Diversity chief racially discriminated against worker

Engineer awarded £14k for being told she must have been ‘oppressed’ because of her Latina background

A SKY diversity officer racially discriminated against a mixed-race colleague when telling her she must have been “oppressed” because of her Latina heritage, an employment tribunal ruled.

Jane Bradbury was left “distressed” after Rosemary Cook made the remark as she prepared to give a presentation about racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ms Cook, an inclusion advocate for Sky In-home Services, was immediately challenged after she made the assumption about the “oppression” Ms Bradbury must have experienced in her life, the hearing was told.

Following the conversation, Ms Bradbury, 50, became “very upset” and selfconscious about her skin colour, causing her to take several days off work as she was worried about being treated differently because of her race, the tribunal heard.

Now, the field engineer has successfully sued Sky In-home Services for race discrimination and has been awarded £14,000 in compensation.

The tribunal ruled that although Ms Cook had not meant to cause offence, the remark was “blunt” and an assumption that amounted to stereotyping.

The hearing was told Ms Bradbury joined Sky as a customer advisor in 2010. In March 2018, she moved to the firm’s In-home Services department as part of its first cohort of female trainees taking part in a new Women in Home Service scheme dedicated to hiring more female engineers.

She is believed to have been based in Stockport, Greater Manchester.

The tribunal heard that by September 2018, Ms Bradbury – who was adopted and raised by white parents – had qualified as a field engineer and later became an inclusion advocate with Ms Cook.

In June 2020, she was left upset after Ms Cook rang her to discuss her views on the presentation she was preparing to give on issues of inclusion and diversity.

The panel was told: “Ms Bradbury stated that she did not agree with the terms of all of the slides she was told about, although at that time she did not have access to them.

“Ms Cook explained those slides and said to Ms Bradbury words to the effect that she would have suffered oppression because of her race, and the colour of her skin.

“Ms Bradbury expressed her views to the contrary, forcefully.”

After raising the issue with bosses,

Ms Bradbury was told she was being removed from her role as an inclusion advocate to protect her “emotional wellbeing”, and was later sacked for gross misconduct following an investigation that was launched when she failed to self-isolate after returning from Spain on a holiday, which was in breach of government guidelines.

At the employment tribunal, she lost claims of unfair dismissal relating to her sacking as well as a claim of sex discrimination.

However, she won a claim of race discrimination for Ms Cook’s comments.