Sexual Themed Text Messages End in Sexual Harassment Award

The BC Human Rights Tribunal awarded a worker nearly $8,000 after finding complaints of sexual harassment from a co-worker played a role in her termination.

According to Canadian OH&S News in the September 15 ruling, tribunal member Murray Geiger-Adams ordered the worker’s employer to pay over $2,900 in lost wages compensation as well as $5,000 for injury to her dignity, feelings and self-respect. The employer, Dave’s Custom Metal Works Ltd. in Port Coquitlam, BC, was also required to provide each current employee with a copy of the ruling.

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Corina Soroka was terminated on Sept. 9, 2009 after she complained to plant owner Dave Rouleau about an incident the previous day in which supervisor Ian MacDonnell took her to a home shop to discuss a previous incident. That first event occurred on July 28, 2009, one day after Soroka took time off work because of a crushed finger she suffered while cutting metal at the shop.

After the workplace injury, MacDonnell obtained Soroka’s cell phone number, called her and the two workers later exchanged more than two dozen sexually themed text messages. Rouleau issued a verbal disciplinary warning to MacDonnell after he found out about the incident, the decision says. The supervisor also received a disciplinary warning for insubordination on the day Soroka was fired.

“I find that Mr. MacDonnell acted from confused and contradictory motives,” Geiger-Adams writes in the decision. “I accept that, on the one hand, he wanted to make things right with Ms Soroka so that they could continue to work together, but that, on the other hand, he continued to press her, against her expressly-stated wishes and feelings, to accept that his interest in her was understandable and even justified. He did so in a setting that he had engineered by using his authority to direct her work – one in which she was isolated and vulnerable,” Geiger-Adams writes.

In awarding damages to the worker, the tribunal member found that “sex discrimination was at least part of the reason Rouleau terminated Soroka’s employment, but that, even in the absence of the contraventions, Soroka’s employment would likely have ended at the end of October, 2009” as it was subject to the availability of work.

In the ruling, Geiger-Adams found that the employer discriminated against the worker in three ways.

First, MacDonnell used his access, through his employment, to Soroka’s private cell phone number, in order to contact her at home to “follow up on the sexual and perhaps romantic interest in her he first expressed in the workplace on July 24 . . . even though she immediately made it clear through her text messages that his interest was not reciprocated.”

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Second, in spite of a verbal reprimand, MacDonnell used his authority as a supervisor to take her away from the workplace to his home, “and there to both threaten to interfere with her employment, and make further inappropriate sexual comments to her.”

Finally, Rouleau decided to “abruptly terminate Soroka’s employment when he did in order to ‘solve’ the problem created for him by MacDonnell’s conduct, and Soroka’s complaints about that conduct,” the decision says.

Geigar-Adams says the plant owner apparently reasoned that, “even though Soroka was the victim of what he twice identified as MacDonnell’s inappropriate conduct toward her, her employment was short-term, and it was easier to remove her from the workplace than deal further with the conduct of the perpetrator.”

Author Robert Elliott, executive vice president, Amaxx Risks Solutions, Inc. has worked successfully for 20 years with many industries to reduce Workers Compensation costs, including airlines, healthcare, printing/publishing, pharmaceuticals, retail, hospitality and manufacturing. Contact: [email protected] or 860-553-6604.

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