Dundee City Council has been ordered to pay a former school technician who was subjected to sexual harassment more than £100,000.
Margaret Malcolm, 56, complained that male technician colleagues at Baldragon Academy stuck models of a penis to her telephone and scribbled male genitalia on drawings she had done for her Brownie pack.
An employment tribunal in the city also heard that they used “coarse industrial language” directly in front of Miss Malcolm, whom they knew to be devoutly religious, and they regularly baited her.
Several episodes from 2001 were recounted, and the tribunal ruled that the behaviour of her colleagues John Strachan, Stuart Gourlay and Graham Strachan was “of an obscene and shameful nature”.
As well as the occasions with the male organs fashioned out of Blu-Tack and Brownies drawings, there was an episode with a slogan to do with a Dundee FC player from 2001.
The judgment said John Strachan wrote on a noticeboard “Caniggia is God” in a reference to the Argentinian footballer Claudio Caniggia.
When she saw it Miss Malcolm changed “God” to “good” but John Strachan changed it back.
Her colleagues “decided to conduct a planned campaign of obscene behaviour against Miss Malcolm because they considered that she was a vulnerable individual who was very naive sexually and a devout Christian. It was sexual harassment of a serious kind and went on for seven or eight months”.
The tribunal ruled that she should receive £25,000 from the council for the injury to her feelings, and remarked that although she complained on several occasions to her superior no satisfactory action was taken by the council to ensure there was no repeat of the obscene behaviour by the two Strachans and Gourlay.
The council was also ordered to pay her £12,500 for psychiatric injury and £25,603 for loss of earnings.
The sums amount to £63,103 and the tribunal ruled that she should also receive interest at 8% from as far back as 2001, plus a sum for loss of pension rights.
This will put the total at more than £100,000.
The council accepted that they owed compensation to Miss Malcolm for the unlawful and “plainly shameful” conduct of their employees between May and December 2001.
Miss Malcolm’s case has a long history and was returned to the tribunal from the Court of Session in Edinburgh, where a judge said the time and expense involved in Margaret Malcolm’s row with Dundee City Council was “staggering”.
Lord Malcolm called for a deal to be reached and chronicled the “long and complicated saga” which an employment appeals tribunal had described as “a mess”.
Miss Malcolm left her job early in 2002 and in April of that year she went to an employment tribunal alleging sexual harassment by fellow employees and blamed the local authority.
After a legal row about whether she had waited too long before going to the tribunal, a series of hearings went ahead but in April 2003 her claims were dismissed.
Although the tribunal accepted that the harassment had happened, they ruled that the council was not “vicariously liable”.
In March 2004 the decision was reversed after it was revealed that one of the tribunal members, ill at the time, had fallen asleep.
A fresh tribunal heard the case again between March 2005 and November 2006, and there were further hearings in each of the next three years before the case arrived at Scotland’s highest civil court In sending the case back, Lord Malcolm expressed concern that the long and expensive saga had occurred in a system which was supposed to improve efficiency and cut costs.