Ms C de Nyary Comandini v White Label Productions Ltd and 5 others — 2019

The claimant worked as a subtitler for the first respondent from 12 November 2018 to 20 May 2019 in a small team supervised by Sophie Blythe and overseen by William Toll and Cheryl Grant. The tribunal found that she was of Italian and French national origin and mixed race, but that her colleagues and managers assumed she was a native English speaker and did not know she was not. It also found that the team worked through ordinary QC, style-guide, and spreadsheet processes, and that many of the disputed emails and edits arose from those processes rather than any discriminatory treatment.

The tribunal rejected the race-related harassment and direct race discrimination complaints about the EZTitles comment, feedback emails, deletion of theme-music and animal-sound labels, the shoulder tap, the opera leaflet, the April 2019 query about the word negro, and the 5 April 2019 native-speaker discussion. It found that several incidents were not proved as alleged, and that the remainder were explained by non-discriminatory reasons such as software unfamiliarity, subjective editorial decisions, routine feedback, or ordinary conversation about a freelancer's caption. In particular, the native-speaker remark was found to relate to Carlos's caption and not to the claimant, whom the team understood to be a native English speaker.

The claimant raised bullying concerns with Mr Toll on 23 and 26 April 2019 and then submitted a written grievance report. The tribunal found that the grievance was treated formally because she said she had been bullied by colleagues over several months, not because of race, and that the report and grievance appeal did not allege race discrimination or any contravention of the Equality Act. It accepted that the appeal process was not ideal because Ms Grant had been involved in the investigation, but found that the decision-makers preferred the colleagues' evidence for consistent reasons and that this did not arise from the claimant's race.

On the probation review, the tribunal found that Mr Toll had already decided to end the claimant's employment before the review meeting, but that the decision was based on genuine concerns about performance, attention to detail, response to feedback, and the claimant's ability to work alongside the team. The unfair dismissal complaint had already been withdrawn. The remaining complaints were dismissed, and the judgment recorded no monetary award.