I’m surprised that Siouxsie Wiles has had to fight with her own university — after she’d been fighting the good fight for science for so many years and striving against the ignorance of anti-vaxxer. The University of Auckland failed in it’s obligation to protect and support its employees, and that’s not just my opinion, since the courts definitively agreed with her.
Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles‘ employer breached its contractual obligations to protect her health and safety in the wake of harassment she experienced as a result of her work, an Employment Court judgment today has found.
The long-awaited judgment comes around two-and-a-half years after she and then University of Auckland employee Professor Shaun Hendy initially filed their claim with the Employment Relations Authority in January 2022.Dr Wiles alleged the university failed to protect her from a “tsunami of threats” she received for her public commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic. She said she had raised concerns to the university about her safety since April 2020, shortly after the pandemic began.
The university has denied unjustifiably disadvantaging Wiles, breaching their agreement or its statutory obligations. It said it had also acted in good faith towards her. However, the Employment Court’s judgment does not agree.
She won! Unfortunately, as I know from ugly past experience, trials are absurdly costly. She won…but what she won, in addition to a moral victory, was $400,000 in court costs. Rebecca Watson is rallying her followers to help her out.
I’ll join in that call! Go to this site to donate to Siouxsie’s court costs!
Why the fuck is it that being right and being the victim and winning a court case that should never have been brought can be so horrendously costly to people it should NOT be costly to?
@1 Really. It’s absurd how courts work like that.
@ ^ Recursive Rabbit : Yup. Sure is one vast vast vast gulf between what is legal and what is ethical.
Personally, I sure wish ethics would prevail over legality.
I know Canadian rules, not New Zealand rules, so I followed through and read the actual court decision.
Dr. Wiles was seeking costs as part of the judgement, and the judgement ended with the court telling them to negotiate first on that, but that they could still seek a court order if they couldn’t agree on costs.
Remember, the idea that everyone pays their own costs, win or lose, is called “the American rule”, and this was not in the USA. It is entirely possible that the university might try and minimize the payout for costs, but by the court order, Dr. Wiles can still ask for the full amount and have that arbitrated by the court (i.e. the court can throw out costs found to be unreasonable).
Maybe it was addressed in the linked video, but it is also more than an hour long. If someone can point to a timestamp where it is discussed if Dr Wiles is NOT recovering costs, I will stand corrected.