The Defender of Rights published on Tuesday in the Official Journal a report concerning a case of discrimination within a Leroy Merlin store – facts contested by the company – a final appeal which comes at the end of a procedure initiated in January 2022. The institution uses its “ultimate power”, which authorizes it to make a file public when an organization does not respond to its recommendations. This “naming and shaming” concerns an alleged case of discrimination regarding the family situation of a homosexual couple, employees of a Leroy Merlin store in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (Essonne).
The two employees, X and Y in the report, claim that their management was not aware of their situation when Y was hired in March 2021. After testing positive for Covid-19 in mid-March, list of contact cases which included the name of his companion. According to him, it was then that the attitude of those responsible changed. When they returned to their post, they noticed that their schedules had been modified so “that they never had a day of rest in common”, according to the report published in the JO. “A manager told me word for word that she was disrupting our schedules since we were together,” Y told AFP.
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Y’s fixed-term contract was not renewed. X claims that after asking in vain for a change and a contractual rupture, he decided to abandon his post on June 15, 2021, before being dismissed a month later. According to the report, Leroy Merlin did not dispute having taken into account the family situation of as a couple, on the grounds that this can “result in a lack of counter-power”. The employer also criticizes X for not having clarified his relationship with Y when he “co-opted” the latter. According to the institution’s analysis, this use is discriminatory: “employees have no obligation to specify the content of their relationship (…) and the employer cannot take family situation into account either. of an employee to make decisions concerning him or her.
In November 2022, the Defender of Rights sent recommendations to the company: “just compensation” for the applicants’ harm and a modification of its working hours practices to respect the principle of “non-discrimination”. “The situation where organizations do not implement recommendations is rare. Leroy Merlin does not recognize discrimination. The justification for distinction between employees is not sufficient,” underlined Rights Defender Claire Hédon. “We contest the facts of discrimination (…) The couple has never been an element which motivates the manager to have to organize his schedule”, reacted Tawfik Kilani, director of development and dialogue at Leroy Merlin.