March 18th, 2011
Abilene workers complaining of workplace bullying
By Jaime Adame, Abilene Reporter News, March 18, 2011
Texas State Coordinator, Esque Walker, and WBI colleague Suzy Fox are interviewed for this local newspaper story from Abilene, Texas.
Though she can’t release names, Esque Walker said she’s heard enough complaints to think Abilene has its share of workplace bullying.
“The way we define it is repeated health harming and abusive conduct in the work environment,” said Walker, coordinator for Texas Healthy Workplace Advocates, a group overseen by the Washington-state based Workplace Bullying Institute.
Walker said her advocacy group, which became active in 2006, began receiving a steady stream of complaints from the Abilene area since getting one about six months ago.
“Between that time and this time, I have picked up about 14 more individuals,” Walker said, including five workers all with the same company.
“There is an increase in workplace bullying going on in that area,” Walker said. Four of the people complaining are men over the age of 55; the others are women between 48 and 62 years old, she said.
“One individual that I spoke to is a person that’s capable and willing to work. They were forced out of a job,” Walker said.
Her group is pushing for legislation that would give workers the legal right to sue a workplace bully, though the group stresses that any law would establish a high standard for misconduct.
For now, Walker said people making complaints are introduced to local lawmakers in hopes of finding a sponsor for the bill in Texas.
Bullying has become a hot topic in schools, and now groups are using the term workplace bullying to describe a hostile work environment.
“We use the term in order to connect to the growing body of research and media attention to school bullying,” said Suzy Fox, an associate professor and chairwoman of the Institute of Human Resources and Employment Relations at Loyola University Chicago.
“There are a lot of differences, but the behaviors are very similar,” she added.
Kathleen Shea, a licensed clinical psychologist in Chicago, said, “I think there is a great deal of passive-aggressive behavior going on in the American workplace that some people often call politics.”
Fox said many people can practice behavior like cutting off someone else’s speech or glaring at a co-worker.
“To be bullying, it has to be a pattern or repeated, or what I call pervasive,” Fox said.
Based on academic research, the consequences of being bullied can be serious, Fox said.
“The associations are with physical symptoms: headaches, migraines, upset stomach, up through more serious ailments,” Fox said. “Some people are finding evidence of post-traumatic stress.”
Shea said she recommends workers confront passive-aggressive behavior, but Fox said workers sometimes get burned if they approach a bully or even other management.
“Any individual solution is going to be dangerous. I have gotten many accounts of people, they went to HR and they were demoted, or they were fined or transferred,” Fox said.
As far as how common such behavior is, it’s difficult to know for sure, Fox said.
“In terms of pervasive bullying, it really depends on the industry. In my corporate study, I’m finding about 47 percent report being bullied pervasively,” Fox said, with an even larger percentage of public school teachers reporting bullying.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Bullying in the News, Legislative Campaign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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