Human Rights Commission Mediation Outcome for proven racism at NZ Government Organization

The background is another big chapter I need to summarize. The outcome was $34,000 in cash and PTSD from work related bullying and racism.

1. We are here because I feel Wellington H2O has failed to provide an emotionally safe work environment for me, as required by NZ by law to provide for their ALL employees, regardless of race, gender, or national origin. My complaint letter to the Human Rights Commission covered 28 issues already, but I have never been heard in a neutral setting until today, especially after this very long and painful year that we went through.
2. I have undergone bullying, unduly disadvantage and duress, which I believe to a large degree originated from racial discrimination, and all of this while the world and my family abroad were fighting for survival from a world pandemic.
3. In saying this, I am backed by substantial evidence in written communication gathered over the course of a year. I brought here today only the ones relevant to bias and discrimination as required by the Human Rights Commission process, but there is plenty more related to bullying, unduly disadvantage, and duress that I was forced to endure.
4. Reinforcing my claim is the fact that I have also spoken to other foreigners and kiwis current and former employees who have left Wellington H2O for similar reasons. I have heard stories about other foreign employees who felt that their work was not appreciated, such as Amelia Seagrave, an American engineer who did great work but left the country after Wellington H2O, and who I replaced. She was probably subjected to the same passive aggressive and condescending behaviour by Ben Fontana, and unwilling to stand up against it. I have witnessed myself very unequal treatment towards other foreign staff members while at Wellington H2O, including 2 other latin american, one from Peru nearly exploited last year and I was who brought it up with Ben Aguas during the same meeting where, as a result, I was subjected to an investigation against me for standing up against the unequal and insulting treatment he had towards foreigners. He is Australian, not kiwi. I think he was worse at chauvinism than racism. He loved taking credit for my comments and opinions.

All of this led me to finally raise this matter to the Human Rights Commission as Wellington H2O was not looking after me. It was quite the contrary.

They were actively finding ways to minimize me and forcing me to quit, which I had to, as anyone with some sense of self-respect would. I could not do it earlier because of the pandemic's effect on the job market and I was also unable to leave the country to travel home. It was the first time I experienced what slavery must have felt like, though I am pretty sure that was much worse, as it came with physical beating as well as psychological humiliation.

5. In my 25 years as a civil engineer, who has worked in 5 countries, I had never been subjected to an investigation. I can sustain that this investigation in itself was biased, orchestrated by Tania, Ben's manager, and it was used to get information from me via a lawyer's interrogation, who actually told me that this investigation would be used to find out what was wrong with the organization, to help her do her job in correcting issues in her department! Not to help me in any way! The person being harrassed. She was a lawyer in charge of a network engineering team. Basically, just a big paycheck and perhaps covering tracks.
   

The investigation was also intended to put me under duress, under threat. It serves in itself as evidence of a biased and unfair work environment. It had the clear purpose of intimidating me, humiliating me, creating stress to pressure me to quit and it had a predetermined outcome against me from the start. It is never a fair process in New Zealand.

It excluded all the statements by others that were in my favour and only used the ones against me. I learned the term "kangaroo court" from this investigation. They spent great effort and money in trying to force me out while still wanting my advice and my work for them to take credit.

This has happened to other foreign employees where they have tried to get their passwords and access their work using IT staff, for others to take over their work. It is all shameless piracy, dodgy behaviour.

The code of conduct did not apply the same to everyone in the organization.There is inequality, plain and simple.

When I initially complained about bullying by Elena Chang a year ago, I was told by Marc Kirvig and Tania Haskin to try to resolve it over coffee.

No investigation was ever conducted about her behaviour. After several months, when I raised a formal complaint about the persistent behaviour and discrimination, a lawyer was hired by Wellington H2O who insisted on interviewing me first, even though I was also interviewed first during the investigation against me.

I was told by the ERA that this lawyer was providing me false information about New Zealand employment law. I called the Ombudsman office who referred me to the Human Rights Commission back then.

I had to withdraw this investigation later, as I was advised by a lawyer that it looked like it would be used against me too, and not as an impartial unbiased process.

My father was in the hospital at the time, and I told them about it. He was in intensive care. We were locked down because of a pandemic. They simply did not care. I was emotionally vulnerable and the situation was used to further harass me. That is the kind of people kiwis are. Not all, but many. I even kept getting calls from HR and their lawyer on a particularly difficult day when I was talking to doctors and my brothers about my father's delicate health situation. Very inconsiderate. No sense of fairness.They can say whatever they want. This is a true story. It did happen to me. I bear witness. I was alone, no family or close friends, they simply don't give a shit.

6. There are enough issues to go on for hours about this investigation against me and how wrong it was. I would just like to go over a few of the comments by Ben Aguas in his own signed statement. I want to emphasize that I believed Ben to be generally good natured and that this action of an investigation against me and Mike Woodhead's false accusations against me that were not investigated, were all supported by their manager, Tonia Haskell, who is a lawyer and probably concocted this "strategy". She deserves the title of hypocritical mean spirited bitch but she would probably take it as a compliment. Then they think of themselves as "kind". What a joke.

As always when there is a biased environment it comes from the top. Mike Woodhead has resigned recently and I have known he would do this for 2 months. A recruiter friend of his who I met for coffee, said Mike shared my same opinion about Wellington H2O's processes and project management. Mike was not as vocal as I was about it. Ben later criticized my management style but also wanted to know more about it during his last PDP. That is cowardly and insulting but perhaps it was also to extract information useful to himself. I was even criticized by him for being too focused on delivering projects on time as if it was a bad thing!!! It was simply crazy. Whatever he could use to minimize me he would use it and would not recognize any of my accomplishments.

There was an article written by customers about my help in solving their flooding problem. All praises, really nice. They told me they wanted to write it as a thank you. Ben said absolutely nothing to me when it was published. No congratulations. He was jealous and wanted to ostracize me. Make me feel unappreciated. My punishment for me complaining about disrespect and him taking credit for my work. Honestly, very few people. He was actually quite short indeed.

7. In my 25 years of work I had never seen anyone quit her job in such a dramatic way as Maiora Dentice, a Maori employee of the People and Capability team directly under Julia Cross. She was teaching the Maori language and values to the organization. Before leaving, she sent 3 very explicit videos about how she felt at Wellington H2O. I think she was brave in doing that, and although her videos were quite funny, I felt sad for her and for the environment that created such an emotional reaction. What is the point of using Maori words like Kia Ora Koutou and Nga Mihi in emails, when Maori people in the organization felt so badly because of how they were treated.
8. In my 25 years as a female latin american civil engineer, I had never experienced racism and discrimination so vividly in a work environment, to the point that it required the support of many friends and counseling, including an african american female engineer in the USA, where I worked for 12 years and where I never felt this type of racism and bias at work. New Zealand Racism at work feels much worse because of the bullying practices here, and the passive aggressive behaviours that are accepted and get unresolved with money but unpunished. I also got support from doctors friends, several lawyer friends in 3 continents (Europe, America and Oceania) and 4 countries, including a lawyer in New Zealand, who never charged me one penny for their advice and support during this time and for which I am very thankful.

This would have probably cost me at least $100k in legal fees by now. Makes me wonder about the fate of those poor souls who are not as lucky as I am to have such friends, how would they cope when attacked by lawyers hired by the same employer to harass and create a false case, but who should be protecting the emotional wellbeing of employees.

I also had to get support from EAP, and from a local counseling person, Caroline, who encouraged my decision to come here, as she was horrified to hear my story, but equally inspired by my strength to endure it for so long. She has seen others in my situation crumble and undergone severe trauma, depression, anger, unable to get up to go to work without medication, even suicidal. For a fucking government job in public utilities!

These are the effects on people after having lived through unfair, unequal and biased treatment. I won't let that happen to me. If that was the outcome sought from all this, f*ck them.

I want to point out that it is a terrible thing to do to any human being. I was sent a harassing email by Ben Aguas during the first days of Level 4 lockdown, for which I had to ask Julia to intervene. He got used to sending such emails after this investigation was completed against me because he knew I couldn't reply due to a written warning against me and only me were reprimanded even after his own biased statement.

9. I believe Wellington H2O has approached these HR matters with the same degree of negligence and unaccountability as it does in dealing with the city's infrastructure, prefering to send the matter to lawyers and insurance companies to cover it, than to solve the problems before causing serious damage. Like Dixon street ww tunnel collapse, a problem that was detected years earlier, and nothing was done to prevent failure. But if you try to fix a broken pipe by drilling where it is most vulnerable, making it collapse further, don't blame the pipe for this. Similarly, don't blame someone for her responses to constant drilling with discrimination and disrespect, toxic behaviour and tell her that "she cant handle her emotions". I had a file called "HR matters" that I treated as a very time consuming project, among my engineering projects. But I wasn't hired to do that.

I raised these issues of bullying and discrimination early on and nothing was done, or whatever was done was mostly against me, to undermine me, reduce my role and criticize me. One of my lawyer friends said to me "how much more disadvantage are you willing to accept there?". A lot. I wasn't willing. I had no choice.

10. For all the above, I have set out the terms for me to leave this work environment to hopefully be able to go home. After going over all these incidents again over the weekend, I think I should have asked for a full year's pay instead of 6 months, based on the fact that I was offered 3 month's pay a year ago, having done nothing wrong other than standing up for myself to discrimination and passive aggressive disrespect against me.

If I applied to the Wellington H2O Cost Estimating Manual, then that year's pay should be 2.24 years pay, based on the high risks that I am taking right now.

11. If I do hear any further attacks to my character or personality, any further harassment, minimization, passive aggression, blocking me from doing a job or from finding work, or from keeping a job, or disrespectful tones, libel and slander, damages to my professional reputation and image, criticizing my project management style, or any accusations against me based on gossip and rumours, any jungle drums or defamation about my mental health or emotional wellbeing that has been impacted because of all the above, as Ben apparently likes talking to my colleagues about me behind my back and going by gossip, as he admitted in the last PDP but if this continues after today, I will take this matter to a court of law against the individual person committing these coward attacks on me. I can also sue from overseas, as laws in New Zealand are very weak about this.
12. I was legally advised to go to the courts for all this but I decided for a mediation resolution instead, as advised by my father who believes I just need to get out of here and never look back. In a year I will barely remember many of these names. I do believe a peaceful resolution is always best, and it was always my position through this nightmare, but it was not the position of Elena Chang, Ben Aguas and Tania Haskins against me.

They felt it was Ok to block me from presenting my work of a year as Project Manager and allowing others to take the credit by presenting it as their own. This is a common practice at Wellington H2O and it is extremely unprofessional, bullish and creates a terrible work environment. Ben supported this because he was already biased against me.

He called me into a meeting after a very calculated email he sent to cause a reaction on me, and Tonia was there at the meeting "to support Ben" in her own words. Not to support me, the one being disadvantaged by Elena's actions. I think the behaviour are shameful and worthy of a larger investigation company wide, also an audit of the accounting and their inflated cost estimates.

I am relieved to have been able to tell my story here at the Human Rights Commission.

I can go on, but it is really not worth one more second of my time. All this time spent by Wellington H2O harassing me, investigating me and discriminating, should have really been spent on fixing more pipes for the entire Wellington region...a job I was often blocked from doing.

Wellington H2O denial:
Julia doesn't believe this is a race issue. She is white. She is HR.She believes it is more about culture as a government entity vs private sector.

She denied that it was to get rid of me. Shift in behaviour is what they wanted. She said an investigation is something they do from time to time. Denied my claim.

PDP discussion:
Tania said Ben has acknowledged me but he gave me the worst reviews in PDP.

Ben doesnt think he is biased. He is not a dumb person. Of course he won't admit it, but he treated all people of colour and different nationalities much worse than he treated the white Australian female in the time. That was obvious.

OUTCOME of HRC mediation ruling: $34,000 compensation paid within 10 days, a letter of reference, no disparaging comments against me, which they violated. There were even rumors, and this was supposed to be confidential. It never is in New Zealand. I walked out with $34k in my pocket, but I'd much rather never had endured this and learned this dark and very sad truth about New Zealand.