Ford pays for its failure to stamp out racial abuse

A Ford worker has won £150,000 compensation after being subjected to "humiliating and intimidatory" racial abuse at the car manufacturer's Dagenham plant.

Shinder Nagra, 45, was awarded the sum by an employment tribunal after an earlier hearing found Ford guilty of racial discrimination. The tribunal heard that the engine plant worker had suffered years of racial abuse, bullying and threats of violence. Two Ford employees accused of racially abusing Mr Nagra have also been ordered to pay him £1,000 each.

The decision comes three years after Mr Nagra's colleague Sukhjit Parmar, 45, was paid a £300,000 settlement by the company and after the company had vowed to stamp out racism at the Essex plant with a "zero-tolerance" policy.

The employment tribunal's judgment said: "The abuse Mr Nagra suffered took place over an extended period and was both humiliating and intimidatory. Ford behaved in a high-handed and oppressive manner, failing to address the appropriate matters in the aftermath of their own inquiry.

"The so-called 'zero policy' was, in effect, an empty gesture compounded by failure to punish all those responsible and the inappropriate way in which some of those who had transgressed were even promoted." The tribunal in Stratford, east London, heard that Mr Nagra, an Indian-born father-of-two, joined Ford in 1988 and was treated fairly during his first seven years in the assembly section. But when he joined Mr Parmar in the engine section in January 1995 the abuse started.

A small number of group leaders, foremen and supervisors called Mr Parmar "Paki" and then graffiti appeared linking him to "nigger Lawrence" – a reference to the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

The original tribunal last May heard that Mr Nagra, of Bexleyheath, Kent, left the company in 1999, fearing a nervous breakdown.

Yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Ford Motor Company said it accepted the findings of the employment tribunal remedies hearing. "Ford accepted partial liability in the original employment tribunal in November 2001. The issues about which Mr Nagra complained occurred in the 1990s and were thoroughly investigated by Ford at the time.

"The investigation resulted in two employees being disciplined, with one being dismissed from the company in 1999,'' she said.