An Asda worker has won a sex discrimination case over an incident where a colleague kicked him up the backside.
Choon Seng Goh said that if “genders had been reversed”, a man “would have been sacked on the spot,” The Mail Online reported.
The tribunal in south London heard that Goh and Mercy Asante “joked and laughed” but were not “close” when working together at an Asda store in Croydon in 2019.
Goh claimed that on one occasion Asante kicked him up the bottom and on another she kneed him in the same area, which led to him seeing his GP.
Goh said this was an act of “bullying” and filed a complaint to Asda over the incident.
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However, he argued that it took months to be investigated by the supermarket, which finally decided that Asante had “no case to answer”.
As a result, Goh launched legal proceedings against Asda and he is now in line to receive compensation.
Employment judge, Stephen Heath, ruled that the supermarket’s investigation had been “seriously flawed” as it took bosses months to begin looking into the claims.
He said: “We have little difficulty accepting Mr Goh’s complaints were not taken seriously. We further accept Asda subjected the claimant to a detriment by not taking his complaint seriously in this time period.
“This was not simply an unjustified sense of grievance, Mr Goh was entitled to feel that his welfare and safety were not being accorded any significance by his employer.”
Having won claims of direct sex discrimination, a remedy hearing will take place at a later date to decide how much compensation he will receive.
