Now brooches are on the banned list!
Now brooches are on the banned list!
Phobia of Woke
I’ll admit I’m a Daily Mail reader. I say this in the loosest possible way, which means I scan over ‘TV and Showbiz’ when I get 5 minutes for a coffee. It’s a guilty pleasure and I try to make up for it by reading the Legal Gazette as penance.
My sneaky read last week reaped rewards:
Oh, come on! Really that’s newsworthy? And someone was actually that distressed?
Maybe I am just particularly robust and being insensitive here. Perhaps there are a myriad of long-suffering workers paralysed by fear at the thought of a colleague wearing arachnid paraphernalia.
Straight to the ‘comments section’ (you know you all do it too). The comments were mixed, though the vast majority showed very little sympathy towards the colleague with the spider phobia. General consensus was that the world has finally and conclusively gone woke mad.
Woke, originally a term to describe being ‘awake’ to racial prejudice and discrimination is now widely used and encompasses everything from social inequalities to identity politics. More recently it has attracted more negative connotations and is connected to the overzealous, or those who are perceived to be offended by the most minor slight. Social commentators warn that if the world becomes too woke freedom of speech could be seriously put at risk.
According to the article, rather than speaking directly to the colleague with the spangled spider, the person went and complained to a manager.
So, my HR compatriots, what would you do if this landed in your in tray? Would you go woke or tell the staff member to go grow up? Or something in between?
I would suggest that if someone had a fear of spiders that was so paralysing that they could not be in a room with a bejewelled accessory, that phobia would likely prevent them going about most of their daily activities. What about spiders on mugs? Or if they saw a spider crawl across their living room floor, or dangling from the roof of the office lift? Put your mind to it, there are not many days in the UK when you don’t come across such a creepy crawly.
Either the staff member was being dramatic and exaggerating, or there was a real paralysing fear. If it is the latter, we could apply Pawlicka v St John and Red Cross Defence Medical Welfare Services. The employee in question suffered with Necrophobia (fear of dead bodies) but it was found not to be a disability. The Government guidance on the subject being that occasional apprehension would not be covered but a fear so paralysing that someone can’t go out would likely be classed as a disability.
In this case there would be two stages:
- Is the phobia sufficient to be classed as a disability; and
- If so, would it be a reasonable adjustment to ask all staff members to eradicate any images of spiders from the work area, including their own person
When looking at what is reasonable a tribunal found (Dyer v London Ambulance NHS Trust) it was fair to dismiss an employee who had a reaction to aerosols and body spray, citing that it would be impossible to absolutely ensure that no such substances were used on the premises.
I suspect an employer would find it hard to guarantee that an employee would never come across a spider or spider image whilst at work. In this instance the employee didn’t seem to suggest that the phobia was so bad that she couldn’t work with the brooch in her presence, I’d likely have been telling her to look the other way (or offer her somewhere else to sit) and try and get on with her work. If the employee had never worn the brooch before, and it wasn’t a recurring event, drawing attention to it would likely have created more problems than it would solve (and end up in the Daily Mail…)
