WARNING: This episode addresses cultural sensitivity issues in the workplace – we advise listener discretion.
Trajce challenges his podcast team, Alan, and Sara, with a claim about cultural sensitivities. He shares a tale about a street sweeper’s unfair dismissal by a local government city council after he raised his concerns about the Acknowledgement of Country before a toolbox session. To add probative value to the engineering of this dismissal, Trajce explains, the employer complained about the worker’s failure to attend cultural sensitivity training. “The problem?” Trajce asks, “the employee was on leave – the employer failed to check this. It looked like they were stacking their deck.” Alan is aghast, sharing his experiences and uncovering instances when white people used racisms laws against Indigenous people. Sara laments colonised approaches to both regulating cultural sensitivity and framing awards for cultural achievements.
The WhyWork Team reflect on the challenges of returning to work once you have won an unfair dismissal claim, given the confrontations linked to resocialisation. The defendant may be hypervigilant, wondering about who has been gossiping, or who still blames them even when the management approach was ill-considered and unjust to them.