Kelly v Leonardo Employment Tribunal Thread 3

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Ms BM Kelly v Leonardo UK Limited Employment Tribunal – hearing Case number: 8001497/2024

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Abbreviations:
C or MK - Claimant, Maria Kelly
NC - Naomi Cunningham, barrister for C
KW - Katy Wedderburn, solicitor for C
R or L - Respondent. Leonardo UK
ST - Susanne Tanner KC, barrister for R
J - Judge
P - Panel member
GC - gender critical
GI - gender identity
AL - Andrew R Letton VP People Shared Services Leonardo - respondent witness

Tribunal Tweets coverage here

https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/kelly-vs-leonardo-uk-ltd

Thread 1 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5416903-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-29th-september-10am?page=1

Thread 2 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5420656-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-thread-2?page=1

We need more toilets available for people with disabilities, changing rooms for nappies and neutral spaces.

The problem is a massive lack of public toilets in general and a massive lack.of toilets in workspaces.

I’m still catching up on the thread. I’ve made it from page 7 to page 18 so far today. Just wanted to say thank you for the suggestion to look up the old tv ads for Tunes. So terribly 1980s/1990s and funny! Particularly liked the one where the man passed out from the amount of perfume the woman had used. That then led me to old ads for Bodyform (Libra) pads. Again, very funny!

BTW for any Australians reading this, Tunes are the square packing of Butter Menthols with the nasal clearing action of Vicks Vapodrops.

That was some satisfying action by NC. Was she as magnificent to hear her saying it as it was to read what she’d said? Was she calm or angry or anything like that?

No conflict. I posted earlier about the purposes of Make UK itself and its committees.

The committee doesn't make law; it discusses the needs of employers for more skilled and diverse staff so that companies can make more money.

Are Parents Rooms not a thing there in the UK? Very common here at shopping centres. It’s separate to the women’s toilets and is for both sexes of parents. Contains a few changing bays for nappies, nappy disposal bins, sinks for hand washing or washing off a particularly dirty baby, comfy chairs for feeding, a microwave for heating bottles, sink for washing out bottles or pumps, a high chair, a private cubicle or two for breastfeeding or feeding a distracted baby, tv on cartoons, some sort of play area for toddlers, and a toilet usually containing a parent and child toilet. That is, a normal sized toilet and a small child sized toilet. Big enough to fit both of you in there, plus a pram.

Are Parents Rooms not a thing there in the UK? Very common here at shopping centres.

Where is this Paradise?

Bluewater shopping mall in Kent had them when mine were babies. They were great.

@Peregrina Australia.

Andy is Andy L, not Andy R, which was an error by TT in his first session.

With respect to AL and consulting the union; in large employers, trade union reps are elected by the workforce and some will be paid by the company to be full time union reps and provided with a shared office for union use. This is cost-effective because the HR dept can head off any problems by directly talking to the reps. There will be any number of disciplinary and grievance cases ongoing at any time, and full time reps can use the time to consult with and represent individuals about their cases. It's cheaper than losing paid time on a job for a TU rep to represent and consult.

Some reps in the workplace are not paid but are available for staff to talk to. No paid union rep can be directly hired as a rep. They have to be existing employees elected to the post.

Some policy/conditions issues are easily dealt with as the union will already have policies or custom and practice. Others will mean the union has to consult its members. More serious issues such as pay rises and changes to hours will need to be balloted, and there are strict laws about that.

If an HR department can work with the union to avoid strike action or conflict, then it will. For example HR might say we will give paid time off for staff training. The union will agree and inform members and then negotiate for more. Or they will suggest something more weighty like buying out overtime (salaries increased across the board in exchange for no more overtime claims and an expectation that staff will work additional hours if necessary). That kind of thing is to test the water. The reps may say, nope, not happening, in which case the company will maybe wait another year, or they may say, we can ask the members, and negotiations can start.

(The unions are also good at letting management know about shitty managers who are bullying staff, because often the staff won't speak up to the company but will talk to reps.)

This is in the union's interests because otherwise the company could threaten redundancies. And having paid reps to work with the staff often means compulsory redundancies are avoided and managers don't have to make uncomfortable decisions about who's selected.

For AL this means keeping the union happy as much as possible and negotiating about most things.

My question is what is the union's policy on SSS? Sometimes this is agreed nationally (Unison recently decided that TWAW) and sometimes locally. Do the union members at Leonardo agree with SSS and if they don't, where was the consultation and policy made with their members?

There were loads of iterations of toilets combinations in the Trafford Centre when my kids were small. Except mixed sex unless you might count the parent/child ones that had two loos, a big and a small. Including one room that was just baby changing which seemed to be infinite. Although that might have been the mirrors. I've not been there in years though.

Cool and calm with bite, is how I heard her.

There’s certainly one in the main shopping area in Hemel Hempstead where my DD lives.

Interestingly S E-B is an ambassador for JKR's LUMOS charity.

https://www.wearelumos.org/who-we-are/our-ambassadors/

Maybe a better analogy is for Men to imagine that they will be guaranteed to have watery diarrhoea at least once a month and will only realise when they shift in their chair and feel it.

Also that it has leaked through their trousers and has stained their chair.

They then have to make into the toilets without anyone noticing the stains on their clothes or chair, then have to wash them or change clothes, dry or bag up clothes.

Then explain to their manager/supervisor wtf took so long in toilet!

Except for of they are surgeons, then they are fine with blood and gore, right?

Have we talked about uti's? How the desperate need to pee can come out of nowhere, can get worse the closer you get to the loo (assuming you can make it that far) so there's a race to drop your pants before you pee through them, can be agonisingly painful and may recur after a matter of minutes.

UTIs were the bane of my life in peri menopause and they were so damned painful. I remember them well.

An excellent film. As is Toilet, another Akshay Kumar one.

I suffered from utis since being a child at primary school. I believe, although not in my case, they can be indicative of child abuse. I used to get them after spending the summer holidays with my grandparents in their caravan in Prestatyn. I'd return to school, terrified of needing the loo. 'Burning' didn't come close to describing the pain. I'd be doubled over. Wet myself several times and was so embarrassed I'd suffer it in silence. Except once when i peed on the landing because someone else was in the toilet and my mum took me to the Doctor. In hindsight, I think the infections were caused by pollution in the seawater. I think Liverpool just piped its toilet waste out to sea untreated. I've suffered them periodically as an adult, though rarely as bad. I actually thought menopause had cured me...but no.

Many people with disabilities need the toilet NOW when they need it, as indeed to many women during meopause, so no, I'm afraid I'm not okay about sharing it with people who don't share and don't understand disability or often believe in it and, and please delete this if it's wrong or controverisal, are on a power trip. I don't think anyone should have to explain that they have a disability and how it affects them, any more than Sandie Peggie and Maria Kelly should have to have done for periods.

There aren't enough disabled loos that have changing facilities for adults or hoists. There haven't been for years and no one listened or cared that this was a barrier to disabled people participating in the world. Now a tiny, tiny group come along and everyone is supposed to worry about them and feel sorry for them and alter everything to suit them.

It's not going to be right to solve the problem by giving back what was taken from women by taking them from the disabled and sharing them with another group. It seems to me that the EHRC, as Akua Reindorf has begun to, needs to jump up and down and scream and take people to court until certain groups have to accept that their rights are not more important than everyone else's.

This isn't aimed at you. It's years and years of frustration and raw anger that the solution to a woman wanting privacy is for her to use a toilet aimed at those with disabilities who CANNOT go anywhere else. Imagine wetting or soiling yourself because you CANNOT use another toilet and a family is using it, who could have gone somewhere else but preferred to use that toilet.

It would be good if there were more toilet provisions but my local council has shut ALL the loos and says that local shops can take up the slack. Except that they don't, and they shut in the evenings.

Remember the determination to cut benefits? The sheer nastiness about education for children with SEND? The 'autism is bad parenting' brigade? Of course the next step will be to try to take the loos too. And to end my little rant with a chilling thought. People with autism have lower life expectancy because they receive poor medical care.

The answer to the question seems to be 'hit the disabled.' It doesn't matter what question is.

As I say, this isn't aimed at you specifically, but I think it's important that each and every disabled person can have their say and be listened to.

Perfect. Now all we have to do is make it happen. I can make a date and walnut cake from Delia's cookbook that has amazing laxative qualities if that's any help?

She's the only one who doesn't have a connection to Harry Potter. Or have I forgotten about something? So it's good that she doesn't let her disagreement with JKR get the way of working with the charity. I hope that continues.

But what she is reported to have said in the interview doesn't make me think she's properly thought about and understood the issues.

A bit off topic.

I think Liverpool just piped its toilet waste out to sea untreated.

Rhyl, just down the road from Prestatyn most certainly used to. Since the tide went out a long way, it receded beyond the sewage outflow pipes, and the sand around used to be have brown stains. I haven't been there for many years, so I don't know if this is still the case.

I’ve not been able to follow this case in real time so have just spent a couple of hours catching up. Thanks to the TT cut and pasters and everyone else’s commentary.

I think previous posters have already covered all the reactions I had while reading TT, but it did remind me of a time I was undermined badly by a vox pop at work.

I was a junior member of a cross functional team, and was asked to develop a plan of action for a certain task, which I presented and the team accepted and told me to crack on with it. Someone else (a man) disagreed with the strategy and went to the VP (a man) and bent his ear about how his alternate approach would be better. Next team meeting, the VP asked the team (mostly men) to vote on which plan to follow, making clear he (the VP) preferred the one that wasn’t mine. Some team members protested that it was not their area of expertise and the VP told them to vote anyway, so of course they voted how the VP wanted. The VP went around the table asking for opinions and I was the only holdout to my original plan, and my boss told me afterwards that she was very proud of me.

Of course, I had to execute the alternate plan, and I did it well. Turned out that the interfering male colleague and the VP knew more background information than they had let on and had I known this information I would have come up with a plan very much like the alternate in the first place. My (female) boss and I had been kept in the dark and she was absolutely steaming about it and I think Words Were Said. She, sadly, left within the year.

Im now the age my female boss was at the time, and am in a different company, and junior colleagues are often surprised at what they term as my cynicism. I often have to coach them on not assuming they’ve been given all pertinent information and on asking the right questions before developing plans of their own, because some people have agendas of their own that don’t necessarily align with the project aims or company values. The Vox Pop was a horrible situation at the time, but it taught me some very valuable career lessons.

Don't worry - I'm not going to take offence! I wanted to gauge the strength of feeling about the exclusivity of accessible toilets, and I got a very firm answer. 🙂🙏🏼

Catching up well after the event, that made me splutter tea all over my keyboard.