In Ms Muawana McCollin v Telecom Service Centres Ltd t/a Webhelp a Sainsbury’s call centre worker who was sacked for hanging up on dozens of angry customers has lost an unfair dismissal claim after saying she wouldn’t have been sacked if she was ‘white and Scottish’. Muawana McCollin, 49, put the phone down on 62 of 129 callers who were ‘unhappy’ or ‘upset’ in a single month while working in Glasgow.
She claimed the hang ups were due to the phone system and that someone was ‘setting her up’ and ‘trying to make her look bad’, an employment tribunal heard. Ms McCollin began working as a customer service representative for Telecom Service Centres Ltd, which traded as Webhelp UK, in May 2018, the hearing was told.
Bosses fired her for gross misconduct after describing her hanging up on customers as the most ‘blatant and unreasonable’ case they had ever seen. Ms McCollin, who is black and of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity, took her call centre employers to a tribunal claiming race and disability discrimination.
At the hearing she said her dismissal would not have happened if she was ‘white and Scottish’. But her claims were thrown out after the panel found she had a ‘skewed perception of events’ with an ‘unrealistic view’ of what happened to her.
‘From a review of (her) calls…it was found that, in the month of June 2019, 62 of 129 calls were terminated early when customers were upset or unhappy,’ the tribunal heard. The hearing was told that when confronted, she claimed a medical condition she suffered from – ovarian fibroids – affected her eyesight and that she would terminate calls ‘in error’ because she struggled to press the correct button.
However, despite her denial she was doing it deliberately, Ms McCollin was sacked after being found guilty of gross misconduct little over a year after joining the company for ‘deliberately and wilfully cutting the customer off calls’.
The tribunal, led by the employment judge Ian McPherson, concluded: ‘Her evidence was an unrealistic view of what she believed had happened to her, and she did not understand why others could not see matters as she saw them.
‘We are satisfied that (her employers) had good cause, with overwhelming evidence, to summarily dismiss (her) for gross misconduct, and as such dismissal was on grounds of her conduct, and not her disability, or race, it was not discriminatory.’
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