The London Central employment tribunal has reconsidered a case in which an executive was denied a pay rise after her boss allegedly claimed that her husband earned a large enough salary already.
Piang Jiang has been awarded a further £3,000 for victimisation after her employer, metal products firm James Durrans & Sons, had threatened to make counterclaims against her if she pursued her claim.
The original tribunal hearings, which concluded in December 2022, ruled that it was wrong for Jiang’s boss to maintain that her household income was “more than enough”.
During that hearing, it was found that Jiang’s boss at the company thought that “a married woman cannot challenge her salary if her husband is a high earner”. Jiang’s husband, David Armitage, was a director at the same company with a salary of up to £270,000, while she was a part-time senior manager earning £36,000.
She successfully sued the Sheffield-based multinational company and was originally awarded £4,000 in March this year. However, other claims for equal pay under the Equality Act 2010, for race, sex and marital status discrimination, and for unauthorised deductions from her salary were not well founded, the judge at the first hearing decided.
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The reconsideration hearing, however, overturned the original tribunal’s ruling that the victimisation claim was not well founded.
The tribunal was told that Chris Durrans, the company’s 62-year-old managing director, threatened to make allegations of discrimination against Jiang, 69, if she sued him.
Jiang, who is Chinese, joined the company in 1998 and worked as a senior manager with responsibility for business in China. Her husband, David Armitage, was the company’s operations director, and managed its Chinese subsidiary.
When working full-time, Jiang received a salary of £65,448 and a £30,000 bonus. She decided to go part-time in 2016 but became unhappy because she felt her workload remained too high given her reduced hours.
She raised a complaint in 2021 but the tribunal noted that Durrans responded that he was uncomfortable with the combined level of her household income. Durrans’s brother, Nicholas, 55, also a director at the company, rejected her grievance complaint, which left Jiang “upset and angry”.
At the original hearing, the tribunal acknowledged that Christopher Durrans had consistently denied commenting in the way that was alleged by Jiang. However, it ruled that given “the absence of any explanation” from Durrans for not considering her pay complaint “and the inherently discriminatory nature of the comment he made” it concluded he treated her less favourably on the grounds of sex.
However, the tribunal rejected additional claims of race, sex and marital status discrimination.
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