I have a nut allergy and colleague eating nuts in office.

[Yewdontknowme]

I’ve been working with this company since June. It’s with a small company with two open plan rooms in the same building. There is no HR department just the owners and the general manager and supervisors. One room is nut free as myself and an intern are severely allergic, the other room is ok for nuts. We never have to go into the other office. We are allocated space based on what we do within the company and wfh isn’t an option. For the past few months everything has been great.

A supervisor has returned to our office this past fortnight after maternity leave. It seems she is really popular among the other women in the office. She has ignored all the signs and warnings and has been eating nuts at her workstation, which is making me wheeze and my throat and mouth are itching until I get away home. I’m working dosed up on piriton and with fingers crossed I don’t need to use my epipen.

Our manager is a bit of a coward so has been trying to deal with this woman calmly including offering her a space in the other room but she’s refusing to swap rooms as she wants to be with her friends and likes the bigger workspace she has. She is claiming it’s discriminating against her as a returning mother and a vegetarian and so she will continue to eat what she wants, as in her words “they’re not eating the nuts themselves so they’ll be ok”. For what it’s worth I too am a vegetarian. She also told us to get epipens. Myself and the intern can’t go into the other room as the work in there is totally different to what we do. We need the facilities in this space. Our manager has told us we need to sort it out among ourselves.

I appreciate this is a management problem but what am I supposed to do in the meantime? I’m still on probation and this woman is a long standing staff member. It took me a long time to find this job after redundancy in lockdown and I’m terrified I’ll be laid off after my probationary period runs out because of the drama this causes. I can start looking for another job but I fear it will take me over a year again.

AIBU to expect the manager to deal with this woman instead of having to sort out a ‘compromise’ myself?

A serious nut allergy is capable of being a disability (see Wheeldon v Marstons) - and if it were to be in your case then a failure on the part of the company to deal with this (make “reasonable adjustments”) would be contrary to the law (plus H&S legislation I would have thought) and you could bring an ET claim - further, if they dismissed you (was the reason for not passing you through probation) off the back of the issue this could amount to disability discrimination for which you need no minimum length of service to make a claim.

As well as reasonable adjustments to minimise the risk, it would be worth suggesting an anaphylaxis / auto-injector first aid session for as many staff as possible. Where I used to work we had a half day course delivered in house by St John Ambulance which was really useful (though thankfully I never needed to put it into action).

Your colleague is an absolute idiot.

From thrive law
’Why should employers care?Aside from generally seeking to be a supportive environment in which an employee suffers minimal anxiety, an employer also has a number of obligations to bear in mind when dealing with allergic employees:

• Under Health and Safety Law, employers must “so far as is reasonably practicable” protect the health and safety of employees by removing or reducing workplace risks.
• If an allergy amounts to a disability, then the employer will have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for the allergy sufferer.
• An employer has a common law duty of care to its employees. Where the risk of injury is foreseeable the employer may be at risk of a personal injury claim if it does not take steps to prevent such injury.‘

tbf though if something happens and hse gets involved they’ll fine both the employee and the company

YANBU and you need to take this to HR. They are putting your life in danger.

Throat swelling and itching IS the danger sign of anaphylaxis.

All of you people who say this is rare - yes - it is. But it is real. She deserves to be protected in the workplace.

This ^^^

Throat swelling can be a medical emergency if @Yewdontknowme can't bloody breath! Some of the posters are either very naïve or blithely go through life uncaring about how their actions might affect others!

but if you go abroad (“learning the relevant words”), then you do go on public transport.

Document EVERYTHING …past and going forward . Start by sending an email to your manager listing the history so far and keep sending emails so you have a record . Even if you are new and there’s no HR as an employee you are legally entitled to duty of care. Your manager has a legal responsibility to deal with this and can’t choose not to. Tell your manager that if you are forced to leave due to your position no longer being tenable you will seek advice on constructive dismissal. Good luck !

Several similar suggestions upthread. All of them batshit. If the OP were ‘collapse’ an ambulance would be called and paramedics would know it was fake. What do you think would happen then ?

She’s still on probation, so not good advice.

If you bothered to read the OPs updates before resorting to rudeness, you’d see that the OP approached the employee and tried to explain the severity of the allergy but the employee doesn’t ‘believe’ in anaphylaxis. So it’s a management problem. The company have made reasonable adjustment as per the Equality Act by making the office nut free. Now they need to enforce it.

You obviously don’t get it, so I’ll stop trying now.

I understand that, yes, and I agree. But once an employer becomes aware of an employee’s condition they are subject to the same obligation to try to find a reasonable adjustment to allow that employee to work without their disability putting them at a disadvantage.

In a larger office, the reasonable adjustment would probably be different and may require some lateral thinking, but the employer can’t simply sack the employee unless they genuinely can’t come up with a solution. And the key is the word ‘reasonable’. Forgive me if I seem like a dog with a bone with this issue but I’ve heard just about every excuse in the book for not complying with the Act when it would be simple to do so. The disabled person loses their job and the inevitable employment tribunal finds in their favour - still doesn’t change the fact that they’re out of a job.

You sound depressingly similar to some employers I’ve worked with over the years in that you seem to be advocating looking for a way around the legislation rather than engaging with it.

So your point is that no organisation can comply with this ? You’re advocating here that a large company would find it difficult to make reasonable adjustment, but upthread you were implying that a small company would have difficulty too because of limited office space.

FFS, stop trying to pick holes!

That poster is also ignoring the fact that the adjustments put in place did work here before this one pig headed woman returned from maternity leave.

I was replying to a poster advocating ‘faking a seizure’. If the OP were to do this and an ambulance was called, paramedics would know immediately that it wasn’t genuine.

So you have to take piriton at work, big deal! How many people have to work dosed up on piriton throughout the summer months because they suffer with hay fever. No one is forcing you to eat nuts, no one is exposing you to “nut dust” let’s face it nuts don’t create dust. Non ingestion allergic reactions to nuts doesn’t really happen, certainly not enough to cause anaphylaxis. https://www.wsh.nhs.uk/CMS-Documents/Patient-leaflets/PaediatricDepartment/6438-1-Nut-allergy.pdf

it sounds to me like to are being overly sensitive, of course you must be careful not to ingest nuts, but that does not extend to a nut free zone around you.

It should be the manager sorting it, but you need to be firm and tell her it's not OK, explain its not as simple as you not eating them, explain that you could die from it and yes she is a returning mum. Ask her what would she do if it was her baby who had a nutt allergy, which could be fatal. It might make her realise the severity of your allergy. (your allergy might not be that bad, but I think you have to make it that severe, to make her understand)
Sadly people with out these conditions don't get it, my niece has IBS, when he has a flare up, she needs the toilet pronto, she had a toilet pass at school, but would often get questioned by teachers why she couldn't wait. That was with a medical exemption! So she stopped off school when she had a flare up, as she was sick of having to explain. I know you cannot do this.

Of course she shouldn't have to take medication and also feel physically uncomfortable just so someone can enjoy a particular food.

Not if you drive your own car through Eurotunnel!

Agree. And as a pp has pointed out, upthread somewhere she was implying that the OP would have been unfair not to have disclosed the allergy before she took up the post as a small company with limited office space would have difficulty meeting her needs. Now she’s advocating the same for larger organisations. So, if the legislation is so difficult to put into practice, as she seems to be saying, maybe we should scrap the Equality Act and let vulnerable people take their chance with no protection, and set the cause for equality for the disabled back fifty years.

You are between a rock and a hard place. You could enforce disability discrimination leglislation in that your health condition combined with your work environment is reducing you ability to carry out your role. BUT then does the environment become so toxic you’d rather leave anyway. Good that you have an Allie otherwise it would feel very isolating. Are there some nuts that you can tolerate better ? Is that a point of midpoint compromise to see if she will moderate ?