Workplace Antisemism Harassment

"You kind of feel like you're drowning. All the bad feels is what I felt: Lonely, confused,  hurt, isolated. And ultimately it led me to have a really bad breakdown."

"I was confused how these people can be my friends one day and then the next day hate me with a capital H, having not gotten into any verbal arguments, or anything like that previously."

"They knew I was Jewish and they knew that I am a Zionist, that I lived in Israel before."

"It escalated to the point where I wouldn't do my job anymore, not because of the things I was feeling, but realistically, I wasn't getting any calls, which we called leads, which are businesses that you get introduced to to sell your product to." 

"No one should be subjected to this kind of treatment at work for being Jewish."

Amanda Rafael 

Amanda Rafael: “I was confused how these people can be my friends one day and then the next day hate me with a capital H.” Photo by Supplied

 

Filing charges against her one-time employer with Quebec's labour tribunal, 34-year-old Amanda Rafael whose work was in sales with the company, documented the pattern of rabid hostility and psychological harassment she faced at her workplace, a situation that emerged the very day that southern Israel suffered mass deadly attacks by Palestinian terrorist groups led by Hamas. She described receiving antisemitic images as several of her co-workers turned on her with a vengeance with denigrating messages leading to her being frozen out of shared sales leads. When she alerted supervisors at the company, nothing came of it.

 

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. is a publicly traded e-commerce company, with a record of success that saw it labelled at one of those tech rarities, a 'unicorn'. Nothing quite prepared this young woman who worked for the company since 2021, when some of her work colleagues disconnected from her to an extent that was unimaginable to her, disorienting and totally demoralizing. She was so badly affected that when she consulted her doctor over the depressed state she was in, she was advised to take sick leave, to separate herself temporarily from the vitriol emanating from within her workplace against her. 

 

Quebec's labour standards authority investigated her complaint, forwarding it to the province's administrative labour tribunal for a hearing, reflecting Quebec's two-stage occupational complaints schedule. Her allegations at the tribunal are being challenged by Lightspeed. A point-of-sale and payments platform out of Quebec since 2005, the company has since expanded with clients in over 100 countries, with listings on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange.  

Lightspeed Commerce

"Lightspeed is committed to providing a safe workplace environment and has a zero-tolerance policy toward workplace violence, harassment and discrimination, including hate speech and antisemitism."

"We expect all our employees to treat each other and every member of our communities with respect and integrity and to foster a diverse and inclusive culture."

Lightspeed Montreal, global tech company 

 According to documents filed with the tribunal a Lightspeed manager informed an investigator that the company's internal probe of the situation failed to support a finding of psychological harassment. Memes and posts at issue in the matter, explained the manager, had been sent from employees' private accounts. Accepting that the workplace atmosphere following October 7 was tense "on both sides", management took steps to ensure the workplace remained 'safe'. 

 

Amanda Rafael after having worked at  Lightspeed for two years, encountered an 'unsafe' workplace following October of 2023. She was ultimately terminated in February 2024, and six months later she filed her complaint against the company whose manager denied the company had failed to intervene on her behalf. Rafael documented how a colleague had posted a photograph of Adolf Hitler and with it a quote: "Jews are not people, they are animals", four days after October 7.  Other colleagues called her a "f---king Zionist", sharing social media posts reflecting "kill all Zionists", informing her that her presence was unwanted.

 

 

 

Rafael was asked to remove the flag of Israel from her company online profile, while some colleagues were free to add Palestinian flags to theirs. She was refused a request to be transferred elsewhere within the company, away from these demeaning colleagues. When she logged into the company's internal sales team messaging system she discovered colleagues having informed her clients that she was no longer employed with the company, introducing themselves at the new point of contact. "Is there something I don't know about here?", she had asked.  

"What Amanda alleges is not ordinary workplace friction or a mere political disagreement. It is targeted discrimination against a Jewish employee, coupled with an alleged failure by the employer to protect her dignity and safety."

"Lightspeed is a global public company. Amanda's experience raises serious questions."

Benjamin Ryberg, chief operating officer, the Lawfare Project