A Sainsbury’s call centre handler was sacked for repeatedly hanging up on unhappy and upset customers, an employment tribunal has heard.

Muawana McCollin put the phone down on 62 of 129 callers who were ‘unhappy’ or ‘upset’ in a single month.

The 49-year-old claimed the high number of aborted calls was due to the phone system and said someone was ‘setting her up’.

But a manager who listened back to the calls said they were some of the most ‘blatent and unreasonable’ hang-ups they had ever heard. McCollin was later fired for gross misconduct.

Ms McCollin, who is black, challenged the decision and took her employers to a tribunal claiming race and disability discrimination due to her health.

She said her dismissal would not have happened if she was ‘white and Scottish’.

But her claims were thrown out after a panel found she had a ‘skewed perception of events’ with an ‘unrealistic view’ of what happened to her.

Ms McCollin started working as a customer service representative for Telecom Service Centres Ltd, which traded as Webhelp UK, in Glasgow in May 2018.

She was tasked with answering customer calls for the supermarket giant Sainsbury’s.

But concerns were raised about her hanging up on customers ‘early’ and an investigation was launched in 2019.

‘From a review of (her) calls…it was found that, in the month of June 2019, 62 of 129 calls were terminated early when customers were upset or unhappy,’ the tribunal heard.

The hearing in Glasgow was told that when confronted about the hang-ups she claimed a medical condition, ovarian fibroids, affected her eyesight.

She said she would terminate calls ‘in error’ because she struggled to press the correct button.

However, managers took the decision to sack Ms McCollin after finding her guilty of gross misconduct for ‘deliberately and wilfully cutting the customer off calls’.

Paul Tausney, a manager who listened to McCollin’s calls, told the hearing they were ‘amongst the most blatant unreasonable disconnects that he had ever heard’.

He said he could not see any reason for her calls dropping off other than she was trying to avoid taking the full call.

In a letter, the company told Ms McCollin she was being dismissed for ‘call avoidance’.

Ms McCollin appealed the decision claiming her poor performance was due to her health.

She claimed she was being discriminated against because of her disability as well as other factors.

Ms McCollin claimed medication she was taking made her drowsy, she sometimes struggled to hear customers down the phone, and was sensitive to light.

But bosses said they had never before had a call centre worker prematurely terminate a customer call due to drowsiness.

After losing her appeal, Ms McCollin made a series of claims at the tribunal including race discrimination, disability discrimination, harassment and victimisation.

But the panel dismissed them all.

The tribunal, led by the employment judge Ian McPherson, concluded: ‘Her evidence was an unrealistic view of what she believed had happened to her, and she did not understand why others could not see matters as she saw them.

‘We are satisfied that (her employers) had good cause, with overwhelming evidence, to summarily dismiss (her) for gross misconduct, and as such dismissal was on grounds of her conduct, and not her disability, or race, it was not discriminatory.’

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