A worker who was sacked after calling a customer a “twat” in an email mix-up has won more than £5,000 in an unfair dismissal claim.
Meliesha Jones, who was a part-time administrator at Vale Curtains and Blinds in Oxford since May 2021, was dealing with a customer complaint when she accidentally forwarded the email to the customer rather than reply to a colleague.
She wrote: “Hi Karl – Can you change this… he’s a twat so it doesn’t matter if you can’t.”
She was sacked for gross misconduct in June 2023, a week after she had sent the message to the customer instead of the company’s installations manager Karl Gibbons, an employment tribunal in Reading heard.
Ms Jones was awarded £5,484.74 after the tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed.
The customer had made “repeated complaints” about his order and had tried to get a full refund of the cost of his curtains.
Shortly after she had sent the message, the customer’s wife rang and asked: “Is there any reason why you called my husband a twat?”
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Ms Jones was “shocked and upset” when she realised her mistake, put the caller on speaker so a colleague could hear and apologised “profusely” but the customer’s wife wanted to speak to the manager Jacqueline Smith.
In a later telephone call, Mrs Smith apologised for what Ms Jones had done and said she would be reprimanded.
The customer’s wife asked how she was going to be compensated and was told she could not get the curtains for free.
She then threatened to go to the press and social media and Mrs Smith said she would investigate the matter and get back to her.
Ms Jones offered to pay the customer £500 out of her own pocket as “a gesture of goodwill”.
The tribunal heard that a probe took place and the company decided there also had to be a disciplinary hearing.
But the tribunal heard neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.
The customer had contacted the company directly and made further threats about publicising the incident, in particular by leaving a poor review on Trustpilot and bosses decided to “get rid of” Ms Jones.
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A letter was later sent to the customer’s wife informing her Ms Jones had been dismissed “following the disgraceful email that was sent to your husband in error”.
Employment Judge Akua Reindorf KC said: “I conclude from the evidence before me that the principal reason for this decision was that the customer and his wife had made threats to publicise the claimant’s email in the press, social media and/or Trustpilot.”
She added: “I am satisfied that if a fair procedure had been followed, there is no chance that the claimant would have been dismissed.
“It is clear that on the day of the incident, Mrs Smith thought that the claimant’s mistake was regrettable but not a disciplinary matter.”
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The judge said: “The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer.
“This is clear from the fact that Mrs Smith immediately informed the customer that [Ms Jones] had been dismissed – notably, without any apparent regard for the claimant’s data protection rights.”
She added the company had “decided to sacrifice the claimant’s employment for the sake of appeasing the customer and heading off bad reviews, and wholly unreasonably failed to consider other more proportionate ways of achieving the same outcome”.
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She described Ms Jones’s sending of the email as “improper and blameworthy” and that she had been “careless”.
The language used was “not out of the ordinary in the particular workplace” and “the mistaken addressee was a genuine error, and one which is often made”.
