According to a tribunal, it constitutes racial discrimination to mix up the names of coworkers from ethnic minorities.
Employment judge Garry Smart said those from minority backgrounds are often ‘confused’ with others from the same heritage, which can make them feel hurt and offended and ‘lumped together as a group’ rather than being treated individually.
Judge Smart added that the ‘adverse inference’ of confusing the names of non-white employees is due to race and can therefore be seen as discriminatory.
His decision was in the case of Abhinav Sharma, an engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, who claimed that his coworker Magdelena Badescu had discriminated against him by calling him by the name of another Indian employee.
Mr Sharma said he looked and sounded ‘very different’ from co-worker Bhuvnesh Bhardwaj – who was of a larger build, wore glasses, had a beard and spoke with a British accent.
The Birmingham tribunal commented that in comparison, Mr Sharma was slimmer, spoke with an ‘obvious Indian accent’, and was clean-shaven or had ‘nothing more than stubble’.
In the engines team, Mr Sharma and Ms Badescu, who is white, were believed to get along well.
However, she called him Bhuv, which was an abbreviated form of Mr Bhardwaj’s initial name, at a team meeting in 2022.
Mr. Sharma submitted his notice and a grievance document in September of that year.
His line manager said Ms Badescu was ‘one of the kindest people he knew’ and would have got the names wrong as an ‘accident’.
But the tribunal found there ‘could be no mistaken identity based on looks and voices’ and concluded the error occurred ‘because of his race’.
The amount of compensation will be determined later.
For goodness sake we have at all one time or another called somebody by another name by accident – these things happen, but most of us have a chuckle about it and move on, but sadly that doesn’t seem possible anymore.
As a mother, I would frequently go through the names of my kids until I got the right one, even the dog! We all laughed a lot about it, and it wasn’t a huge problem.
When I was at school, kids couldn’t pronounce my surname correctly. It annoyed me slightly but it didn’t actually upset me that much, and now I’m old enough to know what a thick skin is.
I will just say that some people are not good at remembering names, but they get there eventually. Sometimes people’s brains wane, so it’s not always deliberate.
Whenever I did the yo-yo-ing with my children’s name I was never criticised for it, nor did they demand recompense, but in this issue it’s about the money, it’s always about the money.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 