Ask the expert: It's discriminatory - and illegal

Q: My boss has recently been promoted into his position. He seems to have singled me out for special attention - of the worst kind.

Everyone in the office completes reports on a regular basis, but he seems always to return mine to me to get every little thing just perfect, even the spacing after fullstops and his particular way of using commas. When there are no spelling or grammatical errors, he will find something else to criticise.

This makes me nervous every time I submit a report, and takes hours of extra work. I feel like my work is being marked by a primary schoolteacher.

Initially, I thought it was his expectation of everyone, but in reading over my colleagues' reports, it seems a different standard is being applied.

The rest of the office files reports with spelling and grammatical errors, and they are accepted "as is". When I mentioned it to one of my colleagues, he looked a bit embarrassed and mumbled something about the "brown factor".

According to this colleague, my boss has often remarked that non-Europeans don't speak "proper English". Now I notice another new recruit is undergoing the same scrutiny, and she is non-European as well. I also sat in on job interviews recently and noticed that my boss had marked all over the CVs of candidates with non-European names.

Now I'm not sure what to do. I like my job and my colleagues, but the continual hassle and the unfairness of being singled out is starting to wear on me.

A: Dr MARIE WILSON is associate professor of management at the University of Auckland, research director of the ICEHOUSE business accelerator and a veteran of 20 years in corporate management and small business.

From your return email address, I can tell that you work for a fairly large employer, so you are lucky enough to have a series of options for dealing with this in the workplace. If you are singled out because of your ethnicity, this is not only unfair, it is probably also illegal.

You can judge whether your new boss would respond to a direct approach - that is, sitting down to talk to him about what he is doing. If he is, you can start here and see if things improve.

If not, or if he doesn't respond, you'll need to involve other people in the company, either going to his manager and/or approaching your HR department, or whoever is responsible for employment equity in your workplace.

Once they know about this behaviour, your organisation will have an obligation to help you with the problem.

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Q: You always offer job-hunting advice as if there is no racism out there. As many people start by saying that they are immigrants or non-Europeans, don't you think that this might explain their difficulties in getting a job?

A: In earlier columns I have referred to Treasury reports that have identified the problems immigrants have in getting jobs, particularly jobs that use their talents.

I'm quite sure discrimination against ethnicity, gender and other factors can enter the hiring decision.

Whenever there is good evidence of discrimination, I encourage applicants to contact the company's HR department, the employment relations service or the Human Rights Commission.

Most applicants, however, will never know the full story of why they were or weren't hired. In these cases, it pays to get feedback.

* Send your questions to: julie_middleton@nzherald.co.nz