Job Fairness - Discrimination, need some advice what to do...?

Question

I need some advice, I live in Ontario Canada, my Girl has moved back to BC for the summer to work. She has a job at a simple small family run grocery store. and she faces some pretty serious discrimination issues. She is Vietnamese while all the other workers are Canadians. The father owns the fruit stand, and his 2 daughters work there. Some how things like 50 lb bags of potatoes and a lot of fruit and vegetables always go missing. (she is 92lbs, and takes a variety of bus routes home, so shes not carrying 50lb bags of potatoes home!) She is the most honest girl ever, would never steal a thing, yet the daughter ( 18 years old canadian girl) always insists on searching her, and her bags when she arrives in the morning, when she steps outside for a break or lunch, and a through search when she is going home for the day. She is verbally degraded by this person all the time. When the father, the owner is around, she backs off and hides her devious intensions, but is relentless on my girl that she is a thief. The daughter is very jealous because she wants her friend to work there, so her plot is clear, make her look like a thief, then degrade her until she finally quits. Now my girl is Vietnamese, a clear visible minority, A very very shy girl, and just a plain hard worker. Saying something to the boss is not something she can do. She is a strong at heart girl, she can take the abuse but I cant! I plan to go out there to see whats going on, but I'm just not sure what to do or say! We have clear rules for workplace behavior in Canada, but what should be the appropriate approach? Sounds easy to say "quit her job and find another" but she cant, her English is not good, and finding work is not easy. Somehow the discrimination has to stop, and peace should be brought to her workplace, but what can i do, that will help solve this? any ideas? She only has one more month of work before she comes home, and she insists she can stand it while she is there, Just I cant....  She calls in tears almost every  night from the accusations she gets. How would you deal with this?

The Arbiter of common sense · Accepted Answer

Sorry, if she refuses to talk to her boss, nothing will change.  Yes, she has workplace protection, but step one is to tell management.  Until she does so, she has no claim of anything.

northernhick · Answer

Can't speak too closely to BC law - in Ontario we recently implemented a new law with specific protections against general harassment in the workplace, and BC is *usually* ahead of us with this sort of thing, but I can't say for sure.

What I can say with more certainty is that, if there's a clear connection between the harassment and her race, then there could be recourse to the British Columbia Human Rights Commission.  But you've said that the daughter's motivation is to get her fired so that her friend can work there...which doesn't sound to be connected to her race in any way.  Of course, while co-worker claims are occasionally made in human rights venues, they're not nearly as useful as a claim against the employer...and for that to succeed you need to show that the harasser was a representative of management (which may not be impossible, if she has such authority as to compel your gf to submit to searches) or that management was aware of the harassment and failed to take appropriate steps to deal with it.

But legal recourse isn't all it's cracked up to be.  The initial stage of conflict resolution almost always should be 1-on-1 discussions to clarify expectations, because initiating a legal proceeding poisons working relationships, and there isn't much an anti-reprisal clause can do to prevent that.

Trending News

Job Fairness - Discrimination, need some advice what to do...?

2 Answers