A woman who sued her former employer over not being given a leaving card lost her case when it was revealed it had been hidden from her after only three people signed it.
Karen Conaghan claimed that the “failure to acknowledge her existence” at IAG, the parent company of British Airways, was a breach of equality law.
However, a former colleague told an employment tribunal that managers had indeed bought a card but did not present it to Conaghan because of the low number of signatures, the Times reported.
The judge, Kevin Palmer, said: “He believed it would have been more insulting to give her the card than not to give her a card at all.”
The tribunal was told that two men also laid off during “restructuring” at the company, which also owns airlines Aer Lingus and Iberia, did not receive leaving cards either.
Conaghan, a former business liaison lead, brought 40 complaints against the company for sexual harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal. But the tribunal dismissed every claim, with Palmer concluding that Conaghan, who started working at the company in 2019, had adopted a “conspiracy-theory mentality”, mistaking “normal workplace interactions” for harassment.
In one claim, she said a colleague had copied her use of the word “whiz” in a card for a colleague, but corrected her spelling by writing “whizz” instead.
She said another employee had asked her: “Are you taking the piss, Karen?” The tribunal heard that this was after Conaghan suggested she had “done all of the hard work” and it was his “turn to do some”.
Conaghan moved to Richmond, North Yorkshire, in September 2021 despite it being expected that all employees live within two hours of the office in Heathrow, the tribunal heard. She was made redundant in the same year as part of a restructuring of the organisation, with colleagues saying in evidence that many people also left around the same time.
Judge Palmer said that although further signatures were gathered on the leaving card after her departure, a former colleague took the view that “it was inappropriate to send such a card to [her] at a later date as she had raised a grievance against him and [another colleague]”.
Many of the acts cited in the claim “either did not happen or, if they did happen, they were innocuous interactions in the normal course of employment”, the judge ruled.
He said that there was no evidence to suggest that any of Conaghan’s allegations were in any way related to her sex and that one of the allegations was indicative of her “view of normal interactions being something more sinister”.
In another, unrelated case earlier this year, an employment tribunal judge ruled that sending an employee an unwanted birthday card could amount to “unwanted conduct” and harassment.
