A black trainee at AIG Asset Management was victimised by a manager who ‘shut down’ a conversation when the claimant complained of unconscious bias, a tribunal has found.
In January 2020, Ms Nyeko told her manager, Ms Monaghan, that she was concerned that there was “unconscious bias” against her in the team she had recently started working for, as she was not being included or being tasked with interesting work.
She said she felt the team needed unconscious bias training and that she hoped to set up an internal employee resources group that would support black employees and offer unconscious bias training.
Monaghan told the Central London employment tribunal that that the claimant did not give any specific examples of what she deemed to be “unconscious bias” and that she did not refer to race discrimination specifically. However, it was believed by Monaghan and colleagues at AIG that Nyeko had been complaining of race discrimination, which the tribunal agreed.
The claimant alleged that Monaghan had closed the discussion down when Monaghan said she had not seen discrimination on the team. This was denied by Monaghan, who told the tribunal: “I never said I had not seen any discrimination at AIG – I said in my [team] I had not seen it. I had no intention of closing it down… I was thinking very seriously about it. I asked for input.”
However, the tribunal found that she had “closed down” the conversation about bias.
Unconscious bias
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The tribunal ruled that the claimant’s allegations about bias amounted to a protected act, although she did not expressly say that she had been subjected to race discrimination.
The judgment said: “Ms Monaghan effectively told a junior black employee that race discrimination did not exist on the team. The tribunal decided that dismissing a junior employee’s concerns in this way, without any undertaking to reflect or discuss the matter again, both ‘put down’ and ‘shut down’ the claimant.
“A reasonable employee in the claimant’s position would feel disadvantaged in the workplace thereafter. They would reasonably consider that serious concerns they raised would be likely to be dismissed, rather than taken seriously.”
The tribunal found that shutting down the conversation and not acting on her concerns had been an act of victimisation.
Managers at AIG were also found to have victimised the claimant when it invited her to an investigation meeting and to discuss allegations that she was not away on holiday and was in the UK, as opposed to Uganda where Nyeko said she had been stranded after losing her visa.
They believed that she had been dishonest about her time away as she had brought forward her holiday booking shortly before going away in order to attend to a family emergency in Uganda, but claimed to have lost her UK visa when she arrived there which meant she had to stay there for longer while a replacement was arranged, returning to the UK when the original holiday booking was set to have expired.
There was a dispute as to whether Nyeko had worked remotely from Uganda during the time she was supposed have been back at work. Nyeko said she had expected to have been paid in full for the time that she worked remotely, but managers thought she had been dishonest about the time she had worked.
The tribunal found it had made an unlawful deductions from her wages when it did not pay her for one of the days she worked remotely. However, the tribunal found that Nyeko had claimed pay for another four days’ work when there was no evidence she had been working remotely, for which the company was right to dismiss her for. It therefore dismissed Nyeko’s claim for wrongful dismissal.
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Compensation will be discussed at a hearing in January 2022.
AIG has been contacted for a response.
