[imagesource:dailymail]

Well, here’s something you don’t read every day.

Many South Africans living and working in the UK are subject to chirps in the workplace, but what happened to 35-year-old Wayne Hoch went well beyond that.

Hoch, a steelworker at UK firm Thor Atkinson Steel Fabrications Ltd., was eventually driven to mental collapse, following sustained abuse from his boss and colleagues.

A tribunal has now awarded Hoch £54 686 (just over R1 million), citing racial abuse, with IOL reporting:

…he was branded a ‘n****r’, ‘immigrant’ and a ‘foreign c***’.

One worker posted a Snapchat image of Hoch’s head superimposed onto the body of a starving black child with the words: “Donate £1 a month to save this poor child”.

And another mocked-up image of him next to a black African woman carrying a child, read: “Congratulations Wayne on the newborn”.

Hoch said he was left suicidal over the abuse at the Cumbria-based firm. His boss, company co-director Thor Atkinson, claimed the taunts were just “office banter”.

Yeah, there’s office banter, and then there’s downright abuse. That’s Thor Atkinson up top on the left, with Hoch on the right, and the entrance to the worksite centred.

Eventually, the strain of the abuse became too much to bear:

Hoch, who worked as a buyer from 2014 until resigning in 2018, said: ‘They degraded me, humiliated me and left me depressed and anxious.

“They bullied me relentlessly and called me the most offensive names on a daily basis. I almost ended my life from the stress and anxiety they caused.”

The tribunal, in Carlisle, Cumbria, heard that Mr Atkinson called Hoch a “w**” and a “foreign c**” more often “than addressing him by his name”.

He also used the offensive slur “k****r”, a racist insult that was commonly used under apartheid.

Imagine having the name Thor, and then being so spineless?

The tribunal also heard that Atkinson would also leave voicemails on Hoch’s phone that simply said “foreign c***”, all of which eventually led to Hoch taking a lower-paying job at another company:

In his resignation letter he said he had found the abuse to be ‘threatening, degrading, racist and a violation of my personal self’.

He wrote: “The way in which you constantly address me and have done so over a prolonged period of time has made me ill to the point I have had to seek medical attention.”

The tribunal heard that Hoch, who came to the UK aged 18, secretly recorded some of the taunts on his phone.

It wasn’t only Atkinson that was in on the abuse, with other employees joining in, too.

A worker called Ollie Hunter, who also posted the Snapchat images, spoke over him saying: “Mud hut, spear, lion, lion, lion”.

A clicking noise made by Hunter was claimed to be an attempt to imitate the sound made in the South African Xhosa language.

Hunter was also filmed saying: “I am not making a brew for a foreigner.”

I get the feeling that Hunter isn’t the sharpest spear tool in the shed.

When handing down the tribunal’s ruling, Judge Hodgson said that the payout was “undoubtedly extremely significant and therefore potentially very worrying to the individuals involved”.

Hoch said that he wanted to show that it’s not OK for a business to behave in such a manner, and to show that victims don’t need to stand for such abuse.

Thanks, Richard

[source:iol]