IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means
- Reference: 1598605509
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/28/ibm_whistleblower_wins_22k_compensation/
- Source link:
Reading Employment Tribunal awarded Dawn Davidsen compensation and ordered that she be reinstated in her job after she was targeted by four managers within IBM, having spoken up about conditions within [1]IBM-owned firm The Weather Company . She said these potentially amounted to sex discrimination, with the practices including work calls scheduled for 8am on Saturdays.
Tribunal judges scorned Big Blue's managers for not having "any proper understanding of how discrimination could arise outside the most obvious situations of direct discrimination" and called upon senior management to "consider carefully this judgment and what steps, whether by way of training or otherwise, it takes in consequence of this".
Davidsen had blown the whistle to her bosses about how The Weather Company's outside-normal-office-hours culture could land IBM in legal hot water.
"I explained that as women predominantly had responsibility for childcare, calls out of normal working hours have a disproportionate effect on them, which would be indirect sex discrimination," she told the tribunal.
In an excoriating 133-page judgment [2]published last week , Employment Judge Anstis, Mr A Kapur and Ms HT Edwards found that IBM manager Samantha "Sam" McFarland and HR man Philip Johnson found Davidsen's whistleblowing "unwelcome", with both being "critical of the claimant for having made the disclosures" at all.
'Impossible' targets and false feedback
Rather than investigate properly, IBM decided to close ranks and try to force Davidsen out of her job by giving her falsely negative annual reviews and "impossible" targets to meet, the tribunal found.
"Those to whom the claimant made her complaints were either very slow to take any steps to investigate the claimant's disclosures (or pass them on to others for investigation) or did not do so at all," said the judges. "If the problem was only with the manner of disclosure that does not explain the reluctance to investigate what the claimant was disclosing."
A group of Davidsen's immediate line managers, including McFarland and UK acquisitions integration manager Claire Bryant, began referring to Davidsen as "militant" and a "shop steward", plotting to force her out of the company altogether through an impossible Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).
She was tasked with gathering data on 48 countries and to devise a roadmap of potential buyouts within just over a week, including "readiness and localisation status per offering per market". Among those potential targets were "medical devices and medical data offerings that would be likely to be highly regulated", said the tribunal.
IBM witnesses Sandra Oliveira, to whom Davidsen reported, and Bryant tried to tell the tribunal that the PIP was "unremarkable… not something for an employee to be alarmed about" only for internal Sametime chat app transcripts shown in evidence to give the lie to their claims.
Employment Judge Anstis commented: "Thus Claire Bryant and Sandra Oliveira – who were preparing the PIP – saw it as such a humiliation or burden that they themselves would resign rather than be subject to a PIP, and they contemplated that the claimant may do the same thing… they are all about the PIP leading to the end of the claimant's employment, whether through her resignation or dismissal."
Revenge is a dish that splatters you in the face
Joanne Czekalowska, IBM's director of acquisition integration for EMEA, was also found to have colluded with fellow managers to block Davidsen from taking on a significant role integrating a new IBM acquisition, Bluewolf, into the company – something the EMEA boss did as revenge for Davidsen's whistleblowing, the judges found.
"We find it more likely that in pursuit of the removal of the claimant from her role [Czekalowska] did not want the claimant to take up more funded work such as the Bluewolf project. If the claimant did not have funded work, it would be easier to remove her through any eventual redundancy process within the team or to persuade her to find other roles and projects elsewhere," the tribunal ruled.
The tribunal also cast aside the evidence of multiple IBM witnesses who contradicted each other or gave differing accounts of conference calls and meetings that all were present for.
It also ordered that its judgment be attached to Davidsen's HR record as a complete answer to her mysteriously negative annual review.
IBM's HR practices have been exposed to courts worldwide over the past few years, as [3]chronicled on The Register . Big Blue also [4]settled 281 UK employment tribunal cases brought over age discrimination and constructive dismissal late last year. A former senior executive told an American court that she was [5]ordered to lie to local government officials about an ongoing age discrimination row in the US, where IBM stands accused of sacking expensive older staff to replace them with younger and cheaper "early career" professionals. ®
Get our [6]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/28/ibm_reported_to_be_splashing_2bn_on_the_weather_company/
[2] https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions/mrs-d-davidsen-v-ibm-uk-ltd-and-others-3352944-2017-and-others
[3] https://search.theregister.com/?q=ibm+employment
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/25/ibm_uk_settles_281_age_discrimination_cases/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/18/ibm_government_lying_claims/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: targeted by four managers within IBM
If that was the case wouldn't IBM have sorted this out before it went to a tribunal and have disciplined the managers rather than going to the tribunal and backing them up?
Harassment and mobbing on the job
"Rather than investigate properly, IBM decided to close ranks and try to force Davidsen out of her job by giving her falsely negative annual reviews and "impossible" targets to meet, the tribunal found."
Just this alone should be enough to demote the managers involved, or force them out of their job for inappropriate behaviour.
The thing that disgusts me the most is that the managers are women. I trust Claire Bryant and Sandra Oliveira are now looking for other employment elsewhere as toilet cleaners (no offence to cleaners of any kind btw).
And what happened to the managers?
Probably a promotion and fat bonus for showing so much initiative. Maybe a private reprimand for getting caught. It is the IBM way.
IBM
I B Moving on... But if you swim with the sharks, you may be bitten, and bleed a bit... calling all sharks!
So many cases, you have to wonder if genuinely good managers in the IBM are the rogues, and the dodgy ones are the norm.
£22K? Is that all?
That's so absurdly low as to not even need a managers approval for petty cash. Try turning that K to a B to make IBM feel it as an actual form of _punishment_ rather than an amusing smack on a knuckle with a foam cricket bat.
Re: £22K? Is that all?
the report states:
£20k as compensation
the difference between what she received since Feb 2018 to six weeks after the court's decision from IBM and what she actually should have received if she had been employed
10% of both these awards as an uplift
and she gets her job back and her slate is wiped clean.
Who would want to stay working there after what they did?
Re: £22K? Is that all?
Yeah, her slate will never be wiped clean. This will follow her at IBM for the term of her employment.
Call me cynical, but if her upper management decided to close ranks against her, there's going to be a stain on her career that can't be washed off.
$22k is peanuts for IBM. The cost of doing business. I'll bet she's gone within 3 years, either resigned or due to some completely unavoidable office closure that's totally above board.
Call me cynical, but companies are like elephants, they never forget, and they hold a grudge against those who bring them negative publicity
Re: £22K? Is that all?
The sad fact is anyone taking their employer to an employment tribunal will never get a decent job again.
So 22K for a few months missed work is not adequate compensation for a career ending move.
Her only option now is to sit at an empty desk with nothing to do and collect a salary from IBM who desperately want to get rid of her but dare not sack her.
Good for Davidson
But really, to go back to her desk and look forward to working with those four assholes - I wouldn't want to have to do that.
And besides, work calls actually scheduled for Saturday mornings ? What the blazes is that ?
If, as a manager, you can't get your work done weekdays from 8 to 8, then you're useless as a manager. Obviously, there can be exceptions, but if you have to wrap up your week every Saturday morning, then you're doing something wrong.
Monday mornings is supposed to be the time for the weekly pep talk, not Saturday.
What absolute arses
IBM sounds a horrid place to work, and a horrible supplier to use, with management showing equal contempt for both.
Disappointed The Register didn't try and get a contrite statement out of an IBM Spokesface. Love to see how's they'd try and spin and brush this one off.
"with the practices including work calls scheduled for 8am on Saturdays"
The phrase there is "Sorry, I'm not contracted to work Saturdays". I've used it many times. If someone wants to sack me for that, that's on them - it'll cost them big and I'll be happy to just leave such a company and then sue them to oblivion.
And no. "Any other reasonable..." clauses do not automatically include unpaid overtime without negotiation on uncontracted days. And when you want those, the magic phrase there is "negotiation". My position will consist of "It's a weekend, I'll charge you ten times more per hour with a £1000 charge for the first hour" and we'll start negotiations there.
I don't understand why companies think such things are necessary. Even an international company - 8am on Saturday in the UK is what? 1am in the US? You'd have to be talking to someone in a Pacific Island late on a Friday their end for it to be 8am on a Saturday in the UK. It's just unnecessary, unless it's an absolute critical emergency and then my question would be why do you only have guys in the UK capable of handling your emergencies?
This is just toxic-workplaceism.
I'm not sure where you've been working, but every professional/executive level private sector job I've ever had came with a contract that states my working hours are whatever time is necessary to deliver the work the business may require of me, that I opt out of the working time directive and that there's no such thing as paid overtime.
In my experience it's simply a fact that if you want a high flying career then your employer is going to own your life 24/7.
It does sound like "We pay you, we own you".
You want Equality? You get Equality.
But it turns out what you really want is special treatment instead. Do none of these children have fathers? Or were they merely a means to an end and the children are now just another tool to be used to ensure the mother's "equality" is just preferential treatment with a thin veneer for respectability?
I do not have a problem with people having equal pay and equal working conditions for doing the same work. I do have a problem with people demanding "equal rights" but then coming up with all sorts of exceptions that benefit them but cannot apply to everyone else, equally. That is not equality.
targeted by four managers within IBM
IBM's a very large company, you know, so it's just four random, "rogue" managers in a crowd of literally thousands of IBM managers that you interact with every single day, absolutely nothing to do with company and corporate values!