The managing director of an award-winning food centre and restaurant got rid of a member of staff because she objected to his homophobic remarks about gay employees, a tribunal heard.
Jackie Atkinson, who was head of human resources and ran the farmhouse accommodation at the Bodnant Welsh Food Centre in the Conwy Valley, told the hearing in Prestatyn that when managing director Chris Morton learned that one employee was transgender and going through the process of becoming a woman he asked what could be done about it.
“I told him ‘Nothing’,” she said.
“I informed him that wherever I had worked in the past there had always been at least one employee who was transgender and once everyone had got over the novelty everything had been fine,” she said.
But another former employee, who cannot be named, claimed that Mr Morton had said to the individual concerned: “What are you going to do now? Are you growing f***ing t**s?”
Miss Atkinson, who worked and lived at the centre from May 2013, until she was declared redundant in May 2015, said she was also shocked by Mr Morton’s response to learning that two successive managers were gay. He had asked her which of them she thought “went on top”.
As the relationship between them grew increasingly difficult Mr Morton sometimes referred to the HR (Human Resources) as “Human Remains” and called her a “socialist republican”, a comment which, he claimed, merely referred to the fact that she was from Liverpool.
The tribunal heard that at one management meeting he had told colleagues to “ignore the feminist witterings from over there” after Miss Atkinson had spoken.
Miss Atkinson, who is claiming sex discrimination, said that at first she accepted Mr Morton as having a dry sense of humour but he became increasingly acerbic towards her.
“I slowly began to realise it was becoming not funny anymore but becoming quite alarming,” she said.
She was told that she was being made redundant because the staff accommodation was to be used as letting for guests but that, she claimed, had not happened.
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She told the hearing she had been victimised for following her professional code of conduct in observing the Equality Act 2010.
“It is not victimisation but pure vindictiveness,” she said.
Martin Corking, former manager of the Centre’s restaurant, said Miss Atkinson was a dedicated, hard-working employee who defended the rights of her colleagues.
“Chris Morton frequently made comments in public which were not only politically incorrect but which I consider to be offensive,” he said.
Mr Morton, who is yet to give evidence, told Miss Atkinson he had nothing against transgender or or gay people as his own best man at his wedding was gay and he had also paid for his brother-in-law to undergo transgender surgery.
The hearing continues.
see-http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/bodnant-centre-md-made-transgender-11499821
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