Telesales firm 'instructed' Asian employees to change their names
Categories: Latest News
Monday July 04 2011
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There’s an interesting story in Saturday’s Daily Mail relating to a tribunal hearing involving a company that is alleged to have exercised a policy requiring ethnic staff to adopt English names because customers “struggled with Indian names”. |
From the Daily Mail:
“A telesales firm has been found guilty of race discrimination for forcing an Indian employee to anglicise his name.
“Mr Jain’s employers, Teachers 2 Parents Ltd, which is owned by Indians, claimed English names were easier for customers to spell in emails. They said customers had struggled with Indian names.
“The tribunal ruled that the school software company’s policy was not a ‘proportionate’ way to stop emails going astray and that it was enforced on Indian employees while white colleagues were allowed to keep their names.
“After the hearing Mr Jain, of Leicester, said: ‘I was the only person in the company to challenge what was happening. They had a policy for all Asians to change their names. There were at least 30 other people of Indian origin who did this and are still working there. What the company did is outrageous and totally racist.’
Teachers 2 Parents was founded in 2007 by Suresh Patel, 37, and Uresh Naik, 36. The Leicester-based firm soon had a multi-million pound turnover.
“The panel was told that ‘Mr Naik and Mr Patel explained that in the early days of recruiting staff to telesales, emails from customers had gone missing and when this was investigated by Mr Patel it was discovered that staff email addresses had been misspelt by customers.’
“The tribunal heard the firm ‘had a number of staff of Indian ethnic origin who adopted anglicised names at work’. They included Aarti (Anna), Mehul (Max), Sarbjit (Sally), Meera (Marie), Neeraj (Neil), Prakhash (Terry), Jaspal (Jay), Jayna (Jane) and Faizal (Fred).”
“The judgment said: ‘If the firm was serious that the name change was optional it was incumbent to communicate that real choice. The tribunal considers that the respondent’s instruction to the claimant to adopt an anglicised name subjected him to a detriment to which it would not have subjected white colleagues and that occurred because of the claimant’s race.’”