He’s obviously very thin skinned… Roll on Friday in the UK who are safely out of the way of his litigous nature report the following
The Managing Partner of Australia’s largest law firm, HWL Ebsworth, has taken a newspaper to the Australian Human Rights Commission for joking about his name.
Juan Martinez claimed that the headline, “At HWL Ebsworth, no Juan can go home” insulted and humiliated him based on his Spanish heritage.
Martinez has come under fire for his firm’s reluctance to allow staff to work from home. HWL Ebsworth said it wasn’t going to follow what other businesses were doing “blindly like a lemming“, which turned out to be a poor maxim. Six people connected with the firm’s Melbourne office were subsequently diagnosed with covid, and health authorities labelled it as a major outbreak site.
But Martinez claimed that the headline in the Australian Financial Review, “At HWL Ebsworth, no Juan can go home”, erroneously suggested that no HWL employees were allowed to work from home, and as a result was not a “fair and accurate report” qualifying for an exemption under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Even though technically, it only stated that no-one called Juan could work from home.
While plenty of publications have punned on Martinez’s name, this time the context was different, according to AFR’s account of his complaint. It argued that there were well-known concerns that people from non-English speaking backgrounds were failing to follow COVID-19 restrictions, and that “in this instance the pun on his first name was intended to ridicule his heritage and suggest that, being Spanish, he did not understand his obligations as an employer”.
Read AFR follow up report at
https://www.afr.com/rear-window/hwl-ebsworth-boss-files-human-rights-complaint-20200730-p55gvc
