Telling someone with a foreign accent you can’t understand them could be racial harassment, a senior tribunal judge has said.
Commenting on or criticising the way someone from another country or ethnic group speaks could breach employment law, Judge James Tayler said.
Excellent, because incentives matter and here is more than enough incentive not to hire foreigners that can’t manage the lingo.
For Elaine Carpzzi to have been “racially harassed”, her manager and colleagues would have had to have been non-white which is just about conceivable these days.
Judge James Tayler…was appointed as a salaried Employment Judge in 2007. He is a Diversity and Community Relations Judge and at Middle Temple has served on the Equality, Diversity and Social Mobility Committee and the Race, Equality, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Working Group. He regularly leads Middle Temple training sessions in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Ethics…
Basically we have people who think that they can legislate away reality.
So when a white haired old bastard like me can’t understand bloody foreigners, it’s racism.
Thanks for telling me!!
“ Judge James Tayler…”
Here’s the problem, he’s so vain.
(Yes, I know it, wasn’t about him but that old rumour was too good to be checked)
Boganboy,
And when they can’t understand you it’s also because you’re racist.
Thanks BiND. I thought it might be like that.
Why not take this a tiny bit further to it’s absurd conclusion and say:
“Telling someone speaking a foreign language you can’t understand them could be racial harassment.”
TfL regularly employ staff members with accents that make station announcements completely unintelligible and I always wondered why they didn’t bar them from using the PA. I guess now I know.
JuliaM @ 10.23m my old TOC used to employ an announcer (English) who couldn’t say the letter V, which caused some amusement as trains went up to Liverpool Street and down to Southend Victoria.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been speaking to someone on a help desk that I can’t understand. I’ve started slurring my words by exaggerating my accent so they don’t understand me. It is interesting seeing how quickly they get frustrated. I actually feel sorry for them. All my calls are recorded so soon one will slip up and I’ll sue the firm for harassment.
There are some dickheads in our justice system. How the fuck did these dickheads get into their positions?
There are some dickheads in our justice system. How the fuck did these dickheads get into their positions?
Using their noncesense.
British judges don’t exist to protect the rights and liberties of British people, they’re just bewigged boy-lovers.
Slightly off topic, while serving in the British Army, I had the good fortune of watching a Geordie instructor telling a lad from Northern Ireland, how to operate a piece of equipment, then asking if he had any questions.
It was one of the funniest 15 minutes of my life.
Penseivat – I always enjoyed it when one of our staunchly orange Britisher-than-thou junior officers from Ulster met visiting brass.
Seeing them force an unhappy smile when Colonel Sir Godric Poshman-Grouseshooter would inevitably exclaim “Oh you’re IRISH! I love Ireland.” was a small treat.
Which regiment? One of my old buddies ended up Major (mebbe carried on, lost track) in RIR.
Basically we have people who think that they can legislate away reality.
That’s obviously the plan, since it became apparent that the proletariat preferred the material fruits of Capitalism to dirt-poor collectivist striving, and the great Marxist utopia had to be re-framed.
I never tire of considering the ramifications of this story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
…especially in the modern context of chicks with dicks, Climate Change, DIE, and the collective legislative project to render illegal the fundamental principles of economics. I then consider Dr. Johnson’s famous remark.
Tim – not sure if you mean Penseivat, but our cap badge featured Jimmy and I mainly played with computers and radios.
But, Britain never lost a war while I was fixing computers. You’re all welcome.
Meant you…..Signals – as with Bloke in N Dorset then….
Sounds like completely different eras. The closest we got to computers were BBC Micros and PCs were just being introduced when I left.
I did write a radio propagation program using BBC Basic that when we tested it round Oakhampton worked reasonably well.
This already looks less implausible than it did six months ago.
Penseivat: My dad spent his National Service in a barracks with blokes from Aberdeen at one end and Somerset at the other. “They might as well have been speaking different languages. And I could barely understand either of them.”
BiND, Tim – I think one thing that’s timeless about the army is working with sarcastic alcoholics.
A useful skill to have in Britain.
For a couple of years at the beginning of the century I worked in Singapore and counted myself lucky if I understood 30% of an office conversation. Ah! The delights of Singlish la!
We’re just finishing up a project.where our contractor is Spain based. It’s taken me two years to get used to the accent, I’m much more used to South East Asian or Indian accents. Never bothered me, just one of those things. I have had to ask for repeats or clarifications a fair bit, no one seemed to be upset, it just slowed us down a bit.
The fun thing in the last few months has been the on site testing with a bunch of people flown out from Spain. When we hit a technical problem they would immediately drop back into torrents of Spanish. The test leader apologised at one point and asked me if they should speak in English, I was meant to be witnessing the test after all. I just said, Alfonso, we’re more likely to get this done if your people can communicate better so go for it, just give me a summary at the end please!
PS – BiND, BASIC has died a death and so too has IT literacy. Which is a shame, because BASIC was a great introduction to code.
Those of us who grew up being curious about the magic boxes with blinky lights, and how to make them do things, tended to assume the next generations would be even better at it due to how much computing power you now have in your pocket. Surely they’d be techno-wizards?
Young people in their 20’s these days are so used to the iPad and Alexa that they’re stumped if an IT problem can’t be solved by touching a screen or talking to the computer like Scotty in Voyage Home. Technology might as well be jazz music, for all they’re interested in it.
One thing that hasn’t changed tho, is if people know you’re “good with computers”, you end up being an unpaid technical support janny in your spare time.
I have a slight hearing loss, one symptom of which is I have a harder time with accents.
Recently I had a tough time communicating with a Somalian clerk, and then her Somalian manager.
Manager started berating me for this.
I pointed to my ears and told her that she was discriminating against me because of my disability. She was taken aback a bit. Discrimination was HER schtick.
We did not part friends, but I had fun.
@Bobby b – Yes, the NHS ear trumpets can be wonderful for a bit of righteous argy bargy and deflating the pomposity of virtue signalling identitarians.
Mine give me the ability to hear the clock ticking, something I could never hear since a teenager (too much Van Halen and Iron Maiden). So whenever someone starts using their bully pulpit or berates me for not listening, I just point to the NHS ear trumpets and say “sorry love, deaf as a post”.
It also helps when people ask for my phone number as a must have prerequisit for bureaucratic nonsery. I simply say “sorry love, a phone’s not much use to me, being deaf”.
Despite having an iPhone 13S in my pocket.
Old people, like me, are cvnts, we really are.
Steve,
“PS – BiND, BASIC has died a death and so too has IT literacy. Which is a shame, because BASIC was a great introduction to code.”
I’m not sure it’s any different than in our day. I meet kids who upgrade their PCs, who do some Python coding for some reason, tinker with robotics. You go to a festival like Electromagnetic Field, there’s girls embedding little arduino machines into clothing, people analysing movements of bees with code.
I don’t do much Python but it reminds me of BASIC in many ways. You can write very small programs in it, but also, you can build quite advanced things.
The iPad is just the worst thing to give to kids because all you can do with it is browse, shop, watch movies and play shitty little games. As a creative device, whether art, music, writing, coding, it absolutely sucks.
@adollff, I used to be regularly confused at West Ham by announcements that the next train was one bound for ‘Upminister’..!
WB & Steve: The point is, too many people mix up and confuse “using” with “making”.
Oooo, we’ve got this great new thing, RADIOS!, everybody will be building radios…. hey why are less than 0.01% of the population intersted in being radio engineers, WE NEED RADIO PEOPLE!!!
Oooo, we’ve got this great new thing, CARS!, everybody will be building cars…. hey why are less than 0.01% of the population intersted in being automotive engineers, WE NEED CAR PEOPLE!!!
Oooo, we’ve got this great new thing, COMPUTERS!, everybody will be writing computer programs…. hey why are less than 0.01% of the population intersted in programming, WE NEED COMPUTER PEOPLE!!!
Computer hardware and software design and construction is just like any other field of design and construction, your interest and aptitude in it is almost entirely innate, it’s not something “poured” into somebody’s skull. You won’t be a radio engineer unless you’ve been building your own electronic equipment since you were 8 years old, you won’t be a professional writer unless you spent your teens writing heart-wrenchingly awful poetry and short stories, similarly, you won’t be a coder and/or systems builder unless you spent your teens writing code and/or building interface hardware and drivers, just because you loved to do it.
Yes, we need people who are IT Literate, because that is just literacy. It is this century’s version of “knowing how to drag a pen across a sheet of paper”. It’s basic life skills, just as is being able to switch on a light. In 1894 you were functionally unemployble if you could not read and write, in 2024 you are functionally unemployable if you cannot prod buttons and cause letters to appear. I have a friend who is the electrician version of manual labourer – if he was incapable of prodding buttons and making letters appeare, he’d be unemployable for all his electrical skills.
But it is just that, fundamental basic how-to-stay-alife skills. *NOT* engineering construction skills. Not: “Oooo, you know how to turn on light, rewire this house for me.”