A British woman who sued her former employer for not giving her a farewell card has lost her case after it emerged that a card was indeed arranged for her, but only three people signed it. According to a report in The Guardian, Karen Conaghan’s colleagues felt it would be insulting to give her the card as so few people had bothered to sign it.
Conaghan, however, claimed that lack of a leaving card was “failure to acknowledge her existence” at International Airlines Group (IAG), which amounted to a breach of equality law. IAG is the parent company of British Airways which laid off Conaghan in 2021.
A former colleague of Conaghan told the judge that a farewell card had been bought for Conaghan, who started working for IAG in 2019. In the end, it was not presented to her due to the low number of signatures.
“He believed it would have been more insulting to give her the card than not to give her a card at all,” Judge Palmer said.
Case dismissed
The employment tribunal heard that Conaghan, a former business liaison lead, brought 40 complaints against the company for sexual harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal. Every claim was dismissed by the court.
Judge Kevin Palmer concluded that Conaghan had adopted a “conspiracy-theory mentality”, and frequently mistook “normal workplace interactions” for harassment.
In one claim, Conaghan said that a colleague had copied her use of the word “whiz” in a card for another colleague, but corrected her spelling to “whizz.” She also complained about another co-worker who asked her “Are you taking the piss, Karen?” after Conaghan suggested that she had done “all the hard work.”
Moreover, the court was told that Conaghan moved to Richmond, North Yorkshire, in September 2021 – despite the fact that all IAG employees were expected to stay within a two-hour commute from the office in Heathrow.
The judge ruled that many acts cited in the claim “either did not happen or, if they did happen, they were innocuous interactions in the normal course of employment.”