This
week Starbucks is in the news but for all the wrong reasons. Defeats in
Tribunals never make good news for employers particularly when delicate issues
relating to disability discrimination are at stake.HR commonly refer to employment issues as “internal matters” but they can go “external” very quickly.
The
Starbucks case was just one of many queuing up to be heard in a London
employment tribunal last year. This week, even before a decision had been taken
on compensation levels, the case was all over social media and even made it to
the BBC’s 9 O'clock News last night.
The
complainant said Starbucks treated her like she was a fraud because of how she
handled the paperwork and that she considered taking her own life as a result
of her treatment. Generally, employment tribunals don't deliver huge awards
-certainly not in comparison to the United States where even labour law judges
are known to adjourn with a bag of noughts to calculate appropriate levels of
compensation.
Starbucks
may be worried a sizeable award is on its way now that the case has hit the
headlines but the real damage has been done to its reputation which its PR arm
will no doubt be working hard to correct over the coming months.
They
could start by letting it be known that each and every one of its staff is now
doing equality and diversity training. This sort of training is something
it should have been doing for a long time already.
In
the old days of employment training (now called Learning and Development) for
an employer to train all of its staff on a single issue was often nothing short
of a logistical nightmare. This was particularly the case where an employer,
like Starbucks, had employees dispersed
over a multitude of sites or with many workers on assignments in other parts of
the country or even abroad. Nowadays, with the advent of online learning such
training can be done very easily. Starbucks I’m sure, could provide each outlet
(if they haven’t already done so) with a PC, laptop or tablet on which all
staff could periodically complete online training – perhaps during a quiet
period of the day in the corner of the café no doubt with a fine latte in-hand.
But
this welcome development in online learning has proved to be something of a
double edged sword for employers. For Tribunals now know that such training is
easy to do and therefore they expect to see evidence that it has been done. In
pre-Internet days Tribunals were given to being far more flexible on the
matter.
Of
course, every employer should be doing equality and diversity training. Not
just to keep themselves legally tight but because it should lead to a fairer
workplace for all.
