Supermarket has to keep paying fired employee

GREAT BAY –Supermarket Le Grand Marché has to keep paying an employee it fired on the spot on July 11 her salary until the labor relationship has legally ended. The employee, D.H., worked as a produce handler for the store since 2007 and told the court that she and other workers have had to endure sexual intimidation and harassment by a supervisor in this department for the past five years.

On July 11, the 37-year-old employee attempted to help a colleague who had been bullied by the supervisor. The supervisor then turned on her, because she was not doing her own work but that of a colleague. The employee then went to a manager, but he dismissed her complaints.

Years of sexual intimidation led to confrontation

That’s when something snapped and the employee asked what it would take to be heard and whether they would listen to her if she said she was going to kill her supervisor and was prepared to go to Pointe Blanche for it.

During the past couple of years, the employee asked management on several occasions for a transfer to a different department. She complained repeatedly to the produce manager about the behavior of her supervisor who turned the situation into a joke, pretending that the supervisor was the employee’s husband and that they were just having a quarrel.

The employee also went with her complaints to higher management but she never received a serious reaction. In the end, the stress and the frustration became too much.

The court ruled that direct or indirect threats are in principle grounds for dismissal on the spot. “The picture the plaintiff paints of years of harassment and sexual intimidation by a supervisor on the work floor and the deafness of higher management towards her complaints, are serious and worrisome.”

The supermarket denied that the employee filed complaints and the supervisor denies the accusations and other employees have declared in writing that they do not recognize the situation.

The court notes that the reason for the confrontation on July 11 did not have anything to do with sexual intimidation.

But there was something with the statements of the other employees, the court found. They were all written on the same day, “apparently in the office of the management.” Furthermore, the ruling notes, the supermarket claims that the fired employee never complained about sexual intimidation, yet it saw the need to ask colleagues in her department about it, even before the attorney of the employee, Cor Merx, had made an issue of it.

“An explanation of this absurdity from the side of the supermarket has not been given. This makes it sufficiently plausible that the supermarket knew at the time of the dismissal about the employee’s complaints against her supervisor,” the court ruled, adding that the supermarket, as a good employer, should have dedicated more time and effort to the employee’s complaints.

The court ordered the supermarket to continue paying the employee’s salary and to pay the costs of the procedure, close to 1,750 guilders.