfunctional office” and in the north of the country.
Judge Jetinder Shergill said: “I am satisfied that swearing should not be acceptable in a workplace, although common everyday experience, particularly in the North is that the F word is used quite often spoken in the public sphere.
“It is interesting that the manager conducting the interview did not intervene to stop the claimant from using expletives. It tends to support a culture within the workplace that stood apart from what might be considered acceptable workplace norms.”
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Mr Ogden, who had worked at Tesco-owned Booker since 2016, admitted he’d said to his colleague: “You can’t do that, are you a f***ing m***? no wonder it takes you 19 weeks to lose a stone, it hasn’t taken me 19 weeks.”
He was dismissed in October 2023 after the woman formally raised a grievance of bullying in August 2023.
She said Mr Ogden had been “very aggressive” and that she had felt “violated and shocked” after the clash in the Greater Manchester office.
The tribunal heard that she had called a friend in tears, claiming she was “sick of it” and had “had enough’” and Mr Ogden was later dismissed for gross misconduct due to breaching the company’s dignity at work policy.
But he claimed he had been singled out and the tribunal agreed there “was clearly a lack of consistency in enforcement of expected standards”.
The judge said: “What the claimant said was offensive and may have crossed a line. However, having not been informed previously that this conduct was causing offence, the decision to dismiss the claimant when assessing all of the defects and concerns holistically with the process failings, is harsh.”
A hearing to determine Mr Ogden’s payout has yet to take place.
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