Toronto, Feb 18 (Inditop.com) A Canadian employer has been fined $25,000 for calling his Pakistani-origin woman employee a ‘Paki’ and ‘nigger.’
Taunting the woman’s two young sons as “half-nigger,” he reportedly told her, “That’s what you get for sleeping with a nigger.” She was later sacked by him.
Accepting Cheryl Khan’s complaint of racist abuse against her boss Lynn Tompkins, the human rights commission has now ordered him to pay her $25,000 in damages as well as $6,750 in lost wages after her sacking last year.
He has also been ordered to introduce an anti-harassment policy at his company and undergo re-orientation to change his behaviour.
Cheryl Khan, who joined Lynx Trucking Transportation as a dispatcher in 2007, said she moved the human rights panel after racial abuse by her employer became unbearable. She told the Toronto Star that Tompkins started racially abusing her immediately after she joined his trucking company.
In her testimony she said he would yell, shout and call his South Asian employees, including truck drivers, stupid immigrants. She said once when she told him not to speak abusively, he shouted back, saying it is his “f—ing company.”
Another employee who testified in her favour told the panel that Tompkins would ridicule his South Asian employees as “stupid or dumb.” The testimony further said that when Indian-origin employees wanted to take leave for Diwali, he said “the f—ing Indians don’t want to work.”
However, those who testified for the employer defended him, saying that he never used abusive langauge.
But rejecting their testimony,the human rights panel held Tompkins guilty of using racially abusive words “Paki” and “nigger” and offensive language and slapped with the hefty fine.
“I have been in Canada close to 35 years and had never experienced racism ever. Not in school, not in work, never. To think that Canada is so multicultural and yet there are still people who say these words, and behave this way …,” Cheryl Khan told the Toronto Star after the verdict in her favour.
