Barclays must pay a former employee almost £50,000 after failing to adjust her hours while she suffered from endometriosis.
Anca Lacatus worked for the bank as an analyst between 2016 and 2020. While she was working there she experienced increasingly debilitating symptoms of endometriosis – a chronic disease that affects the lining of the uterus – as well as a deterioration in her mental health.
In 2019 she began a period of sick leave, during which time the company announced it was making redundancies in her department. During this time she issued her first tribunal claim – for discrimination, victimisation and harassment based on characteristics of disability, race and sex.
Reasonable adjustments
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She was made redundant during her sick leave, at which time she filed a second claim of unfair dismissal. In the first ruling in this case in 2021, she lost her claims for unfair dismissal and breach of contract.
The tribunal heard that, after being dismissed, Lacatus returned home to Romania to live with her parents because of financial constraints. She still remains unfit to work because of her health issues, and “sees no prospect of a return to her future career”.
While the court dismissed a number of claims brought by Lacatus, it upheld that Barclays had failed to ensure she did not work longer than her contracted hours – a reasonable adjustment given her chronic condition; and that the environment she worked in amounted to sex discrimination. Her manager was known to refer to female colleagues as “birds” on occasion.
In deciding her compensation, the tribunal said: “The position before us was stark. It is the claimant’s position that the unlawful treatment by Barclays had led her physical and mental health to decline to a point where she had lost all hope of renewing her career in financial services.
“She argued that the respondents should be held entirely responsible for that decline in her health. As that decline had left her unable to work she said that she could recover loss of wages both past and into the future.”
Lacatus claimed that she had lost £1.3 million before tax when taking loss of earnings and the cost of her medical care into account, while Barclays suggested an award of £16,000.
The remedy judgment ruled that she should be paid almost £31,000 as a combination of damages for personal injury and the bank exacerbating her endometriosis and mental health, and injury to feelings. After interest, this amounted to £48,202.14.
However, no award was given for loss of earnings, as the tribunal ruled that there was a “100% chance” she would have faced the same mental and physical health prognosis without the bank’s lack of reasonable adjustments.
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