NOTE THE TONE: YOUR RIGHTS AT WORK WHEN THEY SPEAK TO YOU DIFFERENT

Scenarios

Perhaps you’ve noticed there’s a special tone for just you at work. It makes you dread showing up for shifts and, frankly, it is insidiously affecting your mental health. You are caught between the chagrin you feel at being picked on, the assault on your dignity that this constitutes, and your keenness to ‘get on with it’, ‘grow a pair’ and not be so sensitive. In many instances, you’re relatively new at the job, and your instinct is to devise a strategy to win over your manager and colleagues. You push your mental health to the side, therefore, grit your teeth and brace yourself as you clock in. Your smile is (soon after) wide, your mien is professional, you keep doing your very best. But the tone is still there, unmistakable, unmissable, directed at only you.

For many people, with bills and sundry other responsibilities on their backs, walking out is not an option. In fact, they resolve (understandably) to somehow grow thicker skin and focus squarely on the sole purpose, for which (they reason)they are there: support the team, deliver the required results and get paid. Besides, and this features quite prominently in the calculation of victims of such harassment, what help is there for someone in such a situation? What profit can possibly result from starting any ‘trouble’? The latter question is key to highlight, because it is typical with immigrants, who are often simply grateful to find work, and genuinely feel enduring a constantly harsher, meaner, patronising (etc.) tone, directed specially at just them in the workplace, though hurtful and degrading, is a price they expected to pay. It is, therefore, in their thinking, not a context for ‘The Law’ and the protections/reprieves, deliverances and possible compensations that it can avail such a victim. It is, instead, simply life and the prudent best learn to get on with it.

You, however, do not have to keep tolerating this. A workplace should be safe and free of harassment and assaults on people’s dignities, no matter your race, age, sexual orientation, etc. This requirement is guaranteed by UK Law and UK employers are obligated to maintain such an environment, including by preventing harassment and the like.

Now, although there is also protection/remedy in UK Law, where the discomfiting tone is deployed equally on all team members by, say, a supervisor, with no intervention from management (despite complaints), this current write-up focuses on a distressing tone reserved specially for just one (or two) employees. The reason is, apart from this latter scenario being the lived experience of several clients with whom our Law Firm has dealt, the protections and remedies provided by UK Law to employees in such unacceptable situations aren’t as common knowledge as they ideally ought to be. Clients often start off their complaint to us, simply as (effectively) an exercise in therapy; because they feel there is nothing that can be done, although they seek the comfort of just conferring with a lawyer. For them, the question is typically, ‘what can I do? I guess nothing. I just started the job a month ago. I know the manager does not like me. She speaks to everyone else with respect, but she talks down to me; her tone is a bit sterner with only me. At first, I thought it was because I was new, but someone else joined after me and the same manager speaks kindly and courteously to him. But what can I do? I am the only Black person there. I hear I must be in the job for 2 years at least, before I can complain or get any help.’

The Law

While this is not a space to detail all the provisions of the law and how they address most such scenarios as above, it is enough to state that the Equality Act 2010, the Employment Rights Act 1996 and the Protection From Harassment Act 1997, all combine to enable an employee in such a situation to engage the employer’s internal grievance process, then ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service), then bring an action against the employer for due compensation at the UK Employment Tribunal (if none of the first 2 steps provide the desired remedy).

Moreover, being on the receiving end of a distressing tone at work (reserved for just you), avails you of options (per UK legislation, cited above) which amount to the following, in practice:

• The aggrieved employee can resign and be deemed constructively dismissed, according to the Law, because such harassment (where not addressed satisfactorily by the employer) would seriously damage the relationship of confidence and trust between the employer and employee. And this is an implied term of the employment contract, per the ruling of the court in the case of Woods v WM Car Services (Peterborough) Ltd [1983] IRLR 413).

• The aggrieved employee, in the scenario earlier illustrated, clearly has a protected characteristic (Race), and the simultaneousness of a harsher tone reserved for just said employee, can ground a claim of automatically unfair (constructive) dismissal, due to racial discrimination. One key implication being that it would not matter that the employee in our scenario only started the role a month before, say. In other words, there is no need to endure the humiliation, perhaps partly to reach 2 years with that employer.

Conclusion

A hostile work environment is nothing to live with. As this article shows, it might not even matter that you only just began working for the employer. You are nonetheless likely to have a valid cause of action, if things get that far. The Law has options and remedies for you. At Haus Ben Brume, we have litigation experience spanning over 21 years in at least 2 jurisdictions (including England and Wales) and on at least 2 continents. We can help.

And, as hinted much earlier in this piece, there are also solutions and remedies, if it is you and your teammates, together suffering the hostile work environment. In a subsequent write-up, we aim to provide some practical tips on how to navigate such a scenario, especially if you attempt to intervene on behalf of your colleagues, partly (presumably) in defence of their mental health, and you are consequently (constructively or otherwise) dismissed.

Haus Ben Brume.

30.12.2025