A woman has been awarded €12,700 for victimisation by a department store after she was told she would not be considered for a job because of a previous complaint to the Equality Authority.
In the earlier case, the woman claimed the store would not employ her after it learned she had attended a school for children with learning difficulties, but an equality officer decided there was inadequate evidence to support her claim.
After losing the first case, the woman continued applying for jobs with the store and eventually the personnel manager wrote to her, on March 29th, 2000, stating that further applications would not be considered because of untrue and unfounded allegations she had made to the Equality Authority during the course of the first case.
The store argued that for victimisation to occur a complaint must be made in good faith and, since it had concluded the original complaint was not made in good faith, it had no obligations to the complainant under the Employment Equality Act.
The same equality officer at the Office of the Director of Equality Investigations, Ms Anne-Marie Lynch, heard both cases. She found that it was not a matter for the store to decide if the job applicant was acting in bad faith. If an employer could be final arbiter on the issue there would be no point in having equality officers to investigate complaints.
Ms Lynch said that while the opinion of the store was relevant to the investigation "it cannot be the determining factor in establishing whether a complainant was acting in good faith".
If that was the situation "a possible consequence of unsuccessfully referring a complaint to the Director [of Equality Investigations] would be victimisation, perhaps in the form of dismissal or demotion, without any protection."
The fact that the earlier complaint against the store was not upheld "is not pertinent".