A new mother without a single day of legal training has won a £60,000 pay out from Morrisons after they changed her role and forced her to work full-time following maternity leave.
Donna Patterson, 38, said she was “gaslighted” into taking on the extra hours and later launched legal action after suffering work-related stress.
The ex-buyer spent five days cross-examining eight former colleagues, using meeting minutes to show how managers had “questioned” her priorities after she fell pregnant.
A judge eventually ruled that she should receive £60,442.25 in compensation after hearing that the grocery giant had planned to demote her after she said she was having a baby.
Ms Patterson said after the “gruelling” case at Leeds Employment Tribunal Court, where she faced off against legal professionals before winning a unanimous verdict, tears of relief streamed down her face.
The mother-of-two said: “I just sat there and tears streamed down my face. Just from the sheer relief that it was worth it – worth all of the stress, all of the effort and worth everybody saying ‘why not just walk away and move on’.”
She added: “It was a complete relief. I was conscious that what had happened was morally wrong but might not have broken the right legal criteria.
“Fortunately I had a really great judge and panel and because of the work I had put in it was quite clear that employment law had been broken.”
Ms Patterson, from Leeds, West Yorkshire, first worked at Morrisons in 2008 before leaving and later returning in 2018 to a buying role for the online sales team.
She was then asked to change her role to the confectionary department. However, she said that after she told the company she was pregnant with her second baby “the role was taken away from me”.
Ms Patterson went on maternity leave in August 2020, ahead of the birth of her second child, who is now two years old. But shortly after he was born, she received a call from HR telling her there had been “a restructure of the online team”.
Ms Patterson said: “My baby was around two months old and it was during the pandemic so my head probably was not in the right place to have a discussion like that.
“At the tribunal that was what the judge was most frustrated about – there being no duty of care.”
After deciding to return to work in August 2021, she contacted the company numerous times to ask what her new job was but received no replies.
Ad she was eventually given an email for someone in HR, who told her that the only job available to her was now in core grocery.
Ms Patterson said Morrisons managers were also reluctant to let her work from home or work have half days to pick up her children.
And when she returned to work, Ms Patterson said her manager said he was expecting she would work full time – even though she didn’t have a previously agreed shift pattern.
Ms Patterson claimed she was “drowning in work” and said “people would criticise me for not meeting deadlines”.
She added: “I felt absolutely gaslighted. It was driving me mad.
“I was showing them why it was not possible, and they just sat there and said ‘No it’s fine, you are good at your job and you just need to prioritise’.
“I said, ‘I can either work to the point of breaking to get this work done in part-time hours or do the part time hours and destroy the reputation I’ve built over 15 years.’”
In December last year, Ms Patterson’s doctor signed her off on work-related stress and during this time, she said her manager called with a work-related query.
In March this year, she resigned over a “total breakdown of trust” and looked to take legal action without the help of a trained team.
She added that her home insurance providers “didn’t believe I had a successful claim on my hands”, and solicitors had asked for tens of thousands of pounds, which was “petrifying”.
During the “exhausting” five-day tribunal, which started on 17 October, she cross-examined eight of her former colleagues.
After leaving, she had submitted a data subject access request and came across a letter that showed there were plans to demote her when she was pregnant.
Ms Patterson said: “The judge went ballistic when that came out. To plan to demote a pregnant woman is totally unacceptable.”
The mother also said that meeting minutes she received showed how her manager had “questioned my priorities” after she gave birth to her second child.
An HR representative also told the court that the restructure of the online team when Ms Patterson was pregnant “wasn’t fair”.
Another file showed that Morrisons expected her to be contactable even on non-working days, and on 21 October the judge said the had panel unanimously ruled in her favour.
A spokesperson from Morrisons said: “The happiness and wellbeing of our colleagues is a fundamental part of our culture and welcoming mothers back from maternity leave in a thoughtful, consensual and decent way is incredibly important to us.
“However, we don’t accept that we acted in an unfair way in this case and believe a number of the facts have been misrepresented and we are considering an appeal.”
