The Employment Appeal Tribunal’s recent decision in Finn v British Bung Manufacturing Company is perhaps a timely reminder that workplace offensive language can translate to unlawful behaviour.

In this case, the Claimant had been called a “bald c**t” by a colleague as well as being threatened with physical violence following a dispute in the male dominated manufacturing workplace.

The focus of this blog is that the Claimant brought a claim for sex and age-related harassment against his colleague personally, as well as bringing claims against the employer.

The Claimant succeeded with the sex related harassment claim, on the basis that the comments made regarding the Claimant’s appearance (his baldness) were sufficient to relate to his sex, given that they focused on an aspect of his appearance that is more prevalent in men. In contrast, the tribunal accepted that baldness affected predominantly adult males of all ages so was not an age-related comment.

Baldness did not need to be an exclusively male issue to qualify. Moreover, the foul remark in conjunction with this clearly met the threshold of amounting to harassment as such personal comments were ‘unwanted’ and were made ‘with the purpose of violating the Claimant’s dignity and creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for him’.

Ultimately, all employers should consider such foul and offensive language to amount to potential gross misconduct, but do the employees themselves (as well as those liable for their actions) have in mind that unless such outbursts are prevented, harassment claims could well succeed entitling those impacted to compensation for injury to feelings?

You’ll have seen our latest Update on the duty to prevent sexual harassment, wouldn’t it be even better if we could stamp out harassment of all types from our workplace? Get in touch now to discuss how our training and policies could help prevent and defend claims like these.

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