Court orders IKEA to reinstate Polish employee fired for homophobia

IKEA has been ordered by a Polish court to reinstate an employee who was fired for posting homophobic remarks on the company’s internal messaging system, including quoting biblical passages suggesting that gay people deserve to be killed.

His lawyers have hailed the ruling as “a milestone towards protecting religious freedom” against “large corporations that impose left-wing ideology on employees”.

IKEA’s lawyers, however, insist that the firm was simply complying with its legal obligation to ensure a tolerant and inclusive workplace and that it was in fact the employee who violated the law. They plan to issue an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The long-running case began in 2019, when Janusz Komenda, who worked for IKEA in the city of Kraków, wrote under an internal IKEA post calling for inclusive treatment of LGBT+ colleagues that “the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality and other deviancies is sowing depravity”.

He also quoted verses from scripture, including one saying: “He who lies with a man as with a woman commits an abomination; both will be put to death and their blood is upon them”.

Another read: “Woe to him through whom scandals come, it would be better for him to have a millstone tied around his neck and to plunge him in the depths of the sea.”

In response, he was fired by the firm, which said at the time that its corporate culture is based on “freedom of ideas, tolerance and respect for each employee but the company has to react when it sees risk of breach of dignity of other employees”.

Komenda, however, challenged that decision and last week Kraków’s regional court concluded that the employee’s intention was not to infringe on the rights of nonheteronormative people, but to defend his own rights and views.

It upheld a lower court decision ordering the reinstatement of the employee, which IKEA had appealed against. In her justification, judge Agnieszka Zielińska noted that it is unacceptable to humiliate anyone in the work environment – either because of their sexual preference or because of their religious beliefs.

“On the other hand, the workplace should be free of any ideological indoctrination,” she added, quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily. “And it should not – even in the name of tolerance in the broadest sense – lead employees to feel coerced into changing their beliefs. In this case: those based on professed faith.”

Conservative legal group Ordo Iuris, which has been representing Komenda, hailed the ruling as “a milestone towards protecting the freedom to express one’s views and religious freedom” against “large cooporations that impose left-wing ideology on their employees”.

IKEA’s lawyer, Daniel Książek, rejected this argumentation and announced that the firm would issue a further appeal against the decision to the Supreme Court, which he said should recognise that the workplace must be “free from intolerance and exclusion”.

“If [the judge] accepts the use of phrases such as “deviancy” or “depravity” to refer to LGBT people, then I deeply disagree, because this is what I consider to be an example of a conscious violation of the law,” Książek told Rzeczpospolita.

A labour law expert, Grzegorz Ilnicki, also criticised the judgment, arguing that IKEA’s LGBT camapign was “not promoting its own values, but those that it has to embody in the workplace”.

He notes that the law requires respect in professional spaces for all employees regardless of their sexual orientation. By opposing this, the employee was therefore “not so much – or not only – contesting the employer’s actions, but even the existing legal order”.

Parallel to Komenda’s efforts to be reinstated, the IKEA manager who fired him, was also put on trial for religious discrimination. If found guilty, she would have faced up to two years’ imprisonment. However, she was acquitted last year, with that decision upheld last month by the Supreme Court.

After Komenda’s firing, members of Poland’s conservative government accused IKEA of discriminating against Christians and seeking to impose its values on Poland. The justice minister called it a case of “legal and economic violence against those who do not want to share the values of pro-LGBT activists”.

The incident took place amid an election campaign by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in which it repeatedly attacked what it called “LGBT ideology” and presented as a foreign threat to Polish culture, identity and even the state itself.

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Main image credit: GGAADD/Flickr (under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.