Nigerian employee awarded €30,000 over racist incidents in Ireland

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Nigerian employee awarded €30,000 over racist incidents at work

CPL Solutions Ltd, doing business as Flexsource Recruitment, was obligated to pay €30,000 to agency worker, Victor Kings Oluebube for racial abuse under the Employment Equality Act, according to Alan Haugh, deputy chairman of the Labour court.

Mr. Kings Oluebube was posted to Kuehne & Nagel as a warehouse operative by CPL Solutions Ltd, a Dublin-based company, at the time of the racial abuse. Mr. Haugh stated that Mr. Kings Oluebube’s compensation should be stringently enforced and appropriate to the injury he has suffered, given the nature of the harassment and the implications.

The €30,000 compensation is roughly equal to 63 weeks of gross salary. After establishing the evidence that no actions were made to address the implications of Mr. Kings Oluebube’s racist abuse, Mr. Haugh stated that CPL Solutions did not assert legal defenses to racial harassment under the Employment Equality Acts.

On a day in late February 2019, Mr. Kings Oluebube claims his team leader called him a chimp and made monkey noises while performing monkey dances in front of a group of co-workers. At the time, Mr. Kings Oluebube did not report the assault. The Team Leader again repeated the same racial abuse on Mr. Kings Oluebube in front of other teammates on May 21st, 2019.

Mr. Kings Oluebube reported the alleged racist insults to the warehouse manager, who then informed CPL Solutions. The allegations of two racist occurrences were reviewed by CPL Solutions, and the charges of harassment on the race track were upheld, with the team leader receiving a final written warning. Mr. Kings Oluebube requested the specifics of the investigation’s result in writing.

Because of the employer’s “very rudimentary bullying and harassment policy” and an “ad hoc approach” to the investigation of Mr. Kings Oluebube’s accusations by a Flexsource employee. The Labour Court’s judgment overturns an earlier Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) decision that dismissed Mr. Kings Oluebube’s racial discrimination claim.

In June 2020, the WRC Adjudicator found that CPL Solutions was allowed to claim a defense under the Employment Equality Acts by demonstrating that it took steps to remedy the harassment’s consequences and prevent a repetition. As a result, according to the WRC, CPL Solutions did not harass Mr. Kings Oluebube’s race. Following an appeal by Mr. Kings Oluebube against the WRC verdict, the case was brought before the Labour Court. It was discovered that two occurrences resulted in racist harassment.

In response, the CPL employee who did the investigation stated that Flexsource does not condone what occurred between Mr. Kings Oluebube and his coworker. Mr. Kings Oluebube had to face “the burden of that scenario,” she said, and Flexsource was very sad.

According to the CPL Solutions witness, Mr. Kings Oluebube and his coworkers had not received any formal training in the prevention of workplace bullying and harassment. Mr. Haugh claimed that the CPL Solutions investigator just told Mr. Kings Oluebube that she had finished her investigation, that she had upheld his allegations, and that the accused perpetrator had been sanctioned orally in a broad sense.

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