A Black warehouse employee has won a race harassment claim for £3,000 after a fellow worker wrote the word “slave” on a piece of machinery.
Seedy Fofana, a former employee at Window Widgets in Gloucester, which deals in plastic and metal parts for windows, was the only Black worker in the warehouse. He originally sought £500,000 in compensation after resigning a month after seeing the phrase written on a Hubtex machine.
The word had not been intended as a racial slur but a comment on the working conditions of the warehouse, an employment tribunal heard. Another worker, Tony Bennett, had written variants of the word on multiple items of machinery in protest at working conditions.
The employer, who removed all graffiti produced by Mr Bennett but did not see the final, offending piece, was found to have created a “hostile, humiliating and offensive environment for him” at the tribunal in Bristol.
The tribunal found that while finding in the complainant’s favour might seem “harsh”, the presence of the highly-charged phrase had to warrant punishment.
Judge David Hughes said: “This is because the term ‘slave’ will, we find, evoke in contemporary English speakers the enslavement of Black people. All right-thinking people regard slavery as a monstrosity.
“Mr Fofana, an evidently proud Black man, feels the evil of slavery viscerally. That is understandable and respectable. We accept his sense of hurt at the graffito is genuine.”
He added: “The graffito could bear a number of meanings. It could carry the meaning that [the colleague] intended. It might have been understood as a comment on obedient machinery… taking the place of the labour of humans, or on humans’ relationship to machines.
“But when one hears the word slavery, English speakers in this jurisdiction in this decade will probably first think of the enslavement of Black people by white people.”
