Friday Frivolity: An Employee’s Right to a Farewell Card

I don’t know how we missed this when the news broke back in October.

According to Jacob Phillips, writing in The Standard, Karen Conaghan worked for IAG, the parent company of British Airways, for two years prior to her dismissal in a restructuring. During that time, she filed forty complaints relating to allegations of sexual harassment, victimization, and unfair dismissal, all of which an Employment Tribunal had rejected. Make that forty-one.

Ms. Conaghan alleged that the company had failed to acknowledge her existence by not giving her a card to commemorate the end of her employment. The Tribunal rejected her claim. First, she was not the only departing employee who did not receive a card, and some of those cardless former employees were men, so Ms. Conaghan could not maintain her claim of gender-based discrimination.

In addition, it emerged from testimony that the managers had circulated a card for Ms. Conaghan, but only two or three people had signed it. The managers concluded that it would have been more hurtful to deliver a mostly-blank card than to deliver nothing at all. After she departed, more people signed the card, but because some of the people who signed had been people named in some of Ms. Conaghan’s complaints, the company decided not to send it. In 2023, an Employment Tribunal had determined, according to Mr. Phillips’ reporting, that "sending an employee an unwanted birthday card could amount to 'unwanted conduct' and harassment."