Polish employee claims inability to speak English is a disability
A Polish hotel room cleaner, Izabela Klarecka, is hoping to have her lack of English classified as a disability after she was underpaid as a result of being unable to understand an employment contract. Izabela is seeking damages on the grounds that her inability to speak English amounted to discrimination.
She agreed to be paid £1.84 for each room she cleaned at a Travelodge, but she claims it was impossible to clean three rooms in an hour, as her boss had stated, thereby receiving the minimum wage of £5.52 an hour, as it soon emerged that cleaning each room actually took about 40 minutes and her pay turned out to be about half the minimum wage.
Izabela will be represented by her husband Tomasz at an employment tribunal which is due to be held in Bedford in September of this year. Tomasz Klarecka said: “Inability to communicate in English is a handicap that disables a person working in Great Britain. This wording is in accordance with the definition of disability included in the Disability Discrimination Act.”
The Act defines a disabled person as one who has “a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day to day activities”. Quite how Tomasz intends to present the claim is unclear but presumably he will argue that Izabela suffers from a mental impairment which under Section 4(1)(g) affects the normal day-to-day activities of ‘learning, and/or ‘understanding’.
We wish the Bedford tribunal well. They must be really looking forward to this case.
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