A telesales firm, owned by Indians in Britain has been found guilty of race discrimination for forcing an Indian employee to anglicise his name.
Leicester-based firm Teachers 2 Parents Ltd asked Rahul Jain, 28, to change his name to Rob Matthews, claiming that English names were easier for customers to spell in emails, the Daily Mail has reported.
Other Indian employees allegedly had their names changed too, including a woman called Sarbjit who became known as Sally and a man called Prakash who was called Terry, the paper said.
An employment tribunal ruled that the school software company’s policy was not a 'proportionate' way to stop emails going astray and that it was enforced on Indian employees while white colleagues were allowed to keep their names.
“I was the only person in the company to challenge what was happening. They had a policy for all Asians to change their names,” Jain said.
“There were at least 30 other people of Indian origin who did this and are still working there. What the company did is outrageous and totally racist,” he added.
Suresh Patel, 37, and Uresh Naik, 36, founded the firm in 2007. Jain joined it in September 2009. His job was to cold-call schools to sell a new product.
The panel was told that ‘Naik and Patel explained that in the early days of recruiting staff to telesales, emails from customers had gone missing and when this was investigated by Patel it was discovered that staff email addresses had been misspelt by customers.’
The tribunal heard the firm ‘had a number of staff of Indian ethnic origin who adopted anglicized names at work’.
They included Aarti (Anna), Mehul (Max), Sarbjit (Sally), Meera (Marie), Neeraj (Neil), Prakhash (Terry), Jaspal (Jay), Jayna (Jane) and Faizal (Fred).
"These names were not only adopted as email addresses, but staff used the names in making calls and around the office to each other," the tribunal heard.