Calling someone Darth Vader. If that’s as bad as your workplace banter gets, I’d suggest you find a more entertaining place to work. Yet, incredibly, an NHS worker not only took enormous offence to being compared to the bucketheaded villain of the Star Wars franchise, she also took her employers to a tribunal. She’s just won £30,000 in compensation for her trouble.
Snowflakery has become endemic among the British workforce
Lorna Rooke claims she was prompted to leave the NHS Blood and Transplant service after an incident in 2021, when a team-building exercise turned to the dark side. In Rooke’s absence, her workmates filled out a Star Wars-themed personality quiz, supposedly determining which type of person they each are, with characters from the movies clumsily grafted on to each archetype. The personality test didn’t declare Rooke to be an evil, planet-destroying psychopath. Apparently, she resembles Darth Vader because she, too, is a ‘very focused individual’. But she certainly didn’t take it that way. While the tribunal dismissed her claims of unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, it ruled that her quiz-related ordeal qualified as a workplace ‘detriment’ – legal jargon for a harmful or negative experience.
Such has been the creep of babyish offence culture into the nation’s laws and businesses, this isn’t even a one-off. Last year, the High Court ruled that calling a man ‘bald’ qualified as sexual harassment under equality law. Tony Finn, the electrician at the centre of the case, was once called a ‘bald c***’ by a male supervisor. Finn told a tribunal he was less upset by the c-word than the comment about his appearance.
Cases of not saying hello to someone, sending someone an unsolicited birthday card and offering a chair to an older colleague have also all been seen as potentially questionable behaviour.
For all the talk of younger generations going soft, it seems that snowflakery – real or put-on – has become endemic among the British workforce. The combination of poorly-worded laws, thin skins and credulous judges seems to have handed a cudgel to any disgruntled employee to exact revenge on an old employer. Now saying anything other than ‘pass the stapler’ – let alone a lewd joke, or the occasionally well-earned put-down – has the potential to end up in court, further purging workplaces of any spontaneity or humour in the process.
What a tragedy. This hyper-regulation of working life has only been a boon to HR managers, who can now discipline workers for the most minor indiscretions, and to handfuls of self-victimising whingers. It’s high time we struck back against this empire of offence-taking.
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