Vancouver (03 Feb 2012) – Respect in the workplace is a cornerstone of the B.C. Government and Service Employees Union’s (BCGEU/NUPGE) work and it is taken very seriously.

Over the years, BCGEU/NUPGE has taken on the issue in numerous ways. Campaigns to educate members and management in workplaces made negotiated collective agreement language a reality in a number of agreements.

“We’re trying to get anti-bullying language in ALL our collective agreements. In 2010, we negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding (#13) in our master agreement. It outlines the process for handling bullying complaints in the B.C. Government. This year, we’re back at the bargaining table determined to strengthen this anti–bullying language,” says BCGEU president Darryl Walker in a recent blog post.

Right now, the union is working to resolve a number of member complaints involving the public service. Twenty-three complaints involve misuse of authority, where a boss misuses authority and three involve worker-to-worker bullying.

Bullying in the workplace is a difficult and complex issue that requires constant attention and a workplace culture that encourages our members to speak out. The premier has indicated bullying is a serious matter.

February 29, 2012 is Pink Shirt Day (anti-bullying awareness campaign). The BCGEU/NUPGE has updated its fact sheet about workplace bullying.

NUPGE

The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada’s largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE

via BCGEU fights for bully-free workplaces | National Union of Public and General Employees.

Only $19.95 plus shipping.

What attempts do Targets of workplace bullying make in order to have employers step in and resolve the situation? Do these attempts stop the abuse, or does it continue unabated?

Take the 2012 Workplace Bullying Online Survey

Bullied targets speak out at Jan. 17, 2012 testimony before the Washington State Senate committee regarding SB 5789, a modified version of the Healthy Workplace Bill.

Bullied targets: Martha (speaking on behalf of over 100 state workers), Thomas, Elaina, “I’m Done!” Richard, Christine, Linda, Mario & Deb

Gary Namie from the Workplace Bullying Institute

Union supporters: Seamus from the Washington Public Employees Association, Sean from the Western Pulp & Paper Workers, Rebecca from the WA State Labor Council, & Melissa from the Washington State Nurses Association.

Thank you all. Join us in the campaign to enact the law.

Past marches have attracted a diverse crowd. “It’s black, it’s white, it’s Baptist, Jewish, Christian, Catholic and Muslim. We all come out and march in unity,” said Teresa Haley, president of the local NAACP branch. “We try to keep the dream alive.” After the march, there will a program at Pleasant Grove, “What would Dr. King Say About Bullying Today?”

Haley said bullying is a problem that elementary school students through high schoolers can face, and it is also seen in the workplace. If King were alive today and saw the bullying problem, Haley said he would probably ask, “How far have we really come?”"He would remind people of what he stood for, what he fought for and what he died for,” she said. “He would try to encourage people to get back on the right track. I think we’re getting lost.” There will also be a voter-registration drive at the church.

If you spend your workday avoiding an abusive boss, tiptoeing around co-workers who talk behind your back, or eating lunch alone because you’ve been ostracized from your cubicle mates, you may be the victim of workplace bullying. New research suggests that you’re not alone, especially if you’re struggling to cope.

Employees with abusive bosses often deal with the situation in ways that inadvertently make them feel worse, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Stress Management. That’s bad news, as research suggests that workplace abuse is linked to stress — and stress is linked to a laundry list of mental and physical ailments, including higher body weight and heart disease.

In at least one extreme case, workplace bullying has even been linked to suicide, much as schoolyard bullying has been linked to a rash of suicides among young people.

Bullying is “a form of abuse which carries tremendous health harm,” said Gary Namie, a social psychologist who directs the Workplace Bullying Institute. “That’s how you distinguish it from tough management or any of the other cutesy ways people use to diminish it.”

Struggle to cope

Namie was not involved in the new study, which surveyed nearly 500 employees about how they dealt with abusive supervision. Abusive supervisors are bosses who humiliate and insult their employees, never let them forget their mistakes, break promises and isolate employees from other co-workers, study author Dana Yagil of the University of Haifa in Israel told LiveScience.

About 13 to 14 percent of Americans work under an abusive supervisor, Yagil said. Her study on Israeli workers found that abused employees tend to cope by avoiding their bosses, seeking support from co-workers and trying to reassure themselves. As useful as those strategies might sound, however, they actually made employees feel worse. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

“It is understandable that employees wish to reduce the amount of their contact with an abusive boss to the minimum, but the strategies they use actually further increase their stress instead of reducing it,” Yagil said. “This may happen because these strategies are associated with a sense of weakness and perpetuate the employee’s fear of the supervisor.”

Tragic consequences

Avoiding a workplace bully might seem easier than avoiding a school bully, given that employees can quit their jobs. But workers get caught in a cycle of stress, Namie said. An online survey of targeted workers by the WBI found that they put up with the abuse for an average of 22 months.

The stress of the bullying may itself lead to bad decision-making, Namie said. A 2009 study in the journal Science found that stressed-out rats fail to adapt to changes in their environment. A portion of the stressed rats’ brains, the dorsomedial striatum, actually shrunk compared with that region in relaxed rats. The findings suggest that stress may actually re-wire the brain, creating a decision-making rut. The same may occur in bullied workers, Namie said.

“This is why a person can’t make quality decisions,” he said. “They can’t even consider alternatives. Just like a battered spouse, they don’t even perceive alternatives to their situations when they’re stressed and depressed and under attack.”

Sometimes this cycle ends with tragedy. Namie works as an expert legal witness on bullying. In one upcoming case, he said, a woman put up with daily barrages of screaming abuse from her boss for a year. By the end, she was working 18-hour days, trying to shield the employees under her from her boss’ tyranny, Namie said. Finally, she and several of her co-workers put together a 25-page complaint to human resources. Nothing happened, until she was called in for a meeting with senior management. The woman knew she would be fired for making the complaint, Namie said.

“Rather than allowing herself to be terminated, she bought a pistol, went to work, left three suicide notes, and she took her own life at work,” he said.

“She was like that rat stuck in a rut,” he added. “She didn’t see any alternative at that point.”

Why bullying happens

While all workplace-bullying cases are not so extreme, it does seem to be a common problem, said Sandy Herschcovis, a professor of business administration at the University of Manitoba who studies workplace aggression. Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans report rudeness and incivility at work, Herschcovis told LiveScience. Fewer are systematically bullied, she said, but the best estimate puts the number at about 41 percent of American workers having been psychologically harassed at work at some point.

Hierarchical organizations such as the military tend to have higher rates of bullying, Herschcovis said, as do places where the environment is highly competitive.

“Definitely the organizational context contributes,” Herschcovis said.

The personality of the bully is often key, with some research suggesting that childhood bullies become bullies as adults, she said. Targets of bullying are often socially anxious, have low self-esteem, or have personality traits such as narcissism, Herschcovis said. “We don’t want to blame the victim, but we recognize this more and more as a relationship” between the bully and the target, she said.

Little research has been done on how to deal with abusive bosses or bullying co-workers. In mild cases, where a boss may not realize how their behavior is coming across, direct confrontation might work, Yagil said. One research-based program that seems to have potential is called the Civility, Respect and Engagement at Work project, Herschcovis said. That program has been shown to improve workplace civility, reduce cynicism and improve job satisfaction and trust among employees, she said. The program has employees discuss rudeness and incivility in their workplace and make plans to improve. [8 Tactics to Bust the Office Bully]

For workers experiencing bullying, Herschcovis recommended reporting specific behavior to higher-ups, as well as examining one’s own behavior. Sometimes victims inadvertently contribute to the bullying relationship, she said. Namie cautioned that victims should proceed with care, however, as there are no anti-bullying workplace laws on the books in the U.S.

“HR [human resources] has no power or clout to make senior management stop,” Namie said. “Without the laws, they’re not mandated to make policies, and without the mandate, they don’t know what to do.”

Since 2003, 21 states have introduced some version of anti-bullying bills, but none have yet passed. Twelve states have legislation pending in 2012, according to healthyworkplacebill.org.

In the meantime, Herschcovis and her colleagues have found that bystanders in the workplace are usually sympathetic to the victim rather than the bully.

“Outside parties are most likely to want to intervene, and to be in a position to intervene,” Herschcovis said. The trick, she added, will be to find ways to encourage co-workers to stand up for one another.

View the original article at http://www.workplacebullying.org/?p=7487 One WBI goal is to educate everyone — the affected individuals, employers and lawmakers — about Workplace Bullying. Acknowledgment of its existence and preventability necessarily precedes corrective action. Our momentum accelerated in 2011, all thanks to new staff, new consultants and new State Coordinators who expanded our repertoire. What a year! Here’s the year-end review.

• programmed our own online survey data collection website so that bullying prevalence can be gathered for any organization

• posted several Instant Polls and their results throughout the year

• produced training DVDs for employers (one 2 hr. video for managers, one 1 hr. video to show to employees)

• produced a DVD for bullied individuals chock full of advice from the team of WBI experts

• maintained two interactive forum websites, one of which relies on our volunteer administrator, C.A.

• maintained private websites for legislative campaign Coordinators and alumni of Workplace Bullying University

Thanks to allied professionals, Dr. Matt Spencer and Greg Sorozan, we were able to:

• design and deliver the first Workplace Bullying University (Sept) solely for Union officers (Greg Sorozan, LCSW, NAGE national officer, was co-faculty)

• educate K-12-related associations and organizations with the help of consultant Matt Spencer, Ed.D. as part of our Workplace Bullying in Schools project

Our marvelous network of volunteer State Coordinators working to enact the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill:

• grew to a group of over 70 nationwide, covering nearly 40 states

• garnered publicity for the HWB via TV appearances in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, and Virginia (watch on the WBI YouTube channel, Legislative Campaign playlist)

• were able to have 12 states carry 18 versions of the HWB simultaneously

• engineered co-sponsorship of the Assembly bill in New York by 74 Assemblymembers!

• staged a compelling committee hearing for the Massachusetts bills in July

Thanks to tireless wordsmithing help from Jessi Brown, Ruth and Gary finished their third book:

• this one for employers — The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels & Snakes from Killing Your Organization — published in May by Wiley.

Finally, thanks to too much time in airports with our groping TSA (now unionized, go AFGE) friends:

• we reached several audiences with speeches and workshops at employer, government agency, hospital, university and union meetings with the introductory message about workplace bullying

• we went on-site at more employers than ever with our industry-defining process to prevent and correct workplace bullying

• Dr. Gary met an increased demand for expert witness services in litigation by both defense and plaintiff attorneys seeking accountability for bullying.

The new year of helping people begins Tues. Jan. 3

First, let me say Dr. Harper, an anthropologist by training, and I, a social psychologist, probably have much in common. The difference is that she came through a horrific academic experience personally. Dr. Ruth Namie bore the brunt of that direct experience for our family; my experience was vicarious. For that reason, I am unwounded have necessarily been the spokesperson. Second, when unhealed wounded veterans of the bullying wars go public (as some of the more brazen critics of WBI do frequently), they can set back the movement with agendas narrowly focused on themselves. Harper’s injuries may not yet be resolved. She makes some silly and downright incorrect claims. I will reply to her Dec. 15 essay in italics.

Top Ten Reasons to Rethink Anti-Bully Hysteria

by Janice Harper

In previous essays I’ve discussed some of my concerns with the use of the bully label, the failure to distinguish between workplace and schoolyard bullying, and the need to distinguish workplace bullying from workplace mobbing. Now, as the year comes to a close and top ten lists rise like hit songs on a pop chart, I’d like to provide my own top ten reasons for rethinking the current anti-bully hysteria.

1. In the understandable rush to eradicate mean-spirited and aggressive people in the workplace, there is a tendency to move from anti-bully to pro-mobbing and encourage people to gang up and eliminate anyone labeled a bully.

Eradication of bullying is the goal, not of bullies. Targets do not suddenly convert to revenge-seekers who team up to bring down those who attacked them. Most individuals skulk away quietly shrouded in shame and secrecy just hoping to move on. Not sure who advises this. Certainly not us at WBI.

2. As awareness about bullying behavior grows, so too does the hysteria surrounding it, so that once a person is accused they are assumed to be guilty and vilified, regardless of their actual behavior or intent.

In the absence of company policies with full enforcement provisions and laws that would indict people in a criminal manner, there is no official sanctioning forum that labels people as “bullies.” In the American society where we are co-located, only child abusers (think Jerry Sandusky) are guilty and vilified without regard to due process. Business frauds who cheat old ladies are forgiven. Jack Abramoff writes a book on how to buy lawmakers. Sports heroes go to prison and return to contracts worth millions. Exactly what “bullies” are vilified? Steve Jobs, the deity? What you say, Janice, does not currently happen.

3. Even if a person does exhibit “bullying” behaviors, they are operating in the context of a specific organizational culture; the anti-bully focus is on the individual, not the organizational dynamics that might foster it.

Couldn’t agree more. We have tried unsuccessfully with two publishers have our book titles include “bullying” rather than “bully,” but neither cooperated. Our book for organizations to read about bullying decries the focus on the individual. This again is the experience in individualistic societies — anthropology told me so.

4. By failing to distinguish interpersonal bullying from collective mobbing, much of the advice given to targets of workplace aggression may escalate their suffering by provoking management’s retaliation and transforming bullying to mobbing.

The canard of mobbing vs. bullying was old 15 years ago when we started, and newcomers to the field like yourself seem to have to rediscover it and share the learning as if it’s new. Though Heinz Leymann died before he could attend our first and only US conference back in 2000, his representative did. She had no qualms about using the term bullying. She was a patient of his in Violen. As the leading proponent of the phrase workplace bullying in the U.S., it is safe to say that WBI has always said that bullying is a multiple-perpetrator phenomenon. End of “dispute.” We defer to Ken Westhues’ materials and arguments about the distinctions. When you use mobbing, you sound paranoid.

As for a focus on bullying (the systemic reinforcement of negative conduct) vs. bullies (the individualistic personality approach), that is another false accusation about the movement (hysteria, as you deem it). The press focuses on bullies. Book publishers fight the term “bullying” in book titles. But smart researchers and practitioners all focus on the former. You need to read the pages in the books, and not stop at perusal of just the covers.

5. Workplace bullying includes a power dynamic that is absent in schoolyard bullying, and although the processes are very similar, their differences are significant. The two forms of interpersonal aggression should be discussed with different terminology, strategies and objectives.

6. The “bully” focus tends to minimize group psychology, looking for convenient scapegoats and exempting others from responsibility when their aggression is collective.

RE: Points 5 & 6. I resent an anthropologist calling the extensive work done in this country by social psychologists on the topic to be somehow devoid of group dynamics. Colleagues Loraleigh Keashly and Joel Neuman were the only two brave souls doing this work back in 1997 (and before). And if you more carefully read what proponents in the movement say you would see it is well grounded in organizational models and processes. Those of us actually working with employers do much more than is known by the press. However, we have written books about it. So, you need to read more.

7. Just as “bullies” are viewed as inherently volatile and bad, targets are viewed as inherently passive and good, and typically advised they are morally superior and did nothing to contribute to the aggression. Such views preclude any possibility of behavioral changes for anyone involved, and flies in the face of human psychology.

You disqualify yourself as an outside observer of the phenomenon when you copy the provocative victim theory, commit the fundamental attribution error, and blame abuse victims for their own fate. Keep your academic perspective on this one. You may have been mobbed, but presumably not abused.


There is a morality play afoot. Don’t make the mistake of siding with the ones who initiate abuse. The parallel is to domestic violence. If one equivocates and stands equally with the abuser and abused, that person has lost her moral compass and right to distinguish right from wrong. Not ALL targets are saints, but if you worked with nearly 7,000 of them as we have at WBI, you wouldn’t perpetuate gibberish about them being equal to their assailants.

8. Too much of the focus on bullies has become associated with a single political perspective, namely liberal Democrats, even though interpersonal aggression affects a diversity of political interests.

Again read, read, read. Visit the national site for the Healthy Workplace Bill. There you can see the political party affiliation of legislators brave enough to sponsor an anti-bullying bill. At least three parties are represented. Republicans are not a itsy bitsy minority, either. As far as labeling, I’m not sure liberal democrats exist today.


However, your point is important in another, more profound perhaps unintended, way. Abuse in organizations is political. It derives its support from those in power. Rather, than dem vs. repub, it’s executives and bullies vs. those who came to their jobs to work. There is a partition, just not along the lines you describe so glibly.

9. Aggressive behavior in the workplace does indeed damage people’s lives and livelihoods, yet by calling for the elimination of workers labeled bullies, encouraging gossip and sabotage of anyone accused of bullying, and making anonymous reports against alleged “bullies,” workplace aggression has the potential to increase.

Who calls for the elimination of the bullies? Most of them will stop when their employers dare to challenge and expose them. They keep their jobs and move on. Who would ever call for anonymous reports against others? You must be reading the work of HR and “career” experts. We see you are associated with some newcomers to the field who profess an “expertise” but know little more than a bullied target. Just living the experience does not make one an expert, nor does publishing an academic journal article, or training in an academic field related tangentially to the topic. But it’s America. If you say you are an expert, you are treated that way by a lazy media.

10. The rhetoric is very negative and exclusionary, rather than focusing on how workplaces and other organizations can become more compassionate and humane toward others.

Interpersonal aggression is indeed a serious problem, and any form of aggression in our workplaces, schools and other organizations merits attention and remedies. But how we view the problem will shape how we address it. And as we move closer to ideological orthodoxy in how we approach it, all I see is an even bigger problem in the making.

You are a naive angel to think that eradication of truly destructive behavior begins with a focus on the positive through HR-type fads of the month: “employee engagement” “visionary management” “purposeful work” “ethical behavior” etc. You haven’t worked either as a consultant or manager enough to know what it takes to right a large ship sinking from destructive action by the few. Take the high road. You are young. But eventually you will learn how organizational default to the lowest ethical level, not aspire to the highest. And certainly not in the contemporary world of multinational for-profit firms that universities (like the host of your personal misery) emulate.

###


My post-article observations:

We all await the publication of your own book, which your series of articles is no doubt meant to pre-promote. But we expect more than tales from the trenches by a wounded warrior whose perceptions have been distorted by horrific experiences. Too many newcomers to the field are so wounded they cannot separate their own injuries and resentments from them to see clearly what needs to be done.

Methinks that you will be a positivist, pollyanna, equivocator. You could use the moniker “Dr. FeelGood.” HR will love you. But your work will not help those abused at work. And your insistence on some of the principles you have espoused above will get you press coverage because you pose no threat to organizations that actually originate and sustain the conduct to which you were subjected. You will be seen as reasonable and corporate-friendly — the goal of all newcomers. You will be very TV-friendly. But will you be intellectually honest to audiences (and more importantly, to yourself, true to your self-perception)?

As for us, we choose to tell truths, side with the abused, and risk not doing business with those too frightened to do what it really takes to change their toxic organizations.

Janice, you live 100 miles from us. Come visit. We’d love to convert you to a champion for the cause rather than an apologist for abusers (part of the hysteria machine). Come see the world through the WBI perspective. Our door is open.

Gary Namie
WBI Director

Players are labor. Owners are capital.

Sports columnist Dave Zirin describes the heart of the blocked trade perfectly.

By not resolving the question of power, the CBA also didn’t resolve the critical issue at the heart of lockout: the zeal of small market owners— in the wake of Lebron and Chris Bosh joining the Miami Heat—to restrict, own and distribute the talents of their employees. It’s a question at the heart of sports labor conflicts: whether the “talent” on the court is labor, or a product of labor and owned by others. This is why players, always to media outrage, turn at times to the metaphor of slavery and a plantation to explain their predicament. Not because they are comparing themselves to those who suffered under bondage but because owners constantly contest whether they are in fact the masters of their own talents.

This past week marked the 150th anniversary of a speech Lincoln made to Congress. I’ve always included a snippet from that speech in my talks to unions. Thanks to former Rep. Alan Grayson, here is the full text of that speech.

“It is not needed, nor fitting here [in discussing the Civil War] that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

“Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.”

For America to ever approximate social justice again, priorities must be rearranged. Valuing workers is a good start.

Phew! They fixed the bill, first in the House, then the Senate thanks to Sen. Gretchen Whitmer leading the way.

The goofy provision was originally inserted to appease the Michigan branch of the radical hate group American Family Association. That group’s agenda is anti-homosexual.

Let’s hope for the best. The Governor promised to sign the revised bill into law in 2011.

These radical hate groups, masquerading as “conservative” “Christian” groups invaded our anti-bullying legislation for adults (the Healthy Workplace Bill) in Illinois in 2009. They are tricky, but hateful nevertheless.

Of course the coverup, circling the wagons defensiveness-at-all-costs strategy is invoked only when a similarly highly valued colleague is in trouble. Jerry Sandusky was a legend and got the protective treatment. If the rape had been done by a lowly janitor, he would have been jailed back in 2002 and still be there! For the powerful, the club comes to the rescue.

Now think of PSU as a medium-size corporation rather than as an academic giant sports brand name. The abuser was one of the elite in the eyes of senior managers. He had many allies. When news came that their fellow (who none of them ever saw abuse anyone, by the way) was an abuser, they kicked into cover-up mode.

Employers, regardless of industry, go to great lengths to prevent discovery of abusive conduct by any of the senior club members. When a VP is accused of harassment or bullying or abusive conduct, the senior-most leader denies it. The reporting target is incredulous to not be believed.

In cases not easily denied (i.e., those with multiple witnesses of public acts), the employer throws unlimited dollars into the defense of their beloved buddy.

I am fond of telling seminar and University participants the tale of a former federal government bureau director (in MMS) who brought us in to deal with an egregiously volatile and cruel bully division chief. The bully was convinced to step down. He accepted his fate. The director, however, would not accept our recommendation or his division chief’s voluntary decision. Said the director:

No. I will not accept it. That would make two chiefs to step down in one week (the other had been caught embezzling). Besides, (the bully) is a lunch buddy and a great conversationalist.

The bond between abusers and their executive sponsors should never be underestimated. Organizations tolerate the banishment of countless victims of managerial abuse without guilt. Organizations have no conscience because the executives are allowed to live in their bubble, never seeing that their sycophant allies are abusers, and never having to acknowledge the truth.

The silence that shrouds the fate of millions of displaced bullied targets enables the country to never learn how bad it is. It enables the “best places to work” to wear the badge of honor while hypocritically covering up the ruined careers of many of their best workers because it suited executives to live the lie.

PSU’s behavior is the norm, not the exception. If the abuse victim had not been a child, you would never have heard a peep. The Paterno/PSU mystique would be untarnished in the public eye.

Lessons for this teachable moment in history:

1. Abuse of adults at work needs to be legally actionable. Pass the HWB.

2. Create misconduct reporting systems inside organizations not prone to favoritism or control by executives. #1 makes #2 possible.

Without the law against child abuse pushing PSU, the Sandusky cover-up would never have seen the light of day. The absence of illegality is the principal reason that workplace bullying remains an employer’s best kept secret.

This is a rare display of political courage. He deserves cheers much more than those given to Texas Gov. Perry’s for his braggadocio about executions by the dozens.

In 2012, we expect a flurry of activity. There will be hearings for existing bills, new bills introduced, bills moving to floor votes and a real chance that one or more states may pass the HWB into state law. To prevent confusion during the hectic period when inaccurate portrayals of the HWB will surface, let me clarify our goals for the bill proposed in every state and then showcase the key features of the bill and distinguish it from what wounded, but unhealed, targets of bullying might wish for.

Repeated, Harmful Abusive Conduct Defined

It is important for legal laypeople to understand that the text of the HWB was written by Suffolk Law Professor David C. Yamada. He has made workplace bullying his legal specialty. His year 2000 treatise published in the Georgetown Law Journal was the U.S. legal world’s introduction to bullying and the need for “status-blind” harassment protections for workers. He modeled the HWB on existing anti-discrimination statutes. Practicing attorneys and we who are not familiar with the structure of laws make the poorest critics. That’s why we at WBI accept the HWB completely as the best model legislation for contemporary America.

Legal critics and bully apologists love to claim that bullying is too ambiguous, subjective, and undefinable. Not true. As a first step, we do not refer to “workplace bullying” anywhere in the HWB text. Given the full range of manifested bullying possible, from mild and covert to severe, it only makes sense to have a law address the most egregious, harmful and severe forms. The HWB puts the misconduct on par with domestic violence and other potentially traumatizing experiences. If people are to be given the right to sue, it must not be over a misunderstood interpretation of an arched eyebrow.

Here is the definition codified in HWB. “Abusive conduct is conduct, including acts, omissions, or both, that a reasonable person would find hostile, based on the severity, nature, and frequency of the defendant’s conduct. Abusive conduct may include, but is not limited to: repeated infliction of verbal abuse such as the use of derogatory remarks, insults, and epithets; verbal or physical conduct of a threatening, intimidating, or humiliating nature; the sabotage or undermining of an employee’s work performance; or attempts to exploit an employee’s known psychological or physical vulnerability.” Who gets to say what is verbally abusive or threatening? The recipient, just as in anti-discrimination law.

A Necessarily High Standard

Therefore, not every person offended by the actions of others could use the HWB. The bill requires that harm be demonstrated by a medical or mental health professional or that the employer foolishly punished the plaintiff worker by demotion, punitive transfer, retaliation or termination (some adverse employment action). Serious harm required to pursue a serious lawsuit against either the employer, the perpetrator, or both.

Critics argue that courts will be flooded with baseless lawsuits that employers love to call “frivolous.” But system hurdles will minimize the chances of that happening. First, plaintiffs will have to pay for a private attorney out of pocket to mount a case. Costs alone discourage filing cases just to annoy employers. Attorneys will not accept cases with no to little chance of winning. Judges are quick to grant summary judgment to employers (they throw out the entire lawsuit by siding with employers before hearing evidence).

Abusive conduct must be malicious, as defined in the HWB, not by the court. “Malice is defined as the desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another.” This requirement also will help sort out trivial bullying from health-harming abuse. In severe bullying cases, this standard will most likely be met.

High standards are necessary to weather challenges of constitutionality, if they arise. Laws should have a higher standard to meet, a higher threshold of impact and severity, than company policies. Bullying happens before the onset of health harm. That’s why companies should be less tolerant of the misconduct and respond earlier than any law should require.

The Primary Reason to Enact the HWB

There are two goals stated in the text of the bill. First, it provides legal incentives for employers to prevent and respond to abusive mistreatment of workers. Second, it plugs holes in existing labor laws by allowing employees who have been harmed psychologically, physically or economically by being deliberately subjected to abusive work environments to seek legal relief which they cannot now do.

A good, non-abusive, employer need not fear the HWB becoming law. However, if abuse is routine practice in an organization’s work environment, that employer requires prodding to stop. WBI surveys show that employers do nothing 44% of the time when bullying is reported (according to the national 2007 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey) and the most common response of employers to bullying (according to an online survey of bullied targets, the real consumers of bullying-related employer responses) is to actively resist employee’s desire to address it (46%) and to remain unengaged (35%) with only 3% of employers creating specific policies and faithfully enforcing them.

It is obvious without the threat of litigation, employers can continue to ignore bullying. Plugging the gap in the law does that. More important is the use of the HWB to dangle the incentive for employers to do what they should be doing voluntarily. With the threat of vicarious liability (holding the employer liable for the misconduct of their managers (72% of bullies are bosses)), employers can be compelled to act.

Employers On, Then Off, the Hook

Plaintiffs can sue their employer (the entity with insurance to cover legal defenses for this type of misconduct, called Employment Practices Liability Insurance – EPLI) because managers are “agents” of the employer and are considered to have acted on the employer’s behalf, whether or not the bully’s actions are known to the employer. That’s the point of employer vicarious liability.

Under HWB, plaintiffs have the option of suing their bully. The only defense for an abuser is if he or she acted “at the direction of the employer, under threat of an adverse employment action.” In other words, the bully was made to do the bidding of the employer under threat.

The HWB text states that if “the employer exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any actionable behavior;” then it would not be held liable. That means that if the employer has a policy (a preventive act) and enforced it (corrected promptly), the employer escapes liability. It cannot be sued. It has a defense against a claim.

The get-out-of-responsibility provisions in the HWB for employers are called “affirmative defenses.” They are the incentives for employers to start addressing, rather than ignoring bullying. Similarly, the HWB cannot be used against employers if a bullying correction process was in place and the target did not use it, or if the employee was punished for poor performance, misconduct, illegal or unethical activity, or if “economic necessity” led to termination.

Inadequacy of Current Laws

The conclusion of Yamada’s seminal law journal article that launched the HWB is that the tort that most closely fits cases of workplace bullying, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (IIED), nearly always fails to provide relief for bullied targets. The primary reason for the failure is that the threshold of “outrageous conduct” is rarely crossed in U.S. courts. That is, what you and I would consider over-the-top cruelty, thus outrageous, does not meet the U.S. legal standard of conduct beyond the bounds of civilized society. That translates to a license for any manager to do anything and courts consider their tactics within their allowed prerogative. As Yamada concluded IIED is inadequate because courts are too strict for plaintiffs while forgiving most ever transgression of bullies. [In Canada, the tort uses the "reasonable person" threshold. There it takes much less violence for conduct to be deemed outrageous.]

In a 2011 case, a young woman won a $41 million jury award for a combined IIED and sexual harassment case. But it was extremely severe. Even the jury had to admit her manager’s lewd conduct and sexual battery crossed the line. But that’s what it takes to win.

The other existing laws that pertain to bullying cases are state and federal civil rights statutes. We know from the WBI 2007 national survey that 1 in 5 bullying cases also have an illegal discrimination component. That is good for the plaintiff. By filing an EEOC or internal discrimination complaint, the employer will have to pay attention. Of course, complaining triggers a reflexive retaliation by employers. But that’s more good news for plaintiffs. There can now be a charge of retaliation. According to the EEOC, more cases are won by proving retaliation for filing a discrimination complaint than are won when the claim is that one of the seven protected categories was the actual reason for the mistreatment. A 2010 study of the efficacy of discrimination laws found that plaintiffs win in only 15% of cases, and the rate is declining.

The public (and many lawmakers, pundits, bloggers, and nearly everyone who is a target) misunderstands is that to be eligible to claim discrimination — sexual harassment, hostile work environment, racial discrimination, religious persecution — it is best when only the recipient/target is a member of protected status group based on race, gender, age, disability, etc. When the harasser/bully/perpetrator is also protected, it is problematic and may disqualify the plaintiff from filing. The majority of bullying is same gender, same race. Thus, bullying which is 80% of all harassment, is invisible in the eyes of the law. Only a very narrow slice of the population is ever eligible to claim discrimination. Always determine whether the perpetrator is similarly protected. That nullifies any protection for the target. It is a simple and erroneous statement to say that a hostile work environment is illegal in the U.S. Sad, but true.

Given the inadequacy of IIED and civil rights statutes to address workplace bullying, a problem of epidemic proportions in the U.S., there oughta be a law! That’s why we need the HWB. We need it despite whining protestations from corporate defense attorneys who point to IIED and civil rights laws as adequate — for employers, yes — for plaintiffs, protections are non-existent.

A Target’s Wishlist

We certainly wanted a law in the beginning of our involuntary involvement with workplace bullying back in 1995. When we started the organization that has become the Workplace Bullying Institute in mid-1997, we had learned the hard way that existing U.S. employment law was very narrowly defined and did not deserve to be called “protection.” David Yamada annexed his legal work with WBI and in 2001 gave us the first version of the HWB to take to the California legislature. Ruth Namie, Carrie Clark and I learned amateur lobbying the hard way but were able to get the largest state to introduce HWB for the first time in 2003. Now, there is a nationwide team of volunteer State Coordinators carrying the HWB to their state legislatures. For the technical content of the bill, we defer to law professor Yamada. We and the Coordinator team are the implementers.

When deep in the throes of emotional turmoil through no fault of their own, bullied targets demand justice. They deserve it. Naturally they turn to the law and courts to provide this. They want to sue. They want retributive justice — someone must be punished and held accountable. They want revenge. One late website author used to insist that all bullies were psychopaths. He never seemed to heal. To individuals subject to such constrained thinking and prone to emotional distortion, affirmative defenses for employers make the bill sound weak.

The HWB will become a civil law. The only method for restoring a plaintiff’s dignity and sense of justice is cash. This is not a bill to create a criminal law. There are only two in the world: (1) a new 2011 bill in the Australian state of Victoria, and (2) the French Social Modernisation Law. So, please know that people, however heinous, will not be going to jail after the HWB becomes law.

Targets want draconian laws to punish employers. And so might we at WBI. However, the process of making laws in the U.S. is through legislators who win their elective seats by raising money, most of it corporate money. There is little appetite for advancing laws for middle class working folks. In fact, after the 2010 election, there was a spate of anti-worker, anti-union laws passed simultaneously in several states. Current politicians who populate the state legislatures mostly hate or are indifferent to the plight of workers.

The lawmakers who are the exceptions to the new rules are the brave sponsors of the HWB. Their lives have been personally touched by destructive bullying. They come from all political parties. They lend credence to our statement that the HWB is non-partisan. However, in states with majorities in both chambers and the governorships where anti-worker laws passed, it is an uphill battle to simply get the HWB introduced.

This is the political world we have for the next several years. Abuse at work is serious. But so is self-destruction of the planet by governments’ failure to deal honestly with climate change, pollution and the effect of the destructive human imprint on the natural world. If lawmakers can’t address ways to ensure we have suitable air and water for our grandchildren, you can imagine how easily they dismiss the abuse of adults in the contemporary workplace. The business lobby’s clamoring for jobs through the elimination of basic regulations for employers overwhelms our counter message that employers should be mildly constrained so that work does not become a war zone for anyone.

We appreciate that some legal writers have considered passage “inevitable.” The momentum of the workplace bullying movement that we originated here in the U.S. is building as the term “workplace bullying” enjoys more mainstream acceptance and usage every year. Much work remains to be done and it will not stop when the first state makes HWB law. That will simply launch a new phase in the struggle.

A short final word about why we are pursuing state laws and not a national one. Each state has different workers compensation laws to which the HWB must conform. It would be nearly impossible to craft a national law that could accomplish that task. With a national law, there are also interstate commerce clauses that must be dealt with, further complicating the task. And finally, have you looked at Congress lately, both the paralyzed Senate and the wacky House? We have lobbied a bit in Washington, DC but with a different purpose than to propose a national law to complement federal civil rights statutes.

For those who think we should expand existing civil rights laws, think again. Those statutes are considered sacred by constituencies that benefit most from those laws. There is a dormant opposition to tinkering with those hard-won laws that could be awakened if we sought to supplement current protections in the civil rights codes. Modifying them in the reactionary political climate that has prevailed for the last 31 years in the U.S. seems to be a fool’s errand. We shall stick with our state-by-state campaign unless there is a major upheaval in national politics and a new progressive era is ushered in.

The Confluence of Movements

The Healthy Workplace Campaign certainly benefits from the Occupy movement that addresses income inequality. The protesters have made clear the unnatural and undemocratic disparity that is reflected where we go to work (if we have a job at all). That owners control the entire work environment and can callously discharge workers with no consequences when no union is present. The intra-organizational political disparities reflect the broader economic ones in society. Workplaces are microcosms of society.

In America’s private sector, 93% of workers have no union. The doctrine of “employment at will” prevails. It is that same negation of workers’ rights relative to those of the owners that fosters workplace cultures where bullying thrives. Employers continue to fire anyone daring to organize a unionization drive. Employer campaigns to discredit unions at meetings where they can mandate all-hands attendance seem to work. Many workers, despite unemployment at Great Depression levels, prefer to side with employers rather than with their colleagues to demand fairer treatment.

To improve workers’ lives, there must be attempts to chip away at employers’ unilateral control over workers. They won’t voluntarily yield or share power without pressure from employees working collaboratively and collectively.

In the absence of unions, and to enhance the safety of unionized workers, please help us pass the Healthy Workplace Bill. Do it to restore some fairness to the American workplace.

Gary Namie
National Director, Healthy Workplace Campaign
Nov. 22, 2011

###

An interview with Adam Cohen, Yale Law Professor, on CNN that provides a great tutorial on the HWB.

Child abuse deserves attention, but society has to acknowledge that adults also can be abused through no fault of their own in situations of powerlessness. Is equivalence possible?

Download Podcast 22 (in .mp3 format)

To Dad, on what would have been his 92nd birthday.

After a terror-filled Friday Nov. 18 afternoon in Davis, California during which peaceful, seated campus protestors were maliciously pepper-sprayed by police in riot gear, the video went viral (identifying Lt. John Pike as the major offender who was suspended WITH PAY). On the video clip, skip to timemark 4:05 to see the full context of the police action. Campus police chief Annette Spicuzza claimed that the police were surrounded and could not escape!! She is temporarily suspended (probably with pay).

Katehi conducted a press conference that night. Students surrounded the building. She remained inside for two hours before she was told the students would not interfere with her exit. She then walked the “walk of shame” between two lines of silent, seated students.

Katehi announced the formation of a “task force” to take 90 days to review the cops’ actions.But she cannot investigate herself! In her blog, she included standard CYA language for her involvement in the violent disruption of the student protests: “the university provides an environment for students to participate in rallies and express their concerns and frustrations through different forums, university policy does not allow such encampments on university grounds,” and “I made the decision not to allow encampments on the Quad during the weekend, when the general campus facilities are locked and the university staff is not widely available to provide support,” (fyi: riot police≠support) “Our campus is committed to providing a safe environment for all to learn freely and practice their civil rights of freedom of speech and expression,” blah, blah, blah.

The faculty association called on her to resign. One brave untenured assistant professor, Nathan Brown, wrote an open letter admonishing his boss. But on Mon. Nov. 21, the arrogant Katehi told ABC News that the “university needs me.”

Here’s an odd juxtaposition of events. On Oct. 26, Katehi celebrated the launch of the UC Davis “Civility Project.” She espoused some lofty-sounding hyperbole. “We are a campus known for its civility and our commitment to respect, equality and freedom of expression runs deep … to engage members of the UC Davis community in an examination of how incivility has been and continues to be manifested on campus and to explore alternative engagements in the future … to help build on UC Davis’ growth as an inclusive environment.”

Are we to assume civility enforcement is handled by heavily armed riot police? Are unarmed, peaceful protesters creating a safety hazard to campus civility and Katehi’s tender sensibilities?

Mark G. Yudof, chancellor of the 10-campus, once-great University of California system needs to fire Katehi and not wait on her internal 90-day delaying tactic.
While he is at it, Yudof should also fire Robert Birgeneau, UC Berkeley campus chancellor.

At Cal Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, the 1964 home of the Free Speech Movement, campus police (only a few miles north of the Occupy Oakland location), goons with batons beat back peaceful, non-aggressive protesters.

Graham Spanier was fired on Nov. 9. Penn State University’s president since 1995 and in office during the initial revelations about Jerry Sandusky’s abuse allegations was ousted by the Board to mitigate PR damage (both he and his wife taught at PSU, fates of professorships unknown).

The appearance of treating with indifference repeated allegations of child abuse on campus (when Sandusky brought young boys onto campus) is sufficient to end an administrative career. As the top administrator, PSU’s most senior manager, Spanier was made to fall on his sword.

Anyone wishing to share their opinion with Linda Katehi can do so here chancellorkatehi@ucdavis.edu

You see, I’m from Washington, Pennsylvania. In town was a neighborhood gym (not much more than an indoor basketball court back when it opened in 1926) where my Dad loved to go shoot hoops from his childhood through adolescence. The place was called the Brownson House. It served as a sports center for youths, later run by a friend of my Dad’s, Art. Art had a son, Jerry, who was a mascot for the amateur BH sports team.

As a boy growing up in Washington, I admired local sports talent, including football stars. A family star was my cousin, Bob, a wide receiver for Wash High, and eight years older than me. He had a teammate, Jerry. Bob and Jerry dominated local sports headlines in my impressionable years. It was Jerry Sandusky who went to Penn State (PSU) to first play for, then coach with, Joe Paterno. I also went to Wash High and was keenly aware of local sports lore from before my time.

Unfortunately, Jerry continued in State College his inherited mission of “helping” vulnerable youths. By the time he started his own organization, he was a superstar in a small town, much bigger than when he was in “little Washington” years earlier. He and Paterno were joined at the hip by virtue of sharing the spotlight at PSU for over 30 years.

So, let’s explore some factors that dissuaded all those involved with Sandusky’s record of abuse — then-graduate assistant McQueary (who caught Sandusky raping a 10 yr. boy in the on-campus team shower room), head coach Paterno (to whom the crime was reported), university administrators (who learned from Paterno), and campus police (who were familiar with multiple, similar crimes by Sandusky) — to abandon any personal morals and to not report the crimes.

1. Mike McQueary was an assistant coach for PSU on Paterno’s staff until Friday Nov. 11 when he was suspended. As the one who stumbled on the rape scene and reported it to Paterno, he had already bought into the Paterno/Penn State mystique. He told his boss. To him, it probably seemed like a chain-of-command reflex. Of course, Paterno should be told. But McQueary did not call the town police because he also knew then-former coach/god Sandusky. As an insider, he kept the complaint “in the family.”

2. Joe Paterno, a coach known as a stickler for player integrity and decorum, forgot his own when he chose to report the rape (though I doubt he called it that) to his titular “boss” Tim Curley, the PSU Athletic Director. I say titular because no one at Penn State, including campus presidents could overrule JoePa with his 48 year tenure. Paterno IS PSU. That’s what the big business of college sports has done to the universities that host the teams. Head coaches trump college president power, especially the winningest in history! (Read the The Shame of College Sports Atlantic article by Taylor Branch, an in-depth history of the shifting of priorities.) Telling Curley was all Paterno was required to do. Who wrote that policy? How can a campus rule usurp society’s demand that everyone in education at any level be required to report such crimes? Technically, Paterno did no wrong. But he did nothing right, either.

As a mentor to young men for half a century himself, he allowed his personal relationship with Sandusky to obscure the bigger picture. Paterno was an adult in a responsible position who enabled Sandusky to continue to abuse children. To me, he loses all future claims to being a person with superior morality. Understanding the pull of loyalty to Sandusky is not hard to imagine. But this was child rape. And Paterno knew about more than one incident. He knew Sandusky was banned from campus and he did not enforce the ban.

3. All the PSU administrators were completely in the sway of the Paterno/PSU mystique. It was all bureaucratic CYA by mice, not men. I wonder how many of the senior executives hypocritically are involved with youth-oriented community groups?

4. How could the campus police subsume their anti-crime role to being part of the Paterno/PSU family? I guess to understand we would have to live under the PSU influence. They all drank the Kool-Aid. At least the police could have told Sandusky to leave campus after he was a former coach and had been instructed to stay away. But the police did not take the proper steps. Maybe there should have been a court-ordered protective order for the campus to shut out Sandusky.

Failing to keep Sandusky away from the campus allowed the Paterno/PSU images to be tarnished by child abuse. Paterno should not be personally blamed for child abuse. PSU enabled it with its fealty to its football gods. If administrators either had had the guts to confront Sandusky or to call the off-campus police on him, they would not have been dragged through the public relations crisis that currently grips the campus.

I am doubly sickened by the entire sordid ordeal. The fact that Jerry Sandusky and I share Washington, PA roots is eerie. Second, I recognize all too well the reflexive response of institutions to cover the careers of their “leaders” rather to do what is morally (and perhaps legally) correct.

Employers that support bullying and love their bullies will pay any price (bad PR, fortunes in lost court cases, millions in settlements just to silence complainants) to not have to confront powerful players in their organizations who hurt people.

Penn State’s bungled response has been all about itself and its precious image. Administrators and Paterno deliberately chose public silence out of deference to the venerated Sandusky, an obviously flawed man. Many adults who were Sandusky victims will have to go public to convince callous Americans that this should be a story about abused children.

The Catholic Church spent years deflecting the truth and punishing the courageous, vocal adult victims who came forward. It took decades before the church shifted its tactics to paying out millions in restitution. Finally, the victims were believed.

I’ve written elsewhere about how and why Cain harassment victims are discredited.

Individuals bullied at work are always discredited and not believed. Employers banish targets. They do not hold offenders accountable. And the organization can act like it does no wrong.

This is the lesson from the Paterno/PSU saga. No surprises here. More of the same. It’s all so sickening and so sad.

Our national reverence for individualism rings hollow when the need to help individuals is so easily muted by powerful institutions that have no intention of letting the needs of individuals be heard.

Gary Namie

Response options and their corresponding percentages were:


Yes I support and I agree with the tactics .50

Yes I support but I don’t agree with the tactics .173

Yes and I have participated in the protest .082

Yes: = .757

No, disagree with message and tactics used .213

No – don’t support message – but no problem with the tactics .030

No: .243

While reversing the $5 fee made mainstream headlines, B of A, with approval and encouragement from the Federal Reserve (that exists by and for banks, not the U.S. government), moved $53 TRILLION of derivative contracts from the gambling reckless risk-taking side of the behemoth corporation (the bank holding company, investment house) to the retail consumer side Bank where funds are insured by the FDIC. That means that the massive losses by Merrill Lynch and the junk derivatives that had a Baa1 rating (the third lowest investment Moody grade) become overnight A2 rated because now the American taxpayers will cover the risk of these gambles failing. That’s you and me, the 99%-ers.

Remarkably, the entire financial system loves the dumping of risk onto the unsuspecting and unaware American public. While distracted by the $5 fee return, Bank of America just flaunted regulators. Of course, since the the Glass-Steagall Act was rendered obsolete by Alan Greenspan’s Fed in 1996, and formally repealed in 1999, the firewall separating retail banking functions that use customer money (and always backed by the FDIC) and investment businesses that play risky games to make incredible profits.

Said investigative reporter Matt Taibbi who has been following the underlying stories about the recession:

So the primary regulator of the banking industry is encouraging a functionally insolvent megabank to respond to a credit downgrade by pushing its most explosively risky holdings onto the laps of the taxpayer. This is lunacy…. Remember that story about the Chinese man who had a world-record 33-pound tumor removed from his face? This would be like treating that patient by removing the tumor and surgically attaching it to the face of a new patient, in this case the U.S. taxpayer.

Despite Occupy and the message that we reject control by the 1%-ers over so much of our lives, NYC Mayor Bloomberg had the audacity to claim on Nov. 1 that the banks and Wall Street cannot be blamed for the recession and global economic crisis.

Watch the outrageous video clip.

The facts do not support Bloomberg’s assertions (lies). Read the careful refutations by Mike Konczal. These are the points never known to the public. They are facts not disseminated by the media because financial reporters do not want to be seen siding the the 99%-ers.

Writing in the Washington Post, a UNESCO proponent reminds us of some worthwhile projects.

- development of tsunami early warning in the Caribbean and the Pacific
- stands up for every journalist attacked or killed across the world
- leading education reform and training journalists in Tunisia and Egypt
- training teachers in human rights and Holocaust remembrance
- leading the country’s largest education program in Afghanistan, reaching some 600,000 learners in 18 provinces

UNESCO’s slogan is “Building peace in the minds of men and women.” The U.S., as the self-declared leader of freedom and democracy, will have none of it (from now on)! Acceptance of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Libya was formally granted by Secretary of State Clinton. But regarding Palestine, …

An internet gathering of rich folks who feel empathy for the rest of us can be found at this website.

One such story is:

The year I was born, my father and grandfather started a business that brought a much-needed service to our community. Overnight, they became millionaires. Simultaneously, I recieved a birthright, and a wealthy inheritance. I grew up in a moderately secular, safe, small city that was consistently ranked in the top 3 ‘best places to live in America’ for five straight years. This city is known for it’s world-renowned medical clinic. Because of this, I have had excellent health coverage my entire life. I have received the highest standard of education and I will graduate college with no loans to pay off because of the family business. I do not have a job because I do not need to work. I do not feel guilty for the life I have, nor do I feel especially spoiled by the things I have been granted. My life is amazing. I want everyone to have what I have. I am the 1%. I stand with the 99%. TAX ME

Congratulations to these individuals with a conscience and brave enough to share it with the world.

The Baum 2010 Halloween staff party mocked the people who lost their homes as a result of the firm’s work. Watch this video clip to see the cruelty. In turn, Keith Olbermann mocked Baum.

Research shows how easy it is to turn a “normal” person into a torturer. Obviously, after working in the anti-family, anti-worker business of separating people from their homes, a hardening of compassion-potential humans at Baum occurs.

It’s one thing to commit anti-social acts under the guise of just “following orders” or “doing my job,” but to make props, costumes and elaborate ways to demean the less fortunate upon whom you prey is twisted.

Maybe they would learn some humility, if the tables were turned.

Military Vet at Occupy Oakland Critically Injured by Riot Police create a war zone in U.S. city

Call for resignation of Oakland mayor Jean Quan

Mayor Quan offers contrite statement in response to public outcry over police tactics

updated Oct. 27, 2010

Follow the story of a worker-driven push for change of a government workplace culture to drive out bullying. No ending yet. We support the unions whose workers deserve to be free from abusive conduct and retaliation. And we support the County administration that has the opportunity to turn a PR disaster into triumph and do the right thing.

2010

As in all government institutions, bullying occurs. Of this we can be sure. 8,000 employees work for Ventura County, California. Using WBI national statistics, we can safely estimate that 720 employees at any given time are being bullied; an additional 2,080 have been bullied. It’s a mid-size corporation.

January, 2011

A group of employees complained to the County Grand Jury (GJ). In a role much like consultants, the GJ investigated complaints (in one of their roles in that county) about workplace bullying by current and former county workers. The GJ as investigator concluded that bullying is a problem and employees deserve protection from it. An investigation conducted by HR might have concluded differently (as it nearly always does). The GJ reported that HR procedures are not trusted.

May 24, 2011

The GJ issues its report confirming the existence of the workplace bullying problem. Read the original Grand Jury report The county HR director, John Nicoll, told the local newspaper “We do not tolerate employees being mistreated because they’ve filed a complaint.” This directly contradicted facts about retaliation and fear of it contained in the GJ report. Read the press coverage of the GJ report and response of County administrators.

May-Sept, 2011

County employees are represented by several unions. SEIU Local 721 represents the majority of workers, numbering 4,500. The SEIU forms an Anti-Bully Committee. Meetings on the topic draw large crowds and several heart-wrenching stories from workers. The Committee conducts a survey of its members. Nearly 500 members responded. Read the SEIU Local 721 Bullying in the Workplace Report.

Some of the most compelling survey findings were:
- 60% of respondents have been bullied, compared to the 35% national estimate
- 69% have witnessed bullying
- Over 40% have been yelled at
- Over 40% have been retaliated against

Sept. 27, 2011

Gary Lowery, SEIU, showing the County's Report Card with all F's

The full record of Union Testimony on Sept. 27, 2011

The full responses by Supervisors & CEO M. Powers on Sept. 27, 2011

[See post to watch Flash video]

Video from the Michigan Education Association, Stand Up for Kids, not CEO’s

And so it is with the principle of fairness. Fairness, or equity, is part of the fabric of the American ethos. But is it imagined or actually operating in the U.S.? In a bullied person’s world, there is no fairness. They are targeted for no reason they caused. They suffer from tactics unilaterally determined by the dominating tyrant. They live with an unpredictable schedule of torture and relief completely out of their control. They seek relief and are not believed or considered deserving of help. They lose the job they once loved, asking only that they be left alone to do their work. A majority lose that job and face sickness without health insurance, risk losing their homes, and find it incredibly difficult to reconstruct a new life with a shattered identity.

On Oct. 25, 2011 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report on income inequality that was requested by two Senators in 2006. The results are in and confirm that the news that the split between the haves and the have-nots in the U.S. is unprecedented. Between 1979 and 2007, the rise in income for the top 1% of the population was 275 percent. For the bottom 20%, the rise was a meager 18%. This report was conducted by the non-partisan group tasked with conducting research to inform members of Congress. Read the full report for yourself.

Need more proof of American economic unfairness? More facts about income.
- The minimum income of top 1% was $516,633. The average income in 2011 was $1,530,773.
- The maximum income of lowest 20% was $16,961. The average income was $9,187.

But cash income is only part of the story when considering the disparity in wealth. Wealth includes home equity, stocks and investments.
- The average wealth of top 1% was $14 million in 2009 (reflecting a post-recession drop from 19.2 in 2007, you see they suffered a bit, too, at least that is what they will tell you)
- The lowest 20% actually had a negative average wealth of $-27,200 in 2009. That reflects the bursting of the housing bubble and loss of property value, actually putting those families in the red.

The wealthiest 1% had an average of 225 times the wealth of the average median household in 2009. In 1962, the ratio was 125. The median is the value at the exact middle of the distribution of all incomes. In 2011, the median income was $65,357.

The richest 20 Americans had wealth ranging from $12.4 to $54 billion in 2010. See who they are.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the U.S. is ranked 39th in the world with respect to equity of the distribution of family income.

So, it’s clear with respect to income and wealth, the top 1% are deriving all the benefits. It’s an unfair world rigged by tax policies (see the CBO report) to grow wealth for the people who do not work an 8 hr. day that is in any way comparable to what a bullied target works.

Even if bullied targets were once in the top 1%, as only bankers and C-suite dwellers are, after the bullying, they join the ranks of the other 99%. Bullied targets are 99%-ers and have much in common with others who are fed up with economic injustice. It’s just that the target’s sense of injustice cuts even deeper.

You can discount the Occupy/99%-er movement, if you wish. It is a rebellion against the unconscionable concentration of wealth in the U.S. Inequity is a fact, not an opinion, supported by an empirical study from a Swiss university, ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

The study used complex mathematical models to determine measurable networking among 43,060 transnational corporations. The principal finding was that 147 “core” companies at the center of the world’s financial universe control 40% of the world’s entire economic value of all corporations. Among the top 50 firms, 45 are from the financial services sector (banks). Barclays is the top ranked firm, exercising the most control. From the top 50 list, 24 are U.S., 8 U.K., 5 are French, and Japan has 4. The allegation of concentration is supported by data. Read the complex study for yourself. Below is the list of the top 50 firms taken from a table in the ETH report.

From their New Scientist article about the ETH study, authors Coghlan and MacKenzie summarize the complex networking study:

From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 transnational corporations and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see the image below). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. [Lehman Bros was still around in 2007, hence they are in the top 50 list.]

The picture of the 1318 firm universe of connections.

If you a success, personal or organizational, to report, add your comment. WBI

This type of essay is common in the American business press. We typically ignore them. But in light of Freedom Week, we thought it useful to reply sarcastically in order to defend our constituents — bullied workers. No malice is intended, just an attempt to provide facts for the falsehoods and adjustment for those with arrested moral development.


Keep The Focus on Job Creation
Last thing business needs is a new litigation trigger.
William Barth, Beloit Daily News, Oct. 22
(Beloit is southern WI town of 39,000 right on the Illinois border.)

Add this to the list of litigation risks operators of Wisconsin businesses may have to worry about: Offending the tender sensibilities of their employees.

Tender sensibilities? Since when is the desire to work free from abuse an undeserved expectation? Are all battered spouses too tender and unjustifiably concerned that they are living in danger? Bet you think so.

Guess who is the tender one in the abusive workplace equation — the bully, the abuser. They whine when they are exposed, after thriving in the privacy provided by their executive sponsor. They bellyache that they must be given free reign to operate with impunity, regardless of their offense, because of “managerial prerogative.” Yes, the whiners assert their “rights” and cry if a person has the courage to call out their unconscionable conduct.

No, dear Bill, the tender ones are the bully and his apologists like you.

If, that is, a measure promoted by Rep. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, and Sen. Spencer Coggs, D-Milwaukee, is adopted. They announced the plan — dubbed by sponsors as the Healthy Workplace Bill — as part of something called “Freedom from Workplace Bullies Week,” which apparently is recognized Oct. 17-23.

A press release says the bill “combats the problem of bullying in the workplace by allowing workers who can demonstrate physical or psychological harm from an abusive work environment a limited right of action against their abusers.”

“Dubbed” and “something called” and “apparently is recognized” are cute ways to discount what you don’t know or understand. Let’s similarly scorn the hysterically self-named “chamber,” the business membership and lobbying group, that repeatedly demonstrates its hateful anti-worker agenda as anti-American! More like a chamber of horrors.

Roys, who is seeking to replace Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin representing Beloit and the 2nd Congressional District, says “bullying is too common a problem in Wisconsin workplaces” and “significantly impairs workforce productivity and health.”
According to a study cited in the release 37 percent of workers claim to have been bullied; 72 percent of the bullies are bosses; 62 percent of employers ignore the problem; and only 3 percent of bullying victims file lawsuits. Well, we can’t have that. What Wisconsin needs in these challenging economic times is more lawsuits targeting businesses. Not.

Exactly what do you, as editor-spokesperson for the town paper, profess to not be able to tolerate? Is it the statistic from the national scientific survey that reveals that 54 million American adults have directly experienced repeated mistreatment from one or more employees that takes the form of verbal abuse, threats, intimidation, humiliation or interference that prevents work from getting done. If you believe that such an epidemic level of aggression and psychological violence is something we (speaking for Beloit society) should not endure, we agree. If most perpetrators are bosses, that most of the violence is directed down the ladder at those less able to fight back because of rank, and that annoys you, then we agree.

While you are agreeing with us, we assume you also regret that so many employers chose to ignore the problem even though it undercuts the bottom line and any moral claim to being a decent, let alone a great, place to work. Or do you, in your pigheaded blustering style, believe that bosses should be unfettered to act as they wish. No bad boss ever entered your life. As editor, you are the one with the chance to be a bad boss and make people suffer. If they dare confront you or go over your head, you can hand them their head on a platter as they join the ranks of unemployed journalists. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it, the power? No sense in ever curbing that impulsive desire. Whatever happens at work stays at work, right?

Remember domestic violence? Remember how hyperaggressive people like you always defended the abuser because he never hurt you, another man? Remember how police never got involved because what happened in the family stayed in the home? Then, society (not necessarily the one you live in and pretend to speak for) was enlightened and took a stand against violence that was always in the perpetrators’ control. If you were ever an abuser, you might have stopped for fear of violating criminal law. The law worked. Bet you said that with the passage of domestic violence laws that jails would be unnecessarily crowded with upstanding men who simply had partnered with the wrong women. The reality is that women did not ask to be abused or who dared stand up to the abuse were brave and not prone to “tender sensibilities.” They were not wimps or deserving victims.

In your world, Dear Billy, guess when bad things happen to people at the hands of malicious, evil perpetrators of violence, they deserve it.

Obviously, this silly piece of legislative sludge has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Assembly and Senate or being signed by Gov. Scott Walker. State government has been trying to make businesses feel more welcome here to spur job creation, rather than brandishing lawyers in the faces of investors and developers.

Silly Sludge? Now you’re getting snarky, but a good alliteration.

Speaking of sludge and scum, what a fine governor you stand behind. Businesses need to feel more welcome sound like tender sensibilities they have that must be coddled.

Job creation by investors and developers? Really? What are you smoking? Stop inhaling the vapors from Frank Luntz and his Republican obliteration of the English language and his truth-destroying campaign.

A fine newspaper editor you are! Too lazy to invent a synonym for “job creators.” And the ethics of investors and developers represent the finest examples of Beloit citizenry? Don’t you know any teachers? How about police or firefighters? How about people who work for a living? Is life at the Beloit Daily News editorial room so removed from work conditions that these real people tolerate daily?

Developers is itself a euphemism for those who finagle building permits from city hall in exchange for political patronage in order to bulldoze homes once owned by foreclosed and involuntarily unemployed working families so that a new commercial strip of shops can be built that will sit vacant since the “job creators” have no intention of risking the start of a business in Beloit. So, by all means, celebrate developers!

We will assume Rep. Roys and Sen. Coggs are bright people, and know their proposal has less chance than a snowball in July. That leaves us with the further assumption that this is a publicity stunt. It allows Roys and Coggs to wrap their arms around the hot topic of bullying, which has become something of a celebrity cause du jour.

Soups are du jour. Workplace bullying has existed since working for another person began. If you say the topic is “hot,” it obviously is one that you feel deserves to have cold water thrown on it. With a little research, you will discover the story of Wisconsin’s own Jodie Zobell. Google her. You’ve heard of the internet, haven’t you?

While you’re at it, google “workplace bullying” to discover that there are three decades of scientific research on the topic, including some of the latest advances in neuroscience.

Or as a Gov. Walker booster, do you doubt that MRI scans reveal anything other than opinions? Don’t let that yellow stripe down your back indicate your abhorrence of science. It’s not becoming of a WI newspaper editor. Well maybe in the era of Walker, opinionated right wingers are “in.”

Likewise, on the predictable response of Walker and his legislative supporters, it paves the way for Democrats to … well, paint the governor and his allies as pro-bullying.

Yes, it does. Let your principle stand and show who you and they are. You are either “for bullying” or “against it.” You’re a concrete thinker and should appreciate the clarity.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. Bullying is harmful, and it is prevalent particularly among school-age kids. Attention deservedly is focused on protecting the vulnerable — children — from such abuse.

In the workplace populated by adults, we don’t see the urgent need for a bill that, essentially, says: You-hurt-my-feelings-and-it-makes-me-feel-sick-so-I’m-going-to-sue-you.
Are there mean bosses? Sure. But they are fewer and farther between, for a very simple reason — it’s bad for business. Churning up the workforce is detrimental to productivity and profit.

Are you certain adults never need help when they cannot defend themselves in situations when in underpowered, one-down positions? Back to the abused spouse. She’s an adult, too. Callous jerks used to say that she had better defend herself and not rely on others or society. Finally, types like you were silenced and the more compassionate and sane Americans prevailed and won protection for those spouses.

Wow. Your ignorance rooted in concrete, simplistic, pollyanish thinking keeps pouring out. Do you really think ass-kissing bullies risk losing their jobs when they are exposed? Never. The bonds with their chief executive sponsor are inseparable. Bullies don’t lose jobs in tight times. They force out those who threaten them.

It would be as if you accidentally (and by your account mistakenly) hired an associate editor or reporter whose competence and professionalism and non-ideological approach to journalism threatened you. You would most likely drive her out. Sure she could sue for sexual harassment, but she would lose because the basis for your cruelty is that you were simply a bosshole (read R. Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule to see yourself profiled) and you spread your disdain for others around the editorial table on more than one occasion. Being an equal opportunity abuser, defense counsel can protect you. However, it still means you are who you are.

Too bad you put such a prize on being a hardass, a tough guy, an unfeeling person lacking in human moral development. Does your mother know you grew up this way?

There’s an old saying that applies: Never work for a jerk.

And how would you identify one as a job applicant? No one, even you, tough independent guy that you think you are, has the nerve/courage/audacity/balls to inquire of your prospective boss if she or he is a jerk!

If a given workplace is just too difficult, quit and move on to a better employer. That may be tougher in a lousy economy, but it’s not impossible. Know your own value. Don’t sell yourself short.

Now you’re a motivational speaker! Just buck up! Regardless of having no jobs out there to replace the good paying one lost to a bullying environment, just walk. How about you walk first? People constructively discharged by bullies like you can never get hired by tough guys like you because they won’t have an acceptable explanation for their departure from the last employer. And jerks like you insist on calling the applicant’s supervisor (the bully in this case) to get the “truth” about their undeserved, disgraceful displacement.

You see how you win from whatever angle — bully boss, hiring bully boss?

You do know that Herman Cain is a similar motivational speaker and he believes that if you’re not rich and in the top 1% it’s your fault. Eh tu, Barth?

I wish you were on the street peddling your wares when the current bums in Madison are thrown out and your pro-Walker boosterism record is part of your job application. Remember to not sell yourself short then. B-E-L-I-E-V-E (say it with pom poms).

Under current law employers obviously cannot assault an employee or cause physical harm. Or create a hostile work environment. Or harass or discriminate or commit any number of other infractions. Though each situation is different and open to interpretation, reasonable civil protections for employees are valid and worthwhile. Employers are quite accountable.

Now, you’re a lawyer! Wrong again, Scruffy. Assault and physical harm are different. Best to use the internet to discover the narrowness of protections for people against a hostile work environment. Employers are NOT accountable regarding non-discriminatory cruelty that is far more prevalent. That’s why the survey showed that they ignore it!

The law is nuanced. A person with your superficiality shouldn’t wade into deep waters. What you don’t know could lead to a lawsuit against you. Check it out.

Introducing the vagaries of employees’ feelings into the equation is clearly problematic. One person’s abuse is another person’s tough and demanding boss. Turning lawyers loose on that dynamic is as anti-business as it gets.
We need jobs, for heaven’s sake, not a cheering section for more lawsuits.

We’re tempted to say that making work for lawyers is also job creation, but we hate that as much as you.

The reality is that the bill proposed by Roys and Coggs was on the books in 2010 and a hearing was held. You can look it up to see the details that provide no threat or risk to good employers. Good, here, is defined as the ones who have decided that bullying is costly and too expensive to maintain. Those good employers will have voluntarily devised ways to deal with health-harming abusive conduct (the actual language of the bill). With policies and enforcement procedures in place, those employers will be exempt from being named a defendant. No lawsuit. An escape from vicarious liability.

What we really don’t need in 2011 as we slide into double-dip recession created by the financial markets that has enabled employers to hoard cash instead of hiring workers, is another chamber mouthpiece passing himself off as a newspaper editor.

Bill, how could you have abandoned all the lessons learned from your work with the AP? Please have your family and beloved schnauzer Scruffy teach you love and compassion. Stop your chamber-induced addiction. Please re-join humanity and write like you understand your place in it.

###

William, Bill, Barth can be reached at the Beloit Daily News, 608-364-9221, bbarth@beloitdailynews.com

- personal shame by targets (who would brag about being humiliated?)
- coworkers frozen by bullies into not helping their bullied colleagues
- executives covering up for bullies they sponsor/support
- bullying is the American style of managing

Over time, fear paralyzes us all. Overcoming the inertia of inaction is difficult. We know.

But the most successful personal change plans are the ones triggered by events that suggest karma is working — a sign from above, a coincidental omen. That event becomes the excuse, the rationale, for doing something out of the ordinary.

WBI’s Freedom from Workplace Bullies Week is the reason to change how you are dealing with your bullying situation.

- City and County executives can formally recognize Freedom Week by proclamation. At the start of Freedom Week 2011, over 30 municipalities have issued such proclamations. Visit the gallery of proclamations.

- Bullied individuals and their families can take stock of the extent of the psychological injuries sustained from bullying. It sneaks up on everyone. High blood pressure goes undetected until the family physician asks what is stressful in your life. Use Freedom Week as the excuse to schedule an appointment to have your blood checked and to look for the onset of stress-related diseases. Ignoring your personal health is not a good idea. Bullying can kill. Please give your health as high a priority as keeping the salary to keep a roof over your head. If you die, no salary will have been worth it. Family members: please give your bullied partner or spouse the support she or he requires. They can build up credits that can be repaid when the bullying situation ends. Read the book The Bully At Work.

- Managers and executives need to calculate the financial losses attributable to preventable bullying. Bullies are actually too expensive to retain. However, the truth is that you are too loyal to bullies who have conned you over the years. When you acknowledge that “Bob” is a jerk, you are admitting the problem. But when you consider Bob indispensable, regardless of costs to the organization or his effect on others, you are condemning everyone to a living hell. Balance the needs of the business (profit making or budget balancing) with the narcissistic needs of Bob. Do the math. Talk to your Risk Manager. Bob is a liability. Stay friends if you must, but cut Bob loose for the sake of many. Honor your fiduciary responsibility to the organization. Bob will live on (elsewhere). Read the book The Bully-Free Workplace.

- Insurers and attorneys should warn your employer clients to prevent and correct costly bullying for their own self-interest and cost savings. Whether or not the employer has employment practices liability insurance (EPLI), bullying is costly. Premiums rise when liability increases. Bullies pose increasingly costly risks. Attorneys: you have been writing in recent years how your clients need to squelch bullying even though no specific laws exist. Continue this advice. Use Freedom Week to bolster that message. Visit The Work Doctor website to assure clients that something can be done about bullying.

- State lawmakers should enact legislation to curb bullying in the workplace. The Healthy Workplace Legislative Campaign has been around since 2003. It exists to help sympathetic lawmakers of all political parties to address health-harming abusive conduct at work (no need to call it workplace bullying). The Healthy Workplace Bill (HWB) has been introduced in 21 states. In 2011, the HWB is alive in 11 states, including Massachusetts and New York. During Freedom Week, Wisconsin state Rep. Kelda Roys and Sen. Spencer Coggs are introducing the HWB in both legislative chambers.

Connie Hedegaard, EU Climate Change Commissioner

My shock is echoed by Connie Hedegaard, the European Union commissioner for climate change. She said, “When more than 90 percent of researchers in the field are saying that we have to take [climate change] seriously, it is incredibly irresponsible to ignore it. It’s hard for a European to understand how it has become so fashionable to be anti-science in the US.”

In November, in Durban, South Africa, 27 EU member states and other western countries will continue their efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and may manage to lay the groundwork for a globally binding agreement despite resistance from China and the U.S.

Read her interview in the Copenhagen Post

First, there was the July Norwegian terrorist attacks by Anders Behring Breivik on government buildings and at the political summer camp for youths his right-wing heart despised. Another crazed person with too many weapons I thought dismissively. Seen it too many times at home. De-sensitized to shock from it. More going postal.

But the reaction of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and the other national leaders made it clear that this tragedy was not a typical American murder spree. There was shock as Norwegians lost some innocence that day. The shooter was one of their own, he had guns (which few Norwegians have or need), and he was intolerant of the Labour Party in power. The emphasis was on mourning and less on the shooter.

Norway is a nation built on tolerance. It has bullying laws. It is the home of the world’s most prolific academic group researching workplace bullying. It is a nation at peace with the world and with itself. Norway couldn’t be more different than the U.S. for all those reasons.

Most stunning to this cynical American was that the Prime Minister insisted that civil rights and existing laws and traditions would not be abandoned even in light of the unprecedented threat to Norwegian democracy. Leaders explicitly stated that democracy for the nation was more important than draconian denial of citizen rights. The response was 180 degrees different than the American response to the Sept. 11 attacks. We allowed the government to take away habeus corpus, freedom from surveillance without a warrant, denial of access to courts if declared a “terrorist” by the loosest of definitions, arrest dissenters, and to use our military against our own citizens. I couldn’t have been prouder of the Norwegians and so ashamed for what we have allowed to happen to us.

The second eye-opening Euro experience was watching the farce orchestrated by the few zealots in Congress to deny the automatic raising of the U.S. debt limit to protect international creditors. We watched BBC and CNN International TV coverage. Both networks took a decidedly different approach than American TV commentators to which we were accustomed. From the outside, the networks had no trouble denouncing the tiny group of Tea Party elected officials as “extreme,” “unsophisticated,” and “naive about the international implications of their short-sighted stance.” Even CNN Int’l, with a different set of reporters than the CNN staff we see in the U.S., were critical. Reading American press reports at the time fixed responsibility jointly on the President and Congress. Those looking from the outside in were not flummoxed by illogic of Tea Party calculations. They called it for what it was — a dangerous game of chicken played by political amateurs.

To us, it is clear the American media have lost their reportorial purpose and direction. Only by seeing other reporters willing to ask the hard questions and call a spade a spade can the public ever approach something nearer the truth. Until they do, the fog of commercial TV news will continue to distort and become ever more tolerant of right-wing extremism as if the political left has a counterbalancing extremism of its own. There is no liberal mainstream media, but with CNN’s alliance with the Tea Party by hosting its own “debate” recently, anyone with their eyes open can see the reality.

The false claim is that the Post Office is broke. (And Social Security and Medicare did not cause the recession/depression; investment banker gamblers did.) Turns out that Geo. Bush in 2006 torpedoed the USPS with legislation requiring an unprecedented prepayment of anticipated pension funds to cover 75 years of operation!

Issa’s move is both union-busting and privatization of a cherished American tradition. Here’s the real story behind the headlines pronouncing (almost celebrating) the death of the USPS.

More news to come about this important story.

Our Instant Polls are meant to be a way to raise awareness of workplace bullying and the issues that accompany it. While they do provide insight into the experiences of those who are targeted for bullying and provide an outlet for those of us working to put an end to workplace bullying (this definitely includes the contributors to this website!), the Instant Polls shouldn’t be seen as all-inclusive or complete. If a particular Poll doesn’t exactly match your experience, don’t worry: in the fourteen years we’ve been advocating for an end to workplace bullying, we’ve seen just about every variation on how bullying plays out. And, as many site visitors have discovered, you can share your experience by commenting on our blog. If you’ve got a story you need to share, we want to hear it!

A break from work promotes a healthy balance in life. How did you use your vacation time?

I spent my vacation emotionally exhausted ~ 34.3%

I spent it by strategizing a way out of my bullying situation ~ 29.7%

I’m afraid to take my vacation time ~ 17.1%

I spent it relaxing and now feel refreshed ~ 12.8 %

I was denied any vacation time ~ 6.1%

Workplace bullying bleeds over into every aspect of a Target’s life, putting pressure on their family and friends and stoping many from enjoying their time off. With an estimated 53.5 million Americas affected by workplace bullying, when will we wake up and fix the problem? Work Shouldn’t Hurt!

Be sure to stop by WBI to participate in the newest survey: What type of bully are you dealing with?

The Drs. Namie began the first and only U.S. research, education, advocacy and consulting organization — the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI, workplacebullying.org) now in Bellingham, Washington. Their current books areThe Bullying-Free Workplace (2011, Wiley) for employers and The Bully At Work (2009, Sourcebooks) for bullied individuals. WBI regularly conducts research, including the scientific 2010 & 2007 U.S. Workplace Bullying Surveys and online large sample studies. As the go-to experts, WBI has been featured on U.S. and Canadian network and local TV, national and local newspapers, business magazines and radio, with nearly 1,000 interviews.

Two important additional types of work the Namies undertake are (1) to direct the national campaign to enact the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill in states (healthyworkplacebill.org), and (2) The Work Doctor® (workdoctor.com) the Namies’ firm that originated the field of workplace bullying consulting for employers in 1998. Gary was the expert witness in the nation’s first ”bullying trial” in Indiana with the verdict upheld by the state Supreme Court.

Prior to their 24/7/365 immersion in workplace bullying, Gary’s university teaching in psychology and management spanned 20 years. Ruth had counseled substance abusers. Both were corporate directors of organizational development and training – he in healthcare, she in the hotel industry.

The Namies’ professional preparation, consulting experience, and unwavering focus on workplace bullying give them an unrivaled, comprehensive perspective of the phenomenon that they introduced to the U.S.

* * *

How do you define “workplace bullying”? What isn’t it?

It is a pattern of repeated personalized attacks by one or more people against a targeted (our preferred term for the victimized) employee. It’s always repeated, chronic. The resultant health harm derives from the repeated exposure stressful work conditions completely out of the target’s control.

Bullying takes the form of verbal abuse, behaviors (physical and nonverbal gestures, space invasions & paralinguistic cues (interruptions, loud hostile volume, speech rate)) that are threatening, intimidating, or humiliating, and work interference or sabotage that prevents work from actually getting done.

We often refer to it as a systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction launched by bullies against targets who neither invited nor deserved the assaults.

We speak of abusive conduct at work as bullying. Contrast it with the less intense and less harmful negative actions — incivility and disrespect. These euphemisms are favorites of American employers who want to act like they are addressing bullying. Bullying is not rudeness or simply inappropriateness.

We frame bullying as a form of violence, albeit non-physical and sub-lethal (NIOSH agrees with this characterization).

The most important distinction to draw is with conflict. Conflict is a clash of intellectual differences between two equal-powered parties that can be resolved using time-tested strategies. Mediation is the preferred tool. But research and our experience find that mediation applied to serious bullying only compromises the previously compromised target. They begin the process as relatively powerless (the vast majority (72%) of incidents are perpetrated by bosses who outrank their targets). The so-called “middle ground” can never benefit, or ensure safety for, the target. To ask a bullied target to further yield to the bully is unconscionable.

The closest phenomenon analogous to workplace bullying is domestic violence. The interplay between abuser and abused victim mirrors the bully-target interaction. Bouts of explosive violence are followed by pseudo-nurturant interludes before a resumption of the violence. Witnesses do not interfere out of fear. Society (akin to the employing organization) remained aloof until pressure mounted to outlaw the practice. Prior to its proscription, apologists rationalized doing nothing because they felt it “inappropriate” to get involved in private family matters.

A final reason to compare bullying to domestic violence is that mediation is an inappropriate tool to stop it. There is no acceptable middle ground in abusive relationships — not in domestic violence and not in workplace bullying.

When and why did you two begin to work together?

That was in 1985. We started The Work Doctor consulting firm while Gary was teaching overseas for the University of Southern California. His graduate management students were military officers who sought guidance on real world organizational problems. So, we started the family-run consulting company, aptly named by Ruth. She and he worked together from the beginning. From its inception until 1998 Work Doctor provided a wide variety of consulting solutions, including lots of fun topics (e.g., strategy sessions at California beach towns with CEOs). However, when bullying so intensely interrupted normal life for us, we knew at the start what employers needed to do to correct and prevent workplace bullying. Work Doctor has focused exclusively on bullying in organizations since then. Services include professional speeches (done by Gary and son Sean who just joined the company), training on-site for caring employers, and, of course, the systemic solution we devised to stop bullying — Blueprint. Of course, market awareness has lagged in the U.S.

We married in 1983. Ruth’s separate career began after her graduate training in clinical psychology was completed in 1992. She was bullied in 1995. The situation resolved in 1996 and by mid-1997, we decided that to import workplace bullying from Britain was our destiny. So we started what became WBI.

By then had either or both of you already become especially interested in the problems that bullies create in the workplace?

We began collecting, at the Work Doctor website, tales of workplace mistreatment — the dark side of the world of work — thanks to inspiration from our friend Daniel Levine, host of the website and author of the book with the same title — Disgruntled! But it had not yet personally invaded our family in the early 1990′s. We understood the phenomenon only slightly and from the safe distance enjoyed by consultants. We had empathy for targets, but not intimate knowledge of its impact. We probably also confused serious abusive bullying with unethical or uncivil conduct (we were naive way back then).

Please explain when and why the Workplace Bullying Institute was founded.

Ruth’s pre- and post-doctoral career was spent in clinics treating individuals with chemical dependency problems. She was an effective clinician. She moved seamlessly across locations within a large HMO and enjoyed respect from her supervisors. In 1995, she voluntarily transferred to a clinic that allowed her to treat families and end the substance abuse specialty. Oops. She suddenly met the boss from hell, a woman clinical psychologist named Sheila. The demise of her happy career followed the predictable stages we have come to document over the years.

Like all targeted individuals and their caring partners, we did not know what to call the irrational thunderbolt that struck Ruth without invitation or deservedness. Ruth called it harassment as per HR instructions. However, we learned the legal lesson that most bullied targets learn — when the harassment is same gender or same race, it is legal and considered unactionable by HR folks who lack policies with teeth when no law exists to compel action. We hired and fired a lawyer and learned the first of many legal lessons.

After an 18-month recovery period, we surfaced emotionally and searched for the name for Ruth’s wretched experience. We found that the Brits called it workplace bullying; the Scandinavians called it mobbing. We assumed that given America’s size there must be a movement led by an organization we could support and help. In June 1997, there was none. So, we decided at that point, while living in the San Francisco suburb of Benicia, to start the Campaign Against Workplace Bullying.

The modest beginning was represented as a part of The Work Doctor website. We began writing about every aspect of bullying that we could find. We relied heavily on the European and Canadian research that had a decade head start on Americans.

The Campaign got its own website on Jan. 3, 1998 (bullybusters.org). It had grown to be rather encyclopedic. After all Gary was an academic (still teaching in No. California to pay the rent) and determined to teach. Ruth saw the need to reach out to people harmed like she had been. We established a toll-free crisis line for those seeking validation and advice. We answered the number day and night weekdays and weekends. It consumed us, both emotionally and financially. However, before we abandoned the goal of giving advice at our expense, Ruth and Gary had heard over 6.000 stories, most told in one-hour blocks.

Later, we would become known for our empirical quantitative research, but those first eight years when we lived on the phone with others we gleaned rich anecdotal information that no survey could yield. We had heard every conceivable variation of bullying that exists.

Oprah called and we worked for seven weeks to develop a November (1998) show for her. We were abruptly cut out of the show itself when Gary had the audacity to recognize the stupid idea a show producer had — to “rehabilitate a bully on stage” — and to call it just that. It’s still a stupid idea that TV shows still try to plug. Telling Dr. Phil “no” was easier after insulting the Oprah people back in the beginning. But sacrificing the dignity of the movement that stands against abuse is too great a price to pay for TV titillation.

Because of a pending Oprah appearance, we hurriedly wrote and published our first book — BullyProof Yourself At Work. We sold over 5,000 copies and quickly tired of buying bubble wrap in 6-foot diameter rolls and stuffing envelopes. In 2000, we attended the booksellers’ convention, BEA, and the publisher Sourcebooks discovered us and bought the book that became The Bully At Work. Its second edition was released in 2009.

Our first national press coverage came from the Washington Post, then USA Today as a special 1998 Labor Day feature. The Campaign first inhabited a kitchen nook, then a bedroom, finally overwhelming both the living and dining rooms. Callers flocked to us. We recruited volunteers to help with logistics and helping us respond to the hundreds of e-mail requests for confirmation that the sender was not crazy. Ruth ran a local support group and, under supervision, offered counseling to bullied clients.

We moved from Benicia, California to Bellingham, Washington in late 2001 to replenish family funds used for the Campaign. Gary again taught university for two more years, capping a 21-year career. For Western Washington University, he designed and taught the first U.S. college course on bullying — Psychological Violence At Work.

In Bellingham, the Campaign became the Workplace Bullying Institute because a team of volunteer research students made possible more surveys. Institutionalizing the name made it seem more academic. We consider the production and dissemination of research by WBI and others the activity that distinguishes us in the field. In America, WBI remains the first and only organization that integrates all aspects of workplace bullying: self-help advice for individuals, personal coaching, research, public education, union assistance, training for professionals, employer consulting, and legislative advocacy.

To what extent (if any) has its original mission changed?

The scope of our work grew from a narrow focus on bullied targets and their families to include a national campaign to enact state laws prohibiting malicious, health-harming abusive conduct at work (a.k.a. workplace bullying), and an extensive repertoire of consulting services for employers. Listening to, and advising, individuals in the throes of being bullied evolved to professional coaching (for a low fee) by a licensed counselor on staff, Jessi Brown. The public education work has expanded to include contributions of research — by WBI and by others — to inform all work. WBI, since 2008, trains professionals in its Workplace Bullying University, to extend the message beyond what a small group like WBI can achieve by itself. WBI also works extensively with unions striving to help their members restore lost power from bullying. In 2011, we are offering the first-ever union-only WB University. And in an oblique way, Gary educates courts and arbitrators by providing expert witness services in lawsuits.

The three domains of our work are related as follows. Individual targets are powerless to stop bullying by themselves and should not be held personally responsible to do so, regardless of how much knowledge they possess. Mighty organizational forces are assembled to block corrective action. To apply the ubiquitous “personal responsibility” mantra to bullied individuals is to blame victims for their fate, as if they wished upon themselves severe abuse.

Employers are responsible for the work environment — bullying or its absence. So, while we currently serve employers (and unions), voluntary steps are typically modest and ineffective without being driven by the CEO. That has happened but is rare since 1998 when we focused exclusively on bullying consulting (workdoctor.com). In 2009, we launched the nation’s first anti-bullying program for adults in schools (Sioux City, Iowa, Community Schools), melding protections for children as well as for adults (workplacebullyinginschools.com).

Abdication of responsibility by employers to address bullying within their organizations is not currently punishable by law, and is even perceived as an indication of an employer’s command over its workforce to deny relief from abusive supervisors and managers. Nearly all employers choose to not give workers additional rights or protections in the U.S. unless and until compelled by laws to do so. Laws are the motivation.

Thus we began legislative advocacy in 2001. It led to the introduction in 2003 in California of the first of over 70 versions of the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill. The HWB has been introduced in 21 states since. Suffolk University Law School professor David Yamada contacted the Campaign in 1999. At the time, he was writing the seminal treatise on the need for workplace bullying laws (published in the Georgetown Law Journal in March, 2000). He shared the goals of what was to become WBI and offered to write language for the requisite legislation. It is called the Healthy Workplace Bill (HWB, healthyworkplacebill.org). Ruth and I took it to Sacramento, and the journey began.

We learned how to lobby state lawmakers the old fashioned way — without money. In the years since, we perfected and teach the methodology to citizen advocates who volunteer as State Coordinators in the Healthy Workplace Campaign. Currently, we have Coordinators in 36 states. We are a focused and successful group numbering 70 that challenges the Chambers of Commerce and other highly compensated business lobbying groups in each state. Our small but powerful team has 16 concurrent versions of the HWB active in 11 states in 2011. In 2010, both the Illinois and New York state Senates passed versions of the HWB, respectively. According to a 2011 New York Law Journal article, passage of the HWB seems inevitable. We believe this to be true, but cannot predict when or where. No state has yet passed the HWB.

Enactment of state laws will capture the attention of employers. The message will spread. Employers will eventually have to treat workplace bullying as seriously as they currently consider illegal forms of discrimination. Under threat of litigation, employers will create, and be compelled to enforce, policies specifically prohibiting bullying as we define it. In this way, and only in this way, will the millions of Americans afflicted by bullying at work be believed and protected.

Our enlarged mission now incorporates this tautological relationship: laws lead to employer actions that lead to protections for bullied workers that lead to diminishing (if not eradicating) workplace bullying.

Why has relatively little research been completed – at least until recently — on bullying in the workplace, given the nature and extent of its destructive and expensive impact?

The first English-language research journal article by Heinz Leymann, founder of the international movement, appeared in 1990. Leymann called the phenomenon mobbing instead of bullying. In 1996, a special Workplace Bullying edition of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, collected papers by Leymann, Norwegians, Germans and others. Bullying was a mainstream academic topic by then. The Bergen (Norway) Bullying Research Group, led by psychologist Staale Einarsen, produces more studies than any other single university or group. Norwegian transplant Helge Hoel completed his doctorate in England and from the University of Manchester is quite prolific. European researchers began to hold small biannual meetings to share new findings back in 1998. That group became the International Association on Workplace Bullying & Harassment. The group by self-definition remains a scholarly group. It holds its 8th meeting in 2012 in Copenhagen.

Laws followed research. The first law is Sweden’s, enacted in 1994. All Scandinavian countries have national anti-mobbing/bullying laws.

Reporter-turned-activist Andrea Adams in the UK launched the movement with her 1992 book, Bullying At Work. She defined the term we borrowed at WBI. Her legacy was extended after her death in 1995 by the Andrea Adams Trust, which closed its doors in 2010. UK unions are fierce anti-bullying advocates. The huge federal public sector union, UNISON, commissioned one of the first UK surveys on bullying done by Charlotte Rayner in 1998. Rayner has been a prolific researcher since. At universities throughout the UK and Ireland, doctorates were awarded in workplace bullying. This leads to a substantial body of peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Australians joined in 1994 with the staging of a conference in Queensland. Laws in various states followed culminating in June 2011 with the passage of a law in Victoria criminalizing bullying. It is only the second in the world to do so, but is the more prominent piece of legislation.

American researchers Loraleigh Keashly at Detroit’s Wayne State (a Canadian by birth) wrote a 1998 review of the literature about bullying, calling it emotional abuse at work. Subsequently, she published results of a Michigan scientific survey that stood as the best estimate of bullying’s prevalence in the U.S. (1 in 6 workers) until the WBI national surveys years later. She often teams with SUNY, New Paltz social psychologist Joel Neuman who applies his knowledge of aggression to the workplace and to bullying. In 2005, NIOSH convened a meeting of workplace bullying researchers. Only a handful of Americans were dedicated to researching the topic back then.

To answer your question about the apparent invisibility of research requires us to contrast the burgeoning international scientific literature with public awareness of research being conducted. Careers of academics depend on publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals. Journal readership numbers in the hundreds, and then only among others competing to publish in the same field. Rarely are articles translated for public consumption. At WBI, we are proud of translating and disseminating significant, but obscure, findings into useable information for the public. We feature such research in our training for professionals and at the website.

The other limitation of research is that it necessarily relies on the perspective of the targeted person. Thus, they are the ones who are researched heavily. Impact on their health, their perceptions of the bullies’ motives, leadership styles of managers involved, etc. The first studies of bullies’ perceptions come from Australia in 2011 where violators of employers’ law-dictated policies have been identified. To date, only their opinions about the injustice of the system that held them accountable for their behavior have been queried.

What are among the most common misconceptions about bullying in the workplace?

Misconceptions by executives: it doesn’t happen here and my trusted and accused colleagues are not capable of being abusive as alleged. Some executives genuinely believe these myths. The national statistics refute the first myth. Clearly the prevalence of bullying across all industries shows that it does happen nearly everywhere. The reason for disbelieving the subordinate who dares to accuse the manager is that that manager used years of ingratiation (butt-kissing) to curry favor with the executive so that accusers are not believed when they come forward with reports of bullying.

Misconceptions by the public: bad things happen to those who deserve it, so when people are bullied, they must have done something to bring the consequences upon themselves. This blame the victim rationalization allows the one believing it to feel protected against future personal harm. Of course, if they have the misfortune (not of their own doing) to be assigned to work with a predatory, toxic bully, they will learn firsthand that it is the bully who chose them, the method of torment, the timing of assaults, and how to convince teammates to betray the target. The target is not responsible for her or his fate any more than a battered spouse.

Misconception by HR-type workplace “experts”: targets are responsible, they actually owe it to themselves, to confront their bully with snappy comeback lines that will make her or him stop. What a joke! And how cruel to add this twist to the myth of “deserving or provocative victim.” By definition, a target is an individual who cannot defend him- or herself when subjected to a surprise character assassination. In other words, if she could have bounced the bully, she would have.

Misconception by workers: all harassment and a hostile workplace are illegal for everyone and HR will ride to the employee’s rescue when the call for help is made. Unfortunately, this is a costly myth. Only in very narrowly defined circumstances where the target is a member of a protected status group (on the basis of gender, race, religion, disability, etc.) and the perpetrator is not similarly protected do federal and state anti-discrimination laws apply. Hard to understand because the details require nuanced public education that does not exist. After a person is bullied, the legal lesson is learned. Part of WBI’s educational mission is to alert employees that most workers have no such legal protection.

Misconception (older and less frequently heard now): bullying happens in blue collar workplaces only to non-supervisors. According to the WBI 2007 U.S. Survey, 55% of targets are not supervisors, but 35% of all targets are managers — first-line supervisors, middle managers and non-executive managers aggregated. Managers are sandwiched between org layers that provide ample opportunities for bullies to emerge. Don’t forget, according to the national WBI surveys, 10% of bullies are subordinates who bully up the ladder.

Do those who are bullies in the workplace tend to be bullies at home and in the community, also?

The worst of the worst are abusers in every domain of their lives — in restaurants, when driving, at work, in church, at home. We cannot know the proportion, but we assume it is small. In worst cases, the person might actually be a psychopath (be diagnosable with an antisocial personality disorder). Robert Hare, the psychopath expert estimates that 1 in 100 executives are psychopaths. They would be excessively controlling and intimidating at home as well as at work.

However, to account for the 35% of adult Americans who have been bullied at work, another factor must be operating. Our preferred explanation subordinates personality as the prime causal factor in favor of powerful work environment cues that suggest to anyone paying attention that aggression is the key to higher status and advancement. When those are the operating rules, regardless of some lofty mission-vision-values language proclaiming that all individuals are respected, it only takes an astute observer willing to test the system to understand bullying. That is, a person who is kind, generous and wonderful outside of work can be transformed, with or without awareness, into a viper and predator at work. When asked why, the answer would be that certain conduct is expected of them at work and they are complying with that expectation. They would be saying that they were only doing what others had been doing all along, and they would be correct.

To what extent (if any) does confronting a bully in the workplace make it much less likely that the bully will be a bully elsewhere? Please explain.

Make no mistake. Bullies are confronted, just not as frequently by targets as they are confronted by bullyproof people. The confrontation conveys clearly to the bully that tormenting those who repel initial attacks will not deliver enough satisfaction to justify the effort required. Those people will not be targeted again.

Ironically, when a bully’s aggression is countered with equal or greater aggression, the respondent is often befriended, and, at the least, respected.

But bullies do renew their attempts to dominate others until they find a target who does not fight back immediately. With a target the benefit/effort ratio is high and the toxic relationship begins.

When coping with a bully, are group efforts much more effective than an individual’s efforts are? If so, why? If not, why not?

Theoretically, group interventions are the most successful. However, we know from studies, our and others, this is a too rare event. In a 2009 online survey, targets reported a joint confrontation in less than 1% of cases.

We could write an entire book describing the many ways coworkers fail their targeted colleagues. The despicable actions range from ostracism to estrangement to abandonment to siding completely with the bully. Many social psychological theories explain why, but the factor in common to all reasons is coworker fear. Fear of retaliation, fear of being the lone person to help, fear of being the next target for the bully.

When coworkers do nothing to help, it is imperative that the employer do something. We discussed elsewhere how dismal is the record of employer intervention, too.

In a way, our legislative advocacy is a way to mobilize the largest group possible – society – to declare the unacceptability of workplace bullying and to demand relief be given to those who request it.

Now please shift your attention to the book. When and why did you decide to write it…and write it together?

We have had the employer book outline on the shelf for years since we started WBI. There was no market for it. American employers showed little to no interest until recently. Corporate employment attorneys started writing about the pending success of our legislative campaign, warning employers to stop bullying voluntarily in preparation for the new law.

Since we started the national movement, drive the legislative campaign and originated the workplace bullying consulting field, we agreed to write the book when Wiley called saying that the market may be sufficiently mature for our employer-specific message.

To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ from what you originally envisioned?

The Bully-Free Workplace is a business book written for managers and organizational leaders.

Wiley editors did an expert job of contrasting the goals for this reading audience with the business professionals who attend our 3-day immersive training on workplace bullying. For the latter group, we devote much attention to the science and theories that shed light on the phenomenon. The brief book cannot cover so much material without losing the audience. This was a lesson we had to learn.

So, we wrote the book in our most direct consulting voice. What should managers do? We tell them. What should executives do? We tell them. What problems arise when you engage in the wrong activities at the wrong time? We’ve been there and we tell them.

It’s not a coddling and comforting voice to put in an executive’s ear, but given their pay grade, they should be able to handle truths about bullying in order to be best informed. If they don’t care about long-term sustainability of their organization and retaining the most talented people who ensure that future, they should not be executives.

Thanks to our book, employers can no longer say they want to do something about bullying but don’t know where or how to start. We tell them.

Are there bully apologists? If so, what specifically is their rationale for defending/justifying bullies?

Yes. Bully apologists defend heinous actions by perpetrators based on one or more of the following reasons:

• He’s no bully, he’s following my orders (I see myself in the mirror when I see him)

• His personality may be grating to some, but they have to learn to live with him as he is. (“I’m as afraid of him as others are, just keep your distance and maybe he will ignore you

• A little bullying is a good motivational tool (learning theory in reverse)

• People can’t handle criticism, he (the bully) is simply trying to make the employees better workers (workers are thin-skinned, bullies build character)

• He (the bully) needs to be left alone to manage in ways tailored to the workers only he knows how to manage (the unlimited managerial prerogative models

In the book, you observe, “Trying to change bullies is a fool’s errand.” Please explain.

There is little hope that another person will ever alter another person’s personality. By definition, personality is stable across most situations. People marry with the foolish notion that they will change their partner. They leave the relationship disappointed.

Rather than change bullies – as the expensive and wasteful option of sending them to anger management or communication skills training implies – the more realistic goal is to simply constrain their behavior when they are in the workplace. That can be done with new rules, strictly enforced, and constant monitoring.

The behaviors change and how they act outside the workplace need not concern the employer. (Pity the spouses, pets, children, and restaurant waitpersons who run afoul of them daily.)

What are the dominant characteristics of a workplace culture in which there is little (if any) bullying?

A non-bullying workplace is one clearly free of abuse. Workers do not dread the possibility because if it happens, it is squashed immediately and the perpetrator is somehow branded anti-social and unacceptable. A fear-free place is the normal expectation of most workers new to any organization. When bullying surfaces, it always surprises people.

Some characteristics of a respectful workplace (a higher standard than the mere absence of abuse)

• Personally confident, curious, truth-seeking leaders

• Established channels of communication to leaders from staff that are trusted and used by workers without fear of reprisal

• Sick day and off-work policies that reflect an inherent trust of workers (not designed with cheaters in mind)

• Few, if any, secrecy mandates (e.g., compensation)

• Small CEO pay to lowest paid worker ratio

How specifically can bullying “kill” an organization?

We know the word “kill” sounds strong and hyperbolic, but right from the beginning of the movement, Heinz Leymann referred to employee death as the ultimate outcome from repeated mistreatment. Death comes from the onset of stress-related diseases traceable to the unremitting exposure to stress that bullying creates. And death can be by disease or suicide. Those are the literal ways that bullying kills.

It also undermines (kills) profitability, productivity, morale, team cohesion, employee trust and loyalty, and perceived effectiveness of leadership. All of these lead to sabotage, theft, sharing the flaws with external groups, and a tarnished reputation for the employer as one of the “worst places to work.”

Finally, bullying leads to the death of the organization’s vitality and ability to innovate and compete because the culture is understood by those on the inside as one that pits workers against their peers. There is no integrity, an ethical collapse, rendering employee engagement in any bold initiative necessary to keep the company solvent impossible.

Executive calls to purposeful action are met with sullen, disheartened, cynical employees.

Prior to what you characterize as an “epidemic” of bullying, are their any early-warning signs? Please explain.

The “red flags” missed by most organizations include:

• Not believing bullied individuals when they report the misconduct (disbelief from either the descriptions that sound too outrageous to be true or defensiveness of the first responders eager to protect the bullies)

• Simultaneously believing the alleged bully’s dismissal of the accusation as frivolous (who would confess to doing it?)

• Mislabeling bullying, aka psychological violence, as a simple “personality clash” and therefore not worthy of the organization’s attention

• mounting financial losses from lawsuits against the same few individuals who are inexplicably retained and never questioned

• C-suite mindguards who believe their role to be to block bad news flowing upward to executives

• A culture that prizes quiet (the absence of reports about potential interpersonal troubles) and considers conflict abhorrent, to be avoided at all costs (delusion accomplishes this goal)

What are the essential components of the “model of preventable causes of bullying” that you discuss in Chapter 8?

We agree that bullies bully because they can. Employers make it possible and some exploit the opportunities. It’s also true that personality has to be at least a small factor because not everyone sees the chances to hurt someone else.

However, our model states that bullying is primarily dependent on organizational learning. Bullies are excellent learners about, and interpreters of, cues in the work environment that signal openings to harm others. When there are situations in which others can be obliterated and one’s personal career advanced (a zero-sum competitive opportunity), it is because the employer has made the competition possible. (In Jack Welch’s world, the competition is by deliberate design in a twisted social Darwinistic way.)

When exploitation opportunities surface, only a few people willing to exploit need exist. With sufficient numbers of employees, a couple of Machiavellian types are bound to exist. Additionally, there must exist a pool of employees to serve as prey for the predators. In some fields (education and healthcare), the pool is vast. In workplaces where people with a pro-social orientation can be found in abundance, targeting is an easy task for bullies.

Third, the employer’s response to bullying when detected or reported is critical. If the actions are frowned upon and stopped, bullying can be suppressed. If bullying is rewarded, explicitly with promotions or recognition or implicitly by being treated with indifference or denial, bullying thrives. It’s simple learning theory in operation. Rewards reinforce and strengthen the likelihood of repeated actions, even in the case of negative conduct like bullying.

Thus, it is the employer’s responsibility to alter conditions under its control. Employers can stop deliberate zero-sum gamesmanship and even stop inadvertent destructive interpersonal strategizing with careful planning. Secondly, employers can shift the response to bullying from positive to negative in order to extinguish the undesirable conduct.

Bullying cannot continue unless employers want it to continue. If employers want to stop it, they can. And it would stop nearly instantly. Bullying is bringing value to employers; it continues unabated.

When contending with bullying, what are the specific leadership responsibilities, not only in the C-suite but at all other levels and in all other areas within the given organization?

Great leaders know that fostering trust among those purported to be led is critical. Leadership is earned, bestowed by the followers, not dictated or automatically granted to a position holder in the org chart. With respect to bullying, leaders and managers must have a modicum of the following abilities:

• Self-awareness: the ability to accurately read how others respond to them and be realistic about others’ perceptions

• Sufficient emotional maturity to allow that personal flaws do not preclude effectiveness in all tasks (a healthy, resilient ego vs. narcissism)

• Insight turned inward to recognize if they are bullies themselves

• An insistence on being told truths, however negative, by those who surround them – be explicit in your instructions and demonstrate that you can handle the truth when delivered

• Relationship-building with peers so that when others are caught being abusive, you can confront them safely, and in private, to compel them to change because unfettered abusive conduct shapes the workplace culture

• Empathy toward individuals who provide evidence of unconscionable psychological violence directed at them

• Desire to include the impact on employees’ lives and health of business decisions as a serious component of routine processes

By what process should bullying be addressed?

Bullying is rampant partly because nearly everyone is afraid to confront strong-willed, blustering bullies. Choosing to see bullying as the result of a few “bad seeds,” misleads leaders to personalize both the problem and solution. They mistakenly dive into the pointless task of personality re-engineering. It is a band-aid, short-term illusionary fix. Bullying recurs.

Relying on our explanatory model, leaders are guided to solutions that are impersonal. They apply to any organization and any bully, regardless of rank, personal abrasiveness or personality. Our Blueprint to Prevent and Correct Workplace Bullying does not ask executives to betray friends. The system, when in place, snares offenders. The system compels executives to act, rather than relying on personal motivation.

The systemic approach is not rocket science. In many ways it mirrors steps currently taken to address illegal discrimination. We do add our special variations to account for differences between bullying (legal, status-blind harassment) and illegal harassment.

1. Measure baseline prevalence. It stuns us how few clients actually want to know the starting rate prior to taking steps to reduce bullying. The fear of this metric runs counter to businesses’ obsession with tracking relevant data.

2. Create an explicit bullying prohibition policy. The ideal process is completed by a cross-disciplinary, cross-rank writing group assembled especially for this task. The group writes the policy, integrates it with existing ones, creates both informal and formal complaint and enforcement procedures, and, most important, designates a team of employees to be trained as peer experts in workplace bullying at a later time.

3. Train the Expert Peers Team. We find that disembodied policies that are introduced to employees once or twice are not inculcated into the company. Bullying generates self-doubt and personal uncertainty. Individuals need to be able to seek help without fear of repercussions. Peer team members provide the valuable services to colleagues of clarification of the experience, validation of their personhood, and information about how to resolve the problem given the new policy and systems put into place. Team members are volunteers. Teams decide which services they agree to provide.

4. Educate everyone. Peer Teams can provide the training. This is the classic program rollout.

5. Integrate the anti-bullying initiative with management training, performance evaluation, employee orientation, and staff re-training each year.

6. Ensure policy compliance. Hold accountable everyone, at all levels, for any misconduct. Skeptical employees will gauge the success or failure of the program based on the credibility of the first “trial.” If it is perceived as unfair or fraught with interference, the program could be untracked.

7. Continuity is guaranteed with a fully-functioning Expert Peers Team and endorsement by the C-suite.

Morris: To what extent must those involved receive training to prepare for response initiatives and whatever resistance they may encounter?

The primary training is for Expert Peer Team members. They need to become internal resources for all employees on the topic of workplace bullying and the organization’s new policy and enforcement procedures.

They are the first responders. Conversations with them constitute the first response that is an informal, non-punitive step towards resolution. They are trained in intervention and resolution alternatives.

Some become trainers. Some become personal coaches. All become ambassadors for the anti-bullying initiative.

When Team members encounter resistance from bullies and managers, it is imperative that their supervisor or leader intercede and mandate cooperation with the Team activities. Resistance should be considered insubordination and grounds for termination. That’s how we define executive commitment to the success of the anti-bullying effort. Anything less is timid and easily defied by bully managers.

Given your response to the previous question, what seems to be the most serious problem that most organizations encounter when attempting to sustain their bully-free workplace? Why?

We have found new executives unwilling to sustain their predecessors’ commitment to the prohibition of bullying. It reveals a lack of the necessary abilities we said executives should possess to comprehensively tackle bullying.

It can take years to overcome resistance within organizations so that anti-bullying efforts can be started. Sadly, with the stroke of a pen, in an instant, all those efforts by so many people can be eliminated and bullying instantly restored.

That’s the American way of doing business.

See the original article

We all have the right to be happy and proud.
We all have the right to stand up and speak loud.

Dignity in the workplace is having a strong leader who believes in what you think.
And when you find he doesn’t, it can really push you over the brink.

It is key to be trusted, supported and respected by your boss.
But if is not a given you may find you’re working with a loss.

A lost case is what bullying is I must say.
It is unhealthy and not worth the stress it brings its way.

A mess of a boss, I’ve had two experiences with thus far.
And I now know someone needs to stand up and set the bar.

We the people and the government too,
Have to stand up for what’s right, that’s what we should do.

Hostility in the workplace is a legal mess.
Hostility in the workplace is a bully’s best bet.

A bully is someone who is weak and threatened.
A bully is usually someone no one wants to recon.

So what do people tend to do when they meet a bully or two?
They may turn their backs or say shoo-shoo.

They may even shake their heads with some regret.

They may not feel pretentious but rather just regress.

To regress is to walk away from the pain.
To regress is to shed oneself from the shame.

I however will stand up with strong pride.
I will admit because I cannot lie.

Bullies in the workplace cause stress and pain.
Bullies in the workplace should be held accountable for the blame.

Dignity in the workplace is not a given, I know.

Dignity in the workplace allows us to grow.

We all have the right to work for one who respects us for being strong.
Dignity is something required for us all to get along.

For those of you that know what I mean,
Please help me stand up for what we’ve seen.

For those of you that are bully’s and mean,
You know who are you but I know, you won’t cause a scene.

Take a vacation and get some sun.
When you come back there is work to be done.

Come back with a plan to be better than who you are.
Come back with a plan to help set the bar.

Rise to the occasion, scary but true.
Come out from under because we can see through.

Don’t hide in shame, for I will not.
Be a man; stand up for what’s right, or get out of the spot.

You may hide behind your lies and shame.
I ask you to stand up and take your blame.

Because when you do you will be proud.
When you do there will be a crowd.

A crowd will stand up for you too.
Once you believe in yourself, we will believe too.

Anon

By: Gary Namie, PhD, author of The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels & Snakes from Killing Your Organization (Wiley, 2011).

Back in 2007, many were surprised to learn that 37% of all adult Americans claimed to have been bullied at work. The scientific poll by the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) used the definition: repeated mistreatment by one or more employees that takes the form of either verbal abuse, threats, intimidation, humiliation, interference with work or some combination. Bosses were the main perpetrators (in 72% of incidents). Workplace bullying held steady at 35% according to the 2010 WBI survey.

Employers have a dismal record of voluntarily dealing with bullying. Why? Bullying benefits executives. Or people don’t know how to stop it. If the former is true, laws are needed to compel attention. Better to assume knowledge and skill shortcomings.

While waiting for executives to realize the benefits from adopting a comprehensive solution, there is much that can be done by managers and supervisors to tamp down bullying and dilute its destructive impact on employee and organizational health.

Here are three simple action steps for managers that can be done today.

1.)  Hold confirmed bullies accountable. Drop the “go work it out between yourselves” ducking of your responsibility as manager. Get involved or the festering problem eventually will prevent any work from getting done.

Your task is easier if there a clear statement about what conduct is, and is not, acceptable in the company. If none exists, you can always create one in collaboration with the team that applies to those you supervise. If such a code does not exist, write a list of what you consider unacceptable. Use work-relevant impacts to justify each item. Share that list with everyone you supervise.

If the alleged bully is your favorite, you will have trouble believing that she or he is capable of being mean. To solve the problem, you have to shelve favoritism. All your other employees are counting on you to do so.

Before questioning the alleged bully, provide the complaining target with physical separation for safety, assuring that it is not punitive. Do it because retaliation follows questioning of the bully. Bullies will justify their conduct — targets make them do it or they are perfectionists. Assess the relevance in terms of impact on the work team’s ability to perform without fear.

The rationale for your 1:1 interviews with employees is a “checkup” of the work climate, rather than an “investigation.” Getting information from terrified coworkers is nearly impossible.

Many side with bullies for self-protection. Ask if they personally ever had negative encounters with the alleged bully.  Ask how negative things can be hidden from you. Ask if they have seen personal changes, minor or major, in any coworkers.

Should you be concerned? Believe the accuser until proven otherwise. Bullies lie. Humiliated targets are ashamed. With a mind untainted by favoritism, you will understand the competing versions of reality represented by the alleged bully and target.

If the facts confirm that your “line in the sand” was crossed, make the bully apologize. Choose other appropriate consequences (HR can advise). Promise coworkers freedom from bullying in the future. Help restore the targeted worker’s health — paid time off, counseling, support. Monitor the bully’s conduct, imposing the threat of termination for non-compliance with the policy or your list. Practice in executing this step makes it easier. Paradoxically, it also becomes rarer.

2.)  Catch and correct peer bullies. If you stumble on a colleague berating a worker, you can intervene. The least risky method is to tug on the manager’s arm to remove her or him. Simply interrupt the incident. Then, deal with it behind closed doors for dignity’s sake. It is more likely that a worker supervised by your subordinate or by another supervisor seeks your help. Do not ignore the person who asked you for relief.

When you have the manager alleged to be a bully alone, make the case for stopping the bullying behavior. Encourage change by citing impact on employee health, morale, productivity, trust and loyalty. If an anti-bullying policy exists, remind her or him of the hassle of a complaint and investigation. Good managers do not use tactics of intimidation, domination or humiliation.  Become the anti-bullying advocate within the management team.

3.)  Your Management Style: Could you be the bully? This is the hardest step of all. Ask your family. Do you feel constantly misunderstood and misperceived? Do you think your standards are high and wonder why others seem to not care as much as you? Is it impossible for you make your contributions subordinate to those of others?

Indicators at work include being excluded from social events. At meetings, are your ideas never met with dissenting views? Is the employee turnover rate in units you supervise higher than elsewhere in the organization? Is absenteeism so high that production is subpar? Do you see decline in the pool of available talent so that no new hires seem acceptable?

Look in the mirror. You are the problem. Turn to your staff to ask how you could change to eliminate the above problems. Follow their instructions.

Americans face bullying long after they have left the playground with a startling 35% of adults either been bullied or currently experiencing bullying at work, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute.

Workplace bullying is defined by the WBI as “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one of more persons by one or more perpetrators,” and includes verbal abuse, offensive conduct and behaviors (including nonverbal) that are threatening, humiliating or intimidating and work interference or sabotage, which prevents work from getting done.

These actions have serious side effects for victims, according to the WBI, including heart disease and post-traumatic stress disorder. Now lobbyists are increasing their calls for state lawmakers to pass anti-bullying in the workplace legislation.

Dr. Gary Naime, national director of the Healthy Workplace Campaign, started lobbying for anti-bullying laws in 2003. Right now, his “Healthy Workplace Bill,” has been introduced in 21 states with New York the closest sate to passing it into law. The New York bill has 43 current co-sponsors, and a new Senate version of the bill is in the process of being written. A companion Senate bill was introduced and referred to the Labor Committee in March 2011.

For employers, the bill defines an “abusive work environment” and requires proof of health harm by licensed professionals. It gives employers reason to terminate or sanction offenders and requires plaintiffs to use private attorneys.

“It’s very soft on employers, and will give them rewards for taking care of bullying voluntarily,” he says. “If they do, they have no responsibility – [legally] they are freed.”

For workers, the New York bill provides an avenue for legal action against “health harming cruelty at work,” and allows a victim to sue the bully as an individual. It also holds the employer accountable by allows for restoration of lost wages and benefits, and compels employers to prevent and correct future instances.

According to a 2010 WBI survey, 15% of workers reported they have witnessed bullying in the workplace. With that said, 50% of respondents reported they have never seen or “don’t know” what bullying is.

“It’s not that they don’t see it, but what they do see they do not consider unacceptable,” Naime says. “They consider it routine—not negative or bad. It’s much more severe than trivial stuff. It is repeated malicious verbal abuse, threats, humiliation and work sabotage. That is pretty severe.”

As the national sponsor of the Healthy Workplace Bill, Naime says he is not looking for lawsuits to bring an end to bullying in the workplace. His goal is to have bullying treated the same way as harassment in the office.

“Employers are ignoring it and HR has dropped the ball—72% of bullying is done by management.”

Also according to the Institute, once a person is targeted by a bully, they have a 64% chance of either being fired or quitting his/her job.

Polly Wright, senior consultant at HR Consults Inc., a management and human resource consulting and training firm, says bullying in the workplace is extremely common. She remembers being bullied by a manager at her first job out of college, but she stayed at the job because she had no other options.

“I was married to that job for financial reasons,” she says. “Bullying is just basically harassment. And sometimes you don’t even realize it is happening. As employers we should be handling it the same as we would unlawful harassment.”

Bullying in the workplace can begin with cliques forming in the office, or by hiring someone with a bad temper or anger-management issues. Wright says many of the Human Resource policies she has recently created for businesses have included wording about bullying in the workplace.

All managers in a company should be trained on what the legal line of harassment actually is, and make sure employees aren’t crossing this line, Wright says. Also, employees may try to work out the issue amongst themselves, but once HR is brought into the picture an investigation will be launched, she says.

“I really think that it takes a toll on morale, to the point where employees are so disengaged in their work environment they are just going through the motions,” Wright says. “They will go through their day trying to have the least amount of interaction with their bully as possible.”

Although Wright condemns bullying, she is not in favor of the Healthy Workplace Bill and says it can be addressed in already-established policies, like those that deal with harassment.

“It will be another burden on employers,” she says. “Hopefully we keep it out of final legislation—employers should just address [bullying] in conjunction with harassment. We shouldn’t need a law to tell us that.”

If a worker is being bullied in a family business, or small company, Naime advises to leave right away, and says changing the culture in a smaller office is often more difficult than in a corporation setting.

“All you can do is try and make it, but in a small business you are trapped,” he says. “In a bigger company there are more layers and you do have a chance of convincing someone that the idiot needs to go, not you.”

via New Bill Targets Workplace Bullying – FoxBusiness.com.

We launched The Work Doctor® radio on June 23, 2011. Gary Namie is the host.

In this debut show, Gary discusses the recent Supreme Court decision dropping the job discrimination class action lawsuit against WalMart by six women, representing 1.5 million current and former women employees of the giant retailer.

Joining Gary in conversation is guest Lewis Maltby, Director of the National Workrights Institute,

and author of Can They Do That? Retaking Our Fundamental Rights in the Workplace. Purchase the book on Amazon.com.

Lew is a U. Penn Law graduate, attorney, former HR director, and former ACLU project director. He is the definitive expert.

Mr. Maltby sounds a warning about hidden surprises in employment law that can hurt American workers. He discusses social media and how GPS-equipped, company-owned devices extend employers’ control over workers’ lives.

I direct readers to a rather long, but thoughtful and accurate analysis of current culture by Henry A. Giroux, a professor at McMaster University. He stated the case more masterfully than I could.  Reveling in the pain of others: Moral degeneracy and violence in the “Kill Team” photos.

Betty Dukes at SCOTUS

The June 20, 2011 Supreme Court decision in the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case (1) insulted any worker who dares complain about discriminatory mistreatment at work, (2) made it harder for individuals to join together for lawsuit efficiency in a class action to go up against a behemoth multinational employing corporation, (3) ignored and rewrote a 45-year legal precedent, and (4) cemented Justice Scalia and the conservative block’s motivation to serve corporate interests over those of ordinary working Americans.

Betty Dukes, in 2000, claimed that she had been denied promotion to higher-paying jobs. The incident that provoked the lawsuit was when she needed change to make a small purchase during her break. She asked a friend to open a cash register with a one-cent transaction, a common practice, according to Dukes. For that act she was demoted and had a humiliating cut in pay, accused by Wal-Mart management of misconduct. She still works as a greeter at the Pittsburg, California store. She is also an ordained Baptist minister of a local church. Ms. Magazine named her one of its Women of the Year in 2004. As of May 2010, at age 60, she still lived with her mother because her Wal-Mart hourly wage of $15.23 did not allow her to own a home of her own.

Dukes’ attorney was Brad Seligman, of the Impact Fund in Berkeley, California. The lawsuit with Dukes as one of six lead plaintiffs was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in 2001. Despite the strain that such a lawsuit has caused its namesake, Dukes said, “In this life you have to stand up or be trampled.”

Corporate Ally

Scalia, writing for the 5-4 majority to strike down the class action suit against giant retailer Wal-Mart, said that because Wal-Mart has an official corporate policy that gender discrimination is prohibited (p. 13 in the decision) and because penalties are presumably imposed for violating the policy, discrimination does not occur at Wal-Mart that can be characterized as pattern and practice.

The majority of justices considered credible Wal-Mart’s claim that they did not discriminate because they said so and had a policy on the books. We agree that a policy, a line drawn in the sand, is the requisite starting point for any workplace culture that intends to treat workers fairly. But to argue that the policy’s presence on the books alone is sufficient is naive. Scalia is not stupid. He and the other corporatists on the Supreme Court simply want to ignore complaining employees as whiners not deserving respect.

This Scalia point is the least legalistic of the several arguments to find in favor or Wal-Mart. It is the HR argument. Recently, a Ventura County (CA) grand jury found evidence of bullying and harassment of employees by management. The HR director, John Nicoll, challenged the evidence by stating that the county has a policy and that he would be shocked if bullying really did happen.

Nicoll, and SCOTUS justices Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito all want us to believe that employers do not lie, never deprive workers of their rights, always follow state and federal laws, and always know best. To challenge the corporate line is wrong. The majority of the current Supreme Court is an “HR dream team.”

Wal-Mart is especially happy with the decision that it failed to win in the federal trial court or the Court of Appeals. Luckily the firm saved their pennies so they could take their case to the one place where they had powerful legal allies willing to protect them and other poor defenseless and largest employers in the U.S.

Gisel Ruiz, Vice President of People (not the magazine, rather the slaves that work for her), Walmart U.S. officially gloated that the SCOTUS decision “pulls the rug out from under the accusations made against Walmart over the last 10 years. Every female associate and every customer can feel even better about the company as a result of today’s decision.” Ruiz feels better, why don’t you?

For their investment, Wal-Mart, on behalf of all corporations, will also benefit from Scalia and the Court conservatives decision to rewrite law. Class action lawsuits are governed by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The Rule, prior to June 20, established a low threshold for groups of employees suffering at the hands of a single employer to file a common lawsuit. Many were discriminated against at Wal-Mart, a single employer. Hence the class action.

Scalia and the cons changed the Rule 23 standard to now require groups of plaintiffs to show that they were harmed by the same boss or the same biased employee test, not simply employed by the same corporation with an overarching pattern and practice of misconduct. Wal-Mart’s defense in the Dukes case was that the corporation gives latitude to individual store managers to make local decisions. That dispersion of responsibility was enough to kill the claim of commonality across all Wal-Mart stores for Scalia.

One far-reaching (too “far reaching” according to dissenting Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) implication of Scalia’s judicial lawmaking — the revision of what defines commonality — will be to force each individual worker to file an expensive lawsuit against the giant employer. Employers will find it even easier now to squash cases with motions for summary judgment or prolonged procedures that bankrupt individuals. The original Rule 23 sought to minimize taxpayer-paid public court expenses. Now smaller and more frequent cases without access to class action status will cost government more without putting a dent in the coffers of giant corporations.

Scalia managed to deal a blow to government at a time of great fiscal pressure and to shove workers’ demands for dignity aside.

Another implication is that the merits of the case must be shown to a judge by plaintiffs before having the case certified as eligible for class action status. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the legal proceedings all centered on the applicability of class action status. The case itself was never tried.

Employers have little to fear from employment lawsuits anyway. The Ashley Alford case is the exception, not a regular outcome. Thanks to Scalia and his cohorts in the majority, employers will have it easier.

###

The two major flaws of existing anti-discrimination laws are: (1) that they fail to cover incidents outside the narrow legal boundaries (victim must be a member of a protected status group while the harasser cannot be, thus 80% of bullied workers cannot rely on existing laws for help), and (2) it is a sick and twisted irony that harassers who torment people across boundaries of age, race, and gender — the equal opportunity abusers — have a legal defense for their misconduct. The final injustice related to the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case is that merits were never debated. The entire 10 year battle was not over whether or not women at Wal-Mart suffered discrimination. It was a technical fight over the legitimacy of filing a class action on behalf of 1.5 million current and former women employees.

###

Read the complete SCOTUS decision in the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case decided June 20, 2011.

An average of 1 million fewer Americans per month quit than in the previous year. Through April, that’s 28 million workers who would have quit when the job market was stronger. Remember, 54 million workers are, or have been, bullied at work.

Being stuck certainly creates more health-robbing stress. The options for workers are to leave hated jobs and face destitution or stay and grow more ill daily, raising your risk of cardiovascular disease. The American workplace. Aint’ it great?  They have us right where they want us — indentured slaves with too little freedom to pursue options.

Read the Business Week article.

Prof. Jackie Gilbert

An Anti-Bullying Champion in the Academe

University professors can be among the worst bullies. Blame ego, inadequate or absent management training, an internalized sense of privilege and entitlement to operate at the top of the hierarchy, and timid or indifferent administrators. However, one woman at Middle Tennessee State is working hard to stop bullying on her campus. She was instrumental in my visit there earlier this year. Now comes the report that she has recruited students to create an instructional video and to teach others. Imagine, students as change agents on campus! It’s an activism whose time has come. Read the article about Jackie’s good work.

with The Bully-Free Workplace

with The Bully at Work

Videos can be purchased separately or together for a discounted price. A third option is to bundle one or both videos with the Namies' books -- The Bully-Free Workplace (for leaders and managers) and/or The Bully At Work (for individuals) for training participants.

We’re ALWAYS asked why bullying is so prevalent. Depending on who is asking and in what context, we explain that it is the work environment much less so than personality. Couple that question with another one — why hasn’t the Healthy Workplace Bill been passed into law yet? The answer that links the intra-organizational and legislative progress notions is to look at our broader society as the context from which all bullying and abuse flow.

By any honest, non-defensive analysis we are a war-making nation. We mock peace. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning president just skyrocketed his “political capital” (the only kind that matters in Washington, DC) by killing Bin Laden (a good thing that maybe should not be celebrated so wildly unless you are a surviving family member of someone killed on 9/11). We escalate wars and engage in new ones. We never stop wars. Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was marginalized as irrelevant partly because he advocated for a Dept. of Peace.

Spokespeople for a huge portion of the population mock individuals’ need for personal dignity as if it is a weakness, or worse yet, something to be “earned.”

Despite years of proving the falsehoods behind the “rape myths,” they persist in presumably post-feminist 2011. It is all part of blame the victim (a seemingly permanent aspect of individualistic societies that define all actions, good and bad, as the result of an individual’s personal will or motivation). Recently, a Toronto policeman glibly commented that violence against women would end if they stopped dressing like “sluts.” This launched a blowback initiative called “Slut Walks.“

Finally, I saw an Acura TV ad that strips down an athlete only to dress him up in an elegant suit. The ad says that the same goes for cars. It ends with the narrator saying “Aggression.” The fully dressed-up person or car is an aggression machine! Geez. As a former driving instructor (yes, Virginia, it’s true and in San Francisco no less), it’s safe to say we have enough aggression on the road. The mix of aggression and cars is lethal. In America, that’s no problem. Texas just raised the speed limit on several of its interstate freeways to 85 mph.

The fight against workplace bullying is not hopeless. We are committed to the end of our lives. But just wanted to remind thinking people that it will always be uphill given the society we live in.

What say you?

UPDATE: I saw the Acura car ad in the movie theater, with “Aggression” included. Just saw the commercial on TV and the ending disappeared, no “Aggression” tagline. Mysterious.

But it also is a day for demonstrations heralding the causes of working people and their unions such as are being held on Sunday that were crucial in winning important rights for working people.

The first May Day demonstrations, in 1886,  won the  most important of the rights ever won by working people ­ the right demanded above all others by the labor activists of a century ago:

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

Winning the eight-hour workday took years of hard struggle, beginning in the mid-1800s. By 1867, the federal government, six states and several cities had passed laws limiting their employees’ hours to eight per day. The laws were not effectively enforced and in some cases were overturned by courts, but they set an important precedent that finally led to a powerful popular movement.

The movement was launched in 1886 by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, then one of the country’s major labor organizations. The federation called for workers to negotiate with their employers for an eight-hour workday and, if that failed, to strike on May 1 in support of the demand.

Some negotiated, some marched and otherwise demonstrated.  More than 300,000 struck. And all won strong support, in dozens of cities ­ Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Denver, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington, Newark, Brooklyn, St. Paul and others.

More than 30,000 workers had won the eight-hour day by April. On May Day, another 350,000 workers walked off their jobs at nearly 12,000 establishments, more than 185,000 of them eventually winning their demand. Most of the others won at least some reduction in working hours that had ranged up to 16 a day.

Additionally, many employers cut Saturday operations to a half-day, and the practice of working on Sundays, also relatively common, was all but abandoned by major industries.

“Hurray for Shorter Time,” declared a headline in the New York Sun over a story describing a torchlight procession of 25,000 workers that highlighted the eight-hour-day activities in New York. Never before had the city experienced so large a demonstration.

Not all newspapers were as supportive, however. The strikes and demonstrations, one paper complained, amounted to “communism, lurid and rampant.” The eight-hour day, another said, would encourage “loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery, and drunkenness.”

The greatest opposition came in response to the demonstrations led by anarchist and socialist groups in Chicago, the heart of the eight-hour day movement. Four demonstrators were killed and more than 200 wounded by police who waded into their ranks, but what the demonstrators’ opponents seized on were the events two days later at a protest rally in Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police who had surrounded the square, killing seven and wounding 59.

The bomb thrower was never discovered, but eight labor, socialist and anarchist leaders ­ branded as violent, dangerous radicals by press and police alike ­were arrested on the clearly trumped up charge that they had conspired to commit murder.  Four of them were hanged, one committed suicide while in jail, and three were pardoned six years later by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.

Employers responded to the so-called Haymarket Riot by mounting a counter-offensive that seriously eroded the eight-hour day movement’s gains. But the movement was an extremely effective organizing tool for the country’s unions, and in 1890 President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor was able to call for “an International Labor Day” in favor of the eight-hour workday. Similar proclamations were made by socialist and union leaders in other nations where, to this day, May Day is celebrated as Labor Day.

Workers in the United States and 13 other countries demonstrated on that May Day of 1890 ­ including 30,000 of them in Chicago. The New York World hailed it as “Labor’s Emancipation Day.” It was. For it marked the start of an irreversible drive that finally established the eight-hour day as the standard for millions of working people.

###

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com

Reprinted with permission of the author.

In this audio montage from a recent school board meeting, bully board president Chris Bentley of the Hesperia Unified School District puts on public display his incredible combination of (1) intimidation and humiliation of the superintendent, department heads and other board members (probably in his mind undertaken in response to his “frustration”); (2) whining about spending his weekend plotting the demise of the public school district he was elected to serve; (3) revealing his ideological roots when he refers to the “entitlement highway” and all the things offered free to public school students; and (4) ending with his willingness to twist legalities to fit his plans. What a piece of work!  It’s time to recall this man. Parents and employees ban together and call him out!!!

Prior posts about this destructive force of nature

Conflict Escalates
Bentley Can’t Stop
School Board Bully Bentley Retaliates
Board bully Bentley goes Latin
When the School Board Pres is the Bully

You want austerity? You want to save money? Then, de-fund immediately the equipment and contracts that provide politicians with the cover that they appear to be providing “security.” And let us keep our shoes on. Just as bullying is about much more than the individual bullies, killing Bin Laden means little except that videos of the celebration of his murder will certainly enrage much of the Muslim world (again). We could use fewer symbols and slogans. We deserve facts and real long-term solutions. Waging war and “war” accomplish little. Here’s wishing that our approach to “security” be rendered as transparent as our clothes through which the machines see images of our naked bodies.

Typical Workplace Bullying Scenario

As bullied targets know all too well, they are not believed when they eventually tell their story. How can this happen? How can others be so incredulous? In this podcast, I describe the lengthy process that leads to the destruction of a thoroughly competent veteran worker.

Share this audio with disbelievers, whether they are in your family or at work. Hopefully, it helps. And as always, remember that targets did not invite the misery upon themselves. No rational person would.

Download Podcast 19 (in .mp3 format)

A funny thing happened to the ostensibly good employer with a solid reputation of superior corporate responsibility when it crossed the Atlantic and opened the Virginia plant 3 years ago.  It left back home its code of conduct called IWAY that guarantees workers the right to organize and to allow overtime to be voluntary. It left its Swedish traditions of honoring workers and acted like locals who test the limits of what American workers will take and exploit them to the max. Swedish workers at IKEA also enjoy 5 paid weeks of vacation thanks to local laws.

At the Virginia plant, the starting hourly salary was $9.75 in a region where the average is closer to $15 (no great shakes, either). This year, IKEA decided to cut the salary to $8.00. Overtime is mandated. Disagree and you’re fired. Its 335 employees wanted to unionize and affiliate with the Int’l Assoc. of Machinists. But the corporation called in the union-busting attorneys at Jackson Lewis (who probably do not have a branch in Stockholm). Employees were ordered to attend management-run lectures on the evils of unions (how many of you knew employers have this right?).

The resultant mistreatment, a.k.a. bullying, has led to a slew of lawsuits. Nothing IKEA did is considered outrageous or illegal in the USA, especially the nearly union-free southern states. But the company’s conduct, so unbecoming for a Swedish firm, made news iIN SWEDEN! The press there believed it wrong for IKEA to act one way when the workers were Swedish and another way when the workers were third-world exploited labor, in America, as it turned out.

IKEA treats workers like commodities. Go where they are cheapest, as if they are resources like sugar, oil, cotton, or wheat. All of the corporations that use Chinese labor do the same. To do so is to treat the country that provides the workers as if it is 3rd world. To Sweden, America is that 3rd world provider of a cheap commodity.

The double irony for those of us in the workplace bullying movement is that Sweden is the home of the international movement. It is where Heinz Leymann conducted his research, treated the oppressed and traumatized workers, and the country that created the world’s first law against “Victimisation At Work” that went into effect in 1994. Sweden is the Seneca Falls of the movement. It breaks our hearts — for the exploited southern workers, for the southern cities who whore out their people willingly, for the globalized employer mindset that corrupts even the best of the best companies in the world to lower themselves in search of profits.

Read the initial report in the Los Angeles Times.

BULLY NO MORE: “I’m Choosing Red… Not Blue, Anymore!”

“One day at a time–this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful it will be worth remembering.”   -unknown author

One year ago I could barely face one day at a time but with the help of my service dog, Miller, he led me to
do just that. His simple needs each day gave me the reason to begin each day and his unconditional love gave me the strength to try to live in the present and attempt to forget the past. You see, I had just gone through  seven years of bullying…two years while in the workplace and  five more years while fighting legally for restitution.

Management wanted me to quit and middle management was forced to carry out the plan. Bullying was ongoing…they stopped at nothing. From disempowering me, with-holding promotions earned, giving poor evaluations even as a top producer, belittling me, isolating me from co-workers, slandering me, and even having a private investigator following  me, snapping pictures while trying to find some reason to fire me or  harass me into quitting.  At 48 years of age, I was considered a liability not an asset. I cost the corporation more than a 23 year old with no experience. Having a persevering and determined nature, as well as being a bit stubborn, I felt I could withstand the two years remaining until I reached retirement vestment.

I did reach retirement vestment but it was while on permanent disability for the complete stress breakdown, anxiety, clinical depression, agoraphobia, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) resulting from the
intensive bullying. While going through the ordeal and the long legal process, I even lost everything beyond my health…my career, six figure income, savings, home, and even my paid in full BMW against my foreclosed home and pending bankruptcy. It looked pretty dismal…and difficult to get through each day.

It was at this point I had no where to go but up. There was nothing more the bullies could take from me. But then I realized  these bullies had won more than the court case ruled “no fault”…they had actually won power over me! This realization gave me the strength to find a way to take my power back, refusing to let them take anything more from me, and to find a way to become strong and well once again. I had to learn to let go of the past, to stop grieving over what the bullies took from me. I realized that in grieving the past I was not living and each day was being lost to the bullies.  I decided I had to find a way to take my power back…one day at a time.

Miller and I moved forward, literally.  We moved far away from the triggers and everyday stressors; though we did it differently than most…we moved to Brittany, France!  I had to get a fresh start, erase the slate clean  from anyone who knew who I was. I was ashamed to have lost my career, my health, and everything in my former life, especially our family home my children had grown up in. No one in France knew me or what I had gone through or lost.  I could truly put it behind me and concentrate on wellness.

Little by little I began to look forward to the next day…Miller and I  took walks by  the seaside and countryside, smelled the fresh sea air, worked in the garden.  I fixed up our home, enjoyed organic foods and great wine, made new friends, and began to learn the language. We were greeted with smiles by strangers. The days began to become easier for me and I found myself smiling and laughing once again. For the first time in five years I cried while watching a movie. I know this sounds silly but it was a milestone for me as my emotions were numb for years while on many  medications, blocking out the pain of the world.  And while we enjoyed our new and healthy lifestyle I also lost 50 pounds and got off six medications.

I realized this year that the bullies were no longer present in my life. I had taken back my power and was once again in the land of the living!  I had let the anger go and forgiven those who had stolen my old life. The anger had immobilized me.  Then it dawned on me…I had beaten the bullies and regained the opportunity to enjoy everyday of my new life!  I am planning on moving back to Florida in the near future, as there are no more demons there, only the people I love. You see, my life is in full color now. I am wearing bright colors once again and even installing red kitchen cabinets!  No more blues for me… except in my music!

“You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don’t think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully.”   Anthony Robbins

So, the current social upheaval created by the Wall Street-induced economic crisis that hurts only the people who are poor and in middle class, can only be stopped by those affected by it. Matt Taibbi, whose meticulous attention to detail frustrates the richest Americans, wrote that not one investment banker has gone to jail. Now jump forward to 2011 state legislatures populated by political rookies (not a bad thing) motivated to wipe out the middle class to which many of them belong (not a good thing).

It’s the struggle between Austerity for the poor and middle classes vs. Government spending solutions to provide employment to get us out of crisis. Austerity has won, both here and in Europe. Working people took to the streets in Greece and Spain early. Then, in Egypt, over income inequality and dashed opportunities for working people. Next, it hit Wisconsin when the new governor and new Republican majorities flexed their muscle and struck out against public workers, especially school teachers! Talk about audacity! Late at night, in a stealth move, they voted away bargaining rights for public sector unions.

The issue is not JUST about unions. It is the naked attacks by those representing corporate interests against workers, betting that non-union workers will allow it to happen. This is a pitched battle that should engage everyone who cares about everyone who works and who does not own the company or agency where they work!  It is US vs. THEM. Despite years of union concessions, “partnering” with management, firing of union organizers and clear victories for the owner class, it is they who have launched the newest scorched-earth, eliminationist campaigns in state houses.

Some have written WBI to complain that we are pro-union. We are proudly pro-union because workers have no other advocates in the American workplace, certainly not HR, etc. Do unions have trouble with bullying and wandering from their mission and fail to help members? Certainly. We know all about it. However, we are working to help unions get better about bullying. We speak at their conferences, we train reps and stewards, union officials attend WBI University, and we are creating a special union-only WBI University.

WBI is pro-worker and stands against any elected official who attacks any group of workers as if they are a “special interest group.” Schwarzenegger learned to not call nurses a “special interest” when he was Calif. governor. He could teach Walker, Kasich, Christie, and other radical worker-haters a lesson or two.

“When a working person votes Republican, it is like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders.”  — a WBI staffer (other than Gary)

Martin Niemoeller, Lutheran Pastor's warning, photo of Holocaust Memorial (MA), credit: Greg Sorozan

Callahan’s article was a so-so attempt from someone new to workplace bullying. Her advice was not hurtful except for advising targets unwisely to (1) not get emotional (as if they can predict the assaults and control the spontaneous reaction to humiliation), and to (2) communicate (she actually wrote: “Pull the bully aside and talk to them someplace quiet where you can privately tell them how their behavior is inappropriate and that you won’t tolerate it.”). Otherwise it was a solid attempt to raise awareness.

Here’s the comment that speaks volumes and reflects a willingness to turn on fellow workers, to hold them responsible for their fate, and make individuals solve all of their own workplace problems by walking away.

One miracle of the modern at-will workplace is that if you see people anywhere in the organizati­on that are behaving other than in accordance with organizati­onal expectatio­ns of profession­alism and mutual respect on the jobsite, and you happen to be the manager, you can solve the problem in about 10 minutes, including the paperwork, in the modern ‘paperless­’ office. That’s how long it takes for most people to stuff their personal effects out of their desk or locker in a cardboard box, hand off their keys, and make their way to the parking lot.
And, from the other side of that, if you’re an employee, under at-will ‘no fault’ type work agreements­, you can pretty much clock out right then and there, no excuse or notice given or required, have a nice day, I must terminate my employment­, now, so it sort of works both ways, managers that want to keep good employees must respect their employees, and employees that want to keep good jobs need to respect their managers and coworkers also. It’s all about making a buck, and if you can’t maintain good manners for 8 short hours (7.5 in most examples, be honest) with your employees and coworkers and managers and stuff, then….ma­ybe you need to go back to whatever school you attended, and start over.

There you have it. Freedom is achievable if you are willing to walk away. What do you say?

Need more proof that Wall St capitalism drives the soul right out of human beings?

Dr. Kristin Neff at the Univ of Texas, Austin has created her own research and practice niche called Self-Compassion. It involves (1) treating ourselves with the kindness we would extend to others, (2) recognizing our shared humanity, and (3) being mindful (and not catastrophizing) about negative aspects of ourselves. Self-compassion is superior to self-esteem since it does not involve evaluation or comparison with others. We think Self-Compassion is going to be a valuable tool for healing wounds from bullying.

Here is Kristin Neff describing the concept. You can visit her YouTube site for all videos.

Neff’s website is a treasure trove of published research articles, her Self-Compassion scale for researchers (though bullied targets will want to apply the scale to themselves and score it to gauge how unnecessarily tough on themselves they might be), and description of a training program that she hopes will create a greater sense of well-being.

Self-compassion sounds a bit like self-love, which borders on narcissism, but it is very different. It is a judgment-free way to perceive your own identity. As Neff describes it, the pursuit of higher self-esteem is problematic and more akin to narcissism.

As the Feb. 28, 2011 New York Times article about Neff’s work by Tara Parker-Pope said in its title, it is about learning to “Go Easy on Yourself.”

…the continuing saga of Hesperia Unified School District Board president, Chris Bentley, and his assault on the employees in his narcissistic pursuit of his self-declared “passionate” advocacy for things that matter more to him than that benefit the students. Go here to read about the misdeeds of this elected public official that lead to the present.

When the school board pres is the bully and   Board bully goes Latin

At the Jan 24 public Board meeting, the chief of the HUSD police, Mike Graham, described an election season encounter with Bentley during which Bentley intimated to Graham that he would be made to pay for supporting a candidate that Bentley did not support. Graham countered this “Godfather-like” threat with an entirely proper rebuff, and the bully Bentley left Graham alone after that. Watch the video.

Jump to 2011 when Bentley attempted a baseless coup of Assistant Superintendent Matt Spencer through Bentley’s cowed Superintendent Mark McKinney. Spencer enraged Bentley by granting an interview with the local paper about his commitment to eliminating workplace bullying in K-12 education (something honed before working at Hesperia). Bentley, as a bully, recognized the threat that a little public education could reveal him for who he is, and had the story killed (it posted, but was actually pulled from the newspaper’s website).

Fearless Spencer chose to launch a counter-offensive by telling the four other Board members what staff in the schools had been telling him about Bentley’s chronic disrespectful mistreatment of school personnel. Bentley deflected personal responsibility for the alleged conduct and started quoting Cicero and Aristotle in his rambling, editorial replies published in the newspaper. He characterized Spencer as a complaining employee, when, in fact, he is a responsible executive daring enough to confront problems experienced by District staff. Bentley retaliated against Spencer with interior decorating. In the Board chamber he moved Spencer and all the Assistant Superintendents (the “cabinet”) to a table in the rear of the room, behind public seating. There, he really showed them who’s boss!!! It’s not a public school district, it’s “Bentley’s district.”

Spencer was the lone voice to speak truth about the Oz-like fraud Bentley — until January 24. Mike Graham strode to the public lectern and spoke up. Bentley thereafter made known his intent to eliminate the district police force. Board member Anthony Riley connected the dots and stated in public session (at the next meeting), that the timing of the move to eliminate Graham and the others led reasonable people to see that Bentley was retaliating against Graham.

This is a classic bullying tactic. Board member Eric Swanson tried feebly, but failed, to excuse Bentley. [You can see all the Board members here.]This is also predictable. Bullies surround themselves with sycophants and toadies. Toadies hover in orbit around the bully hoping that their alliance will protect them from the harm bullies inflict on others. Sychophants are mostly followers who respond with uncritical loyalty to the more direct and aggressive bully. Bentley, puppetmaster, has McKinney and Swanson on strings he can pull at will. Watch Survivor on TV to see how repeat player Russell and Bentley both use deceit and Machiavellian strategies — lots of parallels.

Stay tuned

In states where there are genuinely dire financial straits, the governors are blaming unions. Really?  Why do we have such collective amnesia? How gullible is the American public? Remember the investors who ripped off the world and mortgage borrowers and allowed us saps to absorb the losses? And not one has gone to jail for it (read Matt Tiabi’s new article).

And so the pattern is repeated in every bullying scenario. Bullies cost the employer, corporate or government, tons of cash that the employer whines they cannot afford to spare. Yet, they keep the bully on payroll while the losses mount from undesirable turnover, absenteeism, presenteeism, workers’ comp, disability insurance, and a damaged reputation as the worst place to work. Bullies are too expensive to keep, but it’s about power and cozy relationships between executive sponsors and their favorite sons and daughters. It’s never about the money.

Dignity at work is something that we should take for granted. Of course, employers, like Limbaugh, believe that is it their possession and  can dole it out to favorite employees and withhold it from others targeted for abuse and bullying. That is how they act. If Dignity were the starting point and employers had to justify ever depriving anyone of it, it would be a different world for American workers. Glad to see Thomas Harrington of Trinity College in Hartford, CT agrees.

To many Europeans, the rights to psychological integrity, personal self-esteem and dignity at work are fundamental and unquestioned. In Germany, in the Constitution, people enjoy protection from bullying based on the Fundamental Right of Persons. Gee, wonder who drafted that document? (Hint: the Americans for their post-WWII vanquished foe!)

This is the land of “Fightin’ Bob” LaFollette, the reformer, John Nichols,  Ed Garvey and his annual Fightin’ BobFest and former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (who had the misfortune of launching his new org. Progressives United the same week as the massive worker rallies and who said today (the governor’s action)” is one of the least Wisconsin-like things I’ve ever seen anyone do.” The Green Bay Packers back the workers.

Monica Walker (no relation to the evil gov) is WI State Coordinator for the HWB.

What a difference a nonsensical election has made in this wonderful state! The new governor, Scott Walker, has touched off a firestorm of revolt in reaction to what he calls his “bold” proposal is euphemistically called his Budget “Repair” Bill ( to rob unionized workers of the right to collective bargaining (all except the three unions who supported his campaign).

He immediately attacked public school teachers as if they were the millionaires (lie). He demands legislative action on his draconian proposal IN ONE WEEK. The Madison School Board issued a statement that read in part:

“The Governor’s proposals are a damaging blow to all our public services and dedicated public employees. The legislation’s radical and punitive approach to the collective bargaining process seems likely to undermine our productive working relationship with our teachers and damage the work environment, to the ultimate detriment of student achievement.”

Current and former Packers players, including Aaron Rogers and Charles Woodson, union reps. issued a statement:

“The right to negotiate wages and benefits is a fundamental underpinning of our middle class.  When workers join together it serves as a check on corporate power and helps ALL workers by raising community standards.  Wisconsin’s long standing tradition of allowing public sector workers to have a voice on the job has worked for the state since the 1930s.  It has created greater consistency in the relationship between labor and management, and a shared approach to public work.”

Republicans hold 19 of the 33 Senate seats, but they are one vote short of the number needed to conduct business when the 14 Democrats walked out of the legislature around noon today.  The GOP needs at least one Democrat to be present before any voting can take place. Once the measure is brought to the floor, it needs only 17 votes to pass.

The context for the bill:  the newly elected state CEO tells his employees that they are feckless ingrates on whose backs he needs to balance the state’s budget shortfall (that he created in one of his first acts as gov when he granted a $140 million tax break to businesses). He is an executive who hates his employees. Problem one with this overarching hatred is that that his employees are the ones who teach the children, provide societal safety from crime, fight the fires, maintain the roads and in general try to preserve a dignified life for the less fortunate residents of his state. Problem two is that the employees have a contractual relationship with state government. The gov wants to break the contract and prevent any new ones from being created.

He is a privatizer of all things government. For your edification, you can read all 144 pages of Senate Bill 11. The summary is seven single-spaced pages. He plans to sell off state-owned utility power plants, buildings. His attacks on teachers dominate the headlines, but read the bill. The University of Wisconsin is also to be trimmed and privatized.  This Tea Party crank, who may tout slashing government to make its size more manageable, wants to create his private data-gathering unit called the “Legislative Fiscal Bureau” (pg. 11, section 8). An entirely NEW govt function to serve his personal needs. This would be done as he simultaneously compels teachers with whom you trust your children to work for walmart, minimum wages.

No elected governor in these United States, however zany as many have been, has been so contemptuous of regular working people. In his inaugural address, he said:

“Our rights as free people are given by our creator, not the government. Among these rights is the right to nurture our freedom and vitality through limited government. These rights were articulated in our original constitution …  We have an ambitious goal: 250,000 new jobs by 2015 … We will present a bold set of reforms aimed at helping businesses create jobs … I ask my friends in the Legislature to unite and pass these reforms into law to unleash the power of economic freedom. To create jobs for our citizens … Our message is simple. Act swiftly. Act decisively. And pass our jobs plan by the end of February. Let us get Wisconsin working again! … Our jobs plan provides relief from taxation, regulation and litigation costs for employers … We have businesses in this state that are in a position to hire new workers … What is failing us is the expanse of government … Justice, Moderation, Temperance, Frugality, Virtue. These are the values upon which our state was formed and the values that will drive us forward … God bless you, and God bless our great state.”

If you pray to God, pray for the teachers and those who have sacrificed to work for state government. Walker knows nothing about justice, moderation or virtue.

His premise is clearly not his own. This man of limited intelligence could not have created a 144-page bill in such a short time. SB 11 must be the boilerplate prepared by union busters who have waited until the American voting public lost interest so that idiots could be elected to act as figureheads and front men for the destruction of the middle class.

The premise is a lie. State workers do NOT make more than their private sector counterparts. For most public employees, the Hobbesian deal they made was to agree to work for less but be secure in having a fixed pension when they retired. The same goes for members of the military — low pay in exchange for college tuition assistance and a pension after 20 years of service. With bad faith brokers like Walker in charge, the workers who worked for less might now be denied the promised, contracted-for pensions.

The pension shortfall was from Goldman Sachs, not public sector union pension funds. Pension funds invested, as did governments, in the Ponzi schemes concocted by investment speculators. Not unions.

The scariest part of this scenario for me is Walker’s attempt to turn worker against worker despite having such a clearly defined enemy of the people sitting in the governor’s seat. He is the enemy. Recall him. Atone for the foolish decisions made in the voting booth. You do not have to wait four years!!!

I lived in California when the ambitious Darryl Issa decided to manufacture a lie that newly re-elected governor Gray Davis was responsible for the 2001 electricity cost scandal. Knowledgeable folks knew about Enron scamming the state (and “getting grandma”). Nevertheless, in a faux frenzy, Arnold Schwartzeneggar was rushed into office and Gray Davis recalled.

In Wisconsin, the proud, progressive, earnest people can recall the man who lies. They can base their actions on truths and the values of “Justice, Moderation, Temperance and Virtue.” If Walker is not stopped in Wisconsin, this plague will spread across the land and alter lives for generations.

None of us can afford to let this happen. We stand with you in Wisconsin.

We are all Badgers now!

Bentley made the superintendent give Spencer 24 hr. notice of termination for vague “shortcomings.” (Spencer had dared to uncover Bentley’s bullying and was interviewed by the local paper as an expert on the topic in schools. This obviously ticked off Bentley since all subsequent actions flowed from that single event.) Spencer defended himself the next day with his report of findings that several staff and administrators had been subjected to abusive conduct at the hands of the overreaching, zealous Bentley who fashions himself a populist education reformer (think Michele Bachman effective).

Taking a page right out of the bully quote book, said Bentley, “These are tough times and they require tough people to make tough decisions.” We’re having a national dialogue about civility and there is a person with a record of bullying insisting on his right to be tough. What are you teaching the children, Bentley???

We see that Bentley quotes Marine Corps Code on his private website with the first proviso: “Take responsibility for your actions, regardless of the outcome.”  OK, Bentley, time to live up to it and resign. Your actions — which would be revealed if you would stop trying to assassinate the messengers and stop the investigation — speak louder than your feeble attempt to dignify yourself by using a Latin quote.

Bentley invites comment by posting his personal phone and e-mail in the linked letter to the editor. WBI site visitors should take the arrogant bully up on his offer.

NY Times award-winning reporter Gretchen Morgenson has tracked down legal expenses totaling $93 million paid by taxpayer money through the Federal Housing Finance Agency to defend three Fannie Mae executives, others below the rank of executive vice president, and board members. The lawsuits against Fannie Mae revolve around fraud. In 2006, one regulator accused the Fannie execs of manipulating profits and $115 million in improper bonuses.

The three execs — Franklin Raines, Timothy Howard and Leanne Spencer– left Fannie Mae in 2004 long before the government takeover with the 2008 bailout of the mortgage lender. Yet, Edward DeMarco, acting director of FHFA believed that the paying the fees would be in the best interest of the conservatorship (the status the U.S. Gov’t holds over Fannie Mae).

Read the original article. Mortgage Giants Leave Legal Bills to the Taxpayers

You might want to tell Mr. DeMarco at the FHFA, who defended paying the legal tabs, what you think of the practice.  202.414.6923   e-mail:  Director@FHFA.gov

The new regulation (announced in Bulletin 275 in October, 2010) prohibits two kinds of harassment: (1) “objectionable conduct” that poses a health risk and is based on grounds like all discrimination law (in Manitoba the categories include race, creed, religion, colour, sex, sexual orientation, gender-determined characteristics, marital status, family status, source of income, political belief, political association, political activity, disability, physical size or weight, age, nationality, ancestry or place of origin), and (2) “severe conduct” that adversely affects a worker’s psychological or physical well-being.

Bullying is the second type of prohibited conduct if it could reasonably cause a worker to be humiliated or intimidated and is repeated, or in the case of a single occurrence, has a lasting, harmful effect on a worker.

Employers have to write the policy in collaboration with its health and safety committee (that necessarily includes union representatives) or workers if no committee exists.

Furthermore, a complainant reserves the right to file another complaint with the Human Rights Commission.

Read about the new regulations and download information from the official government site.

Without “provocative” guests, willing to go “over the top,” there would be no TV guest appearances. None. I’ve made lots of TV appearances. What makes me provocative is stating bluntly that employers are responsible for bullying and they don’t much care to stop it. To those familiar with the bullying movement, this is not news! To pro-corporate media, this is unsettling talk.

Long ago, producers and the harried folks who book guests on cable and network shows abandoned “talking heads.” They decided that viewers would not sit for prolonged discussions and static camera shots (ever watch Charlie Rose or Bill Moyers on PBS or documentaries). “News” shows want to reproduce the flavor (and assumed popularity) of reality shows characterized by cutthroat competition and humiliation with short camera shots that stimulate while the abusive words trigger/provoke emotional reactions in the the viewer. Media say they are giving the public what they want. But I counter that the public is fed a steady diet of fighting and small-mindedness, which in turn, shapes public behavior.

Why wouldn’t bosses behave like contestants on Survivor, or worse yet, Jersey Shore or The Real Housewives of … ?

I wonder how many political pundits will decry violence, specifically gun violence — crosshairs on maps, lock-and-load, bullseye victory, 2nd amendment solution, the campaign invitation to “help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly” — in the wake of the Tuscon massacre. Gun availability makes it too easy for the “unbalanced” among us to kill spontaneously. Reuters news service reports that the U.S. has the most armed citizenry in the world, 90 guns per 100 people. So, contrary to Africa or Latin America stereotypes as gun-wielding types, it is we who are flooded with weapons of death.

If the shooter Loughner had used a smaller gun magazine that held fewer bullets than before changes in the law allowed his larger capacity magazine (made possible by the lapsing of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 2004), he would have inflicted less pain by having to reload sooner. Moreover, if he had used a knife, he could not have killed six individuals in such close quarters. He would have been stopped much earlier and certainly would have been less lethal.

Guns and the American way mix in a way that makes violence predictable. In the aftermath of every event like the Tuscon massacre, observers say they never could have imagined it. Why not? It is so common that we have a name for it in our country — Going Postal!

This then is the American context for our attempts to civilize the American workplace with anti-bullying legislation, the Healthy Workplace Bill. Watch the future discourse in the coming weeks. Note how frequently the apologists for hate speech rely on  the psychological crazy-man explanation. They will dismiss all societal influences as irrelevant. That is, if only bad seeds are responsible, nothing in our society needs to ever change.

Quite frankly, given the frequency of public massacres in America, nothing does ever change. The NRA’s power over politicians of all parties is so strong that resistance to gun control has achieved a state of nearly perfect “post-partisanship.” For a sane approach to the national embarrassment that is our handgun addiction, see the views of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Watch and listen to tea party funder Dick Armey (former TX Congressman, PhD in economics, co-chairman of FreedomWorks) state at the 44:00 minute time mark of the 49 min. Jan. 9, 2011 broadcast of ABC This Week. He stated that the unequivocal explanation to the tragedy will come from the discipline of psychology (he means clinical psychology and psychiatry) and not from “pop sociology.” There you have it. Dick Armey, leading conservative activist and tea party defender, telling the world that no explanations beyond the instability of the shooter have any merit.

At WBI, we are committed to eradicating all forms of workplace violence. We always make the point that bullying is sub-lethal and non-physical. It’s not about homicide or battery.

However, site visitors and friends know a great deal about being targeted. Bullied targets face a form of assassination — of their self-identity and personal character — rather than a loss of life. In extreme cases, the targeting compels its victims to take their own lives. Bullies are indirectly responsible, but not in the same way that a gun-toting assassin is completely responsible.  Bullies have been called organizational terrorists for the fear they instill in everyone they encounter. But they are not typically murderers anymore than are frustrated targets who might bring a weapon to work for vengeance for wrongs suffered over a long period of time.

Targets turned to shooters is a very nuanced phenomenon. Does it happen? Yes. I served as commentator along with a criminologist and psychiatrist in the documentary Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal.  For our new book, we discovered the background to the Virginia Tech massacre. Yes, colleague Ken Westhues provides quite an in-depth story behind the headlines for patient people who seek a deeper understanding than TV delivers about that particular tragedy.

Even Jon Stewart on the Daily Show addressed the complexity and multiplicity of potential explanations for the events on Jan. 8 in Tuscon in a way Armey and hate speech apologists never will. A sociologist couldn’t have said it any better. Stewart gets the last word here.

Even former liberal gov. Jerry Brown of California discussed pension changes in his inaugural speech. The new Wisconsin Gov. Walker wants laws in that historically liberal state to now prevent government workers from unionizing. Ohio Gov. Kasich (former Fox News TV host) wants teacher strikes to be illegal.

In other words, using “austerity” as an excuse, the virulently anti-union politicians who have risen to power are determined to bust public sector employee unions. They tirelessly repeat the myth that government workers are overpaid. Really? Relative to whom? Their contention that making $41,000 a year is living high at taxpayers’ expense.

The facts (as if those matter in these United States anymore) are that government workers earn less than their private sector counterparts. Read this timely and recent report from the University of Massachusetts.   Public workers everywhere took lower pay in exchange for job security and deferred happiness via their future pensions. So, now during these tough times, politicians pit workers against workers to undermine the pensions that were part of the promise to gov’t workers. Pay cuts, like those imposed by Pres. Obama on federal workers and NY Gov. Cuomo are sometimes coupled with pension payment reneging. It’s all shameless devaluation of workers on a grand scale.

To paraphrase: first they came for the unions, when they came for me, no one was left to defend.

In Arizona, the hideous governor proclaimed the importance of shaving $1.4 million from the state budget used to pay for organ transplants for citizens without health insurance. The savings affected a small group of individuals estimated to number between 94 and 99. Two people have died from the denial of benefits so far. Gov. Brewer, however, did allow $4 million state dollars to be spent on a convention center. When the human calculus is applied, it does not equate. Read the story here.

But the root cause of all state budget crises is that the federal government (which prints money (under the Fed Reserve Treasury purchases to be made available to banks at 0% interest who then game the government by buying government bonds that pay 4% interest) failed to deliver sufficient funds to the states to prevent the budget shortfalls.

Further buried in the blame-the-poor-public game is that Goldman Sachs crashed the world economies by luring governments to invest in bogus securities (the infamous credit default swaps and hokey-falokey derivatives). No punishment for risk-taking brokers who gambled stupidly and lost but used the federal treasury (us taxpayers) to bail them out.

Bullied targets know austerity. Instead of cash, think in terms of social status and job security and personal safety lavished on favored employees in a workplace. The favored ones enjoy all of those benefits. But if you are the targeted person, you are deliberately deprived of one or all of them. To targets, it’s a workplace characterized by denial of privileges and even their humanity. Austerity and involuntary sacrifice for bullied targets; living well as the bully with her or his executive sponsor!

New hires hear the message that no walmart associate will ever need, nor ever want, a union. They fire organizers and mount counter-union campaigns. One former manager, Orson Mason, wrote a guide to recognizing worker “types attracted to unions.” You can read his memo to other walmart managers. Geez, you think that preferring to work with dignity in a place free from abuse makes me or you a type attracted to unions?

But there is good news from Canada.

The first walmart union was a store in Jonquiere, Quebec in 2005 that the company shut down when ordered to negotiate.

In 2008, workers at a walmart Tire & Lube shop in Gateneau, Quebec voted to unionize and the company shut down the shop.  But in 2010 back in Gatineau, another UFCW election was held and 150 workers won the right to be represented.

A walmart store in Saint-Hyacinthe now has a contract with UCFW Local 501. In Weyburn Saskatchewan, the struggle to unionize has been a drawn-out process. Starting with a vote in 2004 and certification in 2008, countless frivolous appeals by the corporation, ending with a supreme court decision on  October 14, 2010, upholding the union’s right to represent the workers. Walmart has to move forward now and negotiate a contract. To date, there are 3 unions in place in walmart Canada.

How about the U.S. walmarts?

Read the details at the union website.

TSA has the power, however witless they are. The cloud of fear permeates airports. We check our confidence and unrehearsed selves at the door.

Now that fear is coming to a Wal-Mart near you. The union busting, China-enriching importer, retail behemoth is now partnering with Homeland Security to spread fear. The same reticence we are encouraged to feel at airports hits the checkout line.

Now comes “If you see something, say something”  introduced at the checkout register via video from the Department of Homeland Security. Said Janet Napolitano, DHS director, “This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.”

The “experts” at TSA seem to not how to identify “indicators of terrorism” with the purchase of machines unable to detect chemical residue as well as trained  dogs. How in the world would the public be good at it? Here’s one for the TSA and Ms. Napolitano: when the entire population is on “orange alert” when shopping, when are we ever allowed to relax, to be ourselves.

Hypervigilance is a symptom of PTSD. We are being trained to act like a traumatized nation. And we are told to snitch on one another. Given the unlimited powers of local police,  I envision that anyone who hates anyone else can set off a series of horrific incidents simply by accusing the hated one of “terrorism.” Imprisonment without a charge (because Obama never restored habeus corpus that Bush banished).

In fact, terrorism — living in fear — is accomplished. And the terrorists are DHS and Wal-Mart!

Keenly-aware WBI staff discovered this pearl of wisdom from the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that replaced youth clubs with Hitler Youth. Through all such groups, people were encouraged to spy on each other and report “disloyalty.” Are we heading down the same totalitarian, ignorant path?

The report can be downloaded here. The goals of the were to review the “financial operations and management of the Virginia Quarterly Review” with Ted Genoways as Editor thru July 31, 2010. With regard to financials, Genoways depleted $475,000 of the VQR’s $800,000 in reserve fund account which was independent of other Univ. accounts, a status no other on-campus department enjoyed. “No inappropriate transactions were found” was one of the report conclusions. Genoways, working for then university president John Casteen, said he was told to “spend down” the fund.

The only “corrective action” (and never to be known publicly) to be taken against Genoways was for mishandling receipts and a credit card charge.

Investigative reporter Dave McNair of the local Charlottesville The Hook caught the most significant financial omission from the report.

The report makes no mention of VQR development manager Alana Levinson-Labrosse, the daughter of major UVA donor Frank Levinson (and a major donor herself), whose hiring was exempt from standard UVA posting and search requirements, and who had little or no fundraising experience. In addition, documents obtained by the Hook show that Frank Levinson “tentatively” planned to commit $150,000 to the VQR. In fact, a reliable source says he had already cut a check to the VQR in July for $75,000. According to those same documents, Levinson-Labrosse planned to use the $1.5 million she’d committed to UVA’s Young Writer’s Workshop to help the VQR.

As The Hook reported, Genoways gets to keep his $170,000 compensation package as editor with no campus teaching obligations. He makes as much as the highest paid faculty in the English Department whose accomplishments outshine those of Genoways by any measure.

With respect to WBI’s complaint about institutional negligence, the report noted “there were several institutional notifications of problems within VQR, but no specific allegations of bullying or harassment prior to July 30th.” Thus, there was confirmation that the University, even the President’s office, knew about Genoways and employees’ discontent with him. It was not just Kevin Morrissey.

There was blame leveled at Morrissey for not filing formal charges against Genoways. The report, in the above passage, stated: “no specific allegations” were filed. So, the university did not act because problems were not specifically chronicled!

Here is more of  ducking responsibility. The report said

UVA personnel responded to employee concerns in accordance with institutional policies and procedures, given the information they were provided. However, there was a lack of clarity with regard to certain roles, as well as a perceived lack of independent institutional authority to engage and resolve issues for employees while operating with a general good faith desire to respect employee confidences.

Part 1: No they did NOT respond. Policies and procedures were in place for illegal discrimination but when the information did not meet those criteria (“the information provided”) because Genoways was not accused of sexually harassing anyone, nothing need be done. This is true everywhere. UVa is no guiltier than any other institution. It’s the problem with U.S. employment law that we are trying to fix. However, the report cites the University’s Code of Ethics that tells all campus constituents to conduct themselves “professionally and with civility.” As an expert witness in lawsuits, I’ve learned the difference between the power of a policy that obligates both employer and employee and a “Code” that means nothing more than a Mission or Values Statement. Despite its weakness, why did none of the institutional representatives contacted by Morrissey attempt to invoke the Code and warn Genoways that he was in breach?

Part 2: We know that Morrissey contacted Employee Assistance and the Ombudsman (Brad Holland fashioned himself the on-campus anti-bullying crusader). The report cites the need to bury anything discovered about Genoways beneath the cloak of “employee confidence.” Let’s be clear. When someone is asking for relief, for the sake of their own confidentiality, several institutional reps must keep the secret. Bullying is a phenomenon shrouded in secrecy.

If Brad Holland wanted to fight bullying on campus, he should have started with the people who came to him. He could have asked for a release from confidentiality in order to pursue existing solutions or create new ones like we do with progressive employers. Instead, he kept the secret and Kevin Morrissey is dead.

There is little hope for much change based on the report’s recommendations. Rather than lifting the cloak of secrecy, there is a call for better defining what constitutes “institutional notification.” Too many offices are available for collecting employee complaints but there is too little coordination among them. The report states.

The current structure for receiving employee complaints needs to be re-evaluated by the University. Either Human Resources should be charged with this responsibility and give this employee-reporting function a higher status in its department, or an office that is independent of Human Resources should be established for this purpose. (emphasis by WBI)

The ending to that sentence spells hope for employees. Take the complaint function out of HR’s hands. Combined with the following, UVa could make it better for bullied employees.

A task force should be created and charged to strengthen the institution’s policies and structure with regards to acceptable workplace conduct. This should include emphasizing a culture where all employees are valued, regardless of their position.

This is typically the first step in accomplishing our Blueprint to Prevent and Correct Workplace Bullying.

Or the “task force” could become simply another go-nowhere/do-nothing commission-type stalling tactic. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, the two remaining VQR staffers have been “unequivocal in their condemnation of Genoways’ leadership and his treatment of Morrissey,” according to The Hook. They will be leaving, possibly holding on to university employment but elsewhere. We wish them luck, but why should they have to be the ones to leave?

Again, bullying happens with impunity and a handsome intact salary to boot!

Read the NY Times story by Steven Greenhouse, one of few labor reporters left in the country.

Read colleague law professor David Yamada’s interpretation of the case and implications for bullied workers.

Alyssa Peterson

Sept. 15, 2010 marks the 7th anniversary of Alyssa Peterson’s death in Iraq.

Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff Arizona native served in a military intelligence unit of the 101st Airborne in Iraq in 2003. She formally and loudly objected to techniques used against prisoners (which we have all since learned were torture). She was trained in Arabic and interrogation techniques.  She was a Mormon who, prior to deployment, reportedly was questioning her faith. Her family and fellow trainees remembered her as extremely empathetic and kind.

Alyssa was assigned to “the cage.” After only two days, she refused to participate further. The military command reprimanded her for her “empathy” toward Iraqi prisoners. She was re-assigned to different duties and sent to suicide prevention training. An Army sergeant interrogator, Kayla Williams, knew about Alyssa’s internal struggle with the conflict over her personal feelings and professional duties. On Sept. 15, 2003 she killed herself with her service rifle. She left a suicide note referring to the irony that suicide training had taught her how to kill herself. A notebook was found near her body but was blacked out by the Army.

The Army’s official cause of death, which is all that the family knew at first, was death from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

The suicide and Army investigation report was uncovered by tenacious KNAU public radio reporter Kevin Elston. [Read the transcript of Elston's 2005 radio report. Listen to his Nov 2006 interview on Democracy Now.]

The Alyssa Peterson case is an extreme example of how one person chose integrity over doing whatever her employer commanded her to do. The case comes with all the complications that accompany suicide stories. However, here was one gentle soul who refused to torture other human beings.

If more refused, people like Alyssa might not have to see suicide as the only way to resolve a personal integrity conflict.

Finally, her sacrifice should serve as warning that witnessing torture demeans witnesses, too. When torture is the norm, we’ve all lost our humanity and the right to claim moral self-righteousness.

This report is an abbreviated summary of a 2-part series by Greg Mitchell for the Nation – “The soldier who chose suicide after she refused to go along with torture.”

IPS Report

The 17th annual report on executive compensation from the Institute of Policy Studies (Sarah Anderson is principal author) should disgust all Americans. There is a surreal inverse correlation between responsibility for corporate layoffs and personal pay for execs. The more workers they put on the street, the higher their pay package. In 2009, the ratio of average CEO compensation to average worker compensation was 263:1.

From the Key Findings of the IPS report:

• Profit-Employment Disconnect: The overwhelming majority of the layoff-leading firms — 72 percent — announced their mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports. This reflects a broader trend in Great Recession Corporate America: squeezing workers to boost profits and maintain high CEO pay.

• Slashing Jobs Pays: CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009, 42 percent more than the CEO pay average at S&P 500 firms as a whole.

• Bailout Barons: Five of the 50 top layoff leaders owe their good fortune directly to major taxpayer bailouts of the financial sector. Of these, American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault took home the highest 2009 pay, $16.8 million, a sum that included a $5 million cash bonus. American Express has laid off 4,000 employees since receiving $3.39 billion in TARP funding. (Be sure to check out the compensation of execs at bailed-out layoff leading firms, page 9)

• CEO Pay and Unemployment Insurance: The $598 million combined compensation of the top 50 CEOs in our layoff leader survey could provide average unemployment benefits to 37,759 workers for an entire year — or nearly a month of benefits for each of the 531,363 workers their companies laid off.

• Golden Parachuter: Fred Hassan of Schering-Plough, by far the highest-paid layoff leader, last year pocketed nearly $50 million. Hassan received a $33 million getaway gift when his firm merged with Merck, while 16,000 workers were receiving pink slips. Hassan’s 2009 pay could have covered the aver- age cost of these workers’ jobless benefits for more than 10 weeks.

• Tax Dodgers: Of the 50 layoff leading companies, only two reported paying corporate income tax in 2009 at the 35 percent statutory rate. Hewlett-Packard, under recently fired CEO Mark Hurd, remitted $47 million in federal corporate income tax, a mere 2 percent of the company’s reported pretax domestic net income. HP’s federal tax bill came to just twice CEO Hurd’s $24.2 million pay package.

Download the IPS report here.

If you believe that individuals should be rewarded for their ability to maximize their compensation at the expense of others because that’s the way the system is set up, and you see no problem with the system, stop reading here. If the above facts disgust you, read on.

###

One of the nostalgic myths of Americana is that we are a nation of equals. This comforting pablum keeps the masses quiet while the super wealthy benefit tremendously from real inequalities. There is no end in sight for the recession, an investment house creation that has bankrupted governments and individuals. We common folk are told to tighten our belts and accept austerity. U.S. cities, counties and states are broke. Government is breaking down. The poorest and most vulnerable among us are told that services must be cut, as if they did something to deserve it.

European governments which were suckered into Goldman Sachs’ ponzi schemes built on a foundation of bundled mortgages of questionable quality are imposing severe cutbacks on their citizens. And the people are rightfully protesting the mandates not warranted by anything the citizens did. Millions have taken to the street. Some governments have litigated and imprisoned investors responsible for the malaise. Many Europeans understand that the underlying problem is unbridled, unregulated capitalism. The enemy is better understood.

Here in the U.S., capitalism is the most sacred of religions, protected and unquestioned above all other -isms. Ironic how undemocratic capitalism is, don’t you think? But no one in the media will tell you this. You want to get mad about losing your job, your home, you health insurance? Fix blame squarely on corporate ownership. It is that elite group that is making the decisions that affect your life so strongly, so adversely.

Americans seem to be displacing their anger. They are directing their genuine angst against the wrong targets. Certainly, lame ineffective, corporate-owned politicians are part of the problem. But the corporations are at the vortex of the recession and too few of us are appropriately blaming them. You won’t see anti-corporate or anti-capitalism stories on TV. That kind of “root cause” analyses would get a reporter or producer fired.

To see how the American brand of capitalism is hurting people, visit the site for Richard Wolff (Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst).

Are CEOs alone to blame? I think not. It’s the system, silly! The only incentives in our society are increasingly rigged to foster zero-sum (winner-take-all) outcomes. We celebrate the big lottery pot and ridicule proposals to distribute wealth more evenly. We allow disingenuous politicians to mock the unemployed as if they are aliens from a different planet. We listen to bozos suggest a morals or drug test to receive a paltry sum just to pay the rent and shop for food. We allow more and more children to slip into poverty in this country while making celebrities of some elevated supervisors who could not manage the stress of a McDonald’s drive thru line at lunch time.

The problem is not just the people who happen to be CEOs.  It is that so much is taken from society by so few. Income inequality historically drives revolutions, but not in over-corporatized America. Don’t worry fellow citizens, the next season of Idol begins soon.

The summary of research findings from the CEPR report by Hye Jin Rho:

•   37 percent of male workers age 58 and older had jobs that involved any general physical demand, compared to 32.2 percent of female workers age 58 and older.
• Out of 1.4 million Latino workers age 58 and older, about 54 percent had physically demanding jobs. Latino men had the largest share (62.4 percent) of older workers in physically demanding jobs.
•    Among those age 58 and older, difficult jobs were held by 62.4 percent of Latino workers, 53.2 percent of black workers, 50.5 percent of Asian Pacific American workers, and 42.6 percent of white workers.
•    Older workers with less than a high school diploma had the highest share of workers (77.2 percent) in difficult jobs. Those with an advanced degree had the lowest share of workers (22 percent) in difficult jobs.
•    Immigrant workers age 58 and older were more likely (47.5 percent) than non-immigrant workers (33 percent) to have physically demanding jobs. Nearly 56 percent had difficult jobs.
•    56.4 percent of older workers in the bottom wage quintile had physically demanding jobs
compared to only about 17 percent of those in the top quintile.
•   63.3 percent of older workers in the bottom wage quintile had difficult jobs compared to only about 25 percent of those in the top quintile.

Get the picture? Older Latino workers with the least amount of education earn the lowest pay doing the heaviest lifting in the workforce.

Those wimpy politicians and policy wonks who advocate postponing retirement age because they see healthy elderly folks greeting them at WalMart should have to work a demanding job.

You can download the complete report here.

The CEPR report took me back to my bookshelf to rediscover the wonderful, clear, no platitudes book by Reg Theriault about the industrial blue collar worker’s fate, to work for a lifetime in hard labor at the command of the owner.

You can purchase the book at Amazon.

Watch an in-depth C-SPAN interview with the author.

What does official Washington say about the recession’s impact? Mostly that things are getting better because banks and investment houses reported record profits last quarter. Recovery is underway. The one nagging problem is that it is a “jobless recovery.” To hell with the quarter of the population looking for jobs that will never materialize or working for peanuts in demeaning jobs for wages that cannot keep a family afloat. Where is our leaders’ compassion for people suffering?

Annie Lowrey writing for the Washington Independent (Death and Joblessness, 8/17/10) explored in depth anecdotal tales of suicide and hopelessness at the website Unemployed Friends. She interviewed a CDC spokeswoman who timidly said that “more studies” are needed to understand the link between economic strain (I say catastrophe) and risk factors for suicide. Some economists are studying the link between joblessness and suicide. Despite the lagging social science research on the topic, it seems intuitively clear that once a person’s identity is taken from her or him, and the ability to support one’s family is lost, it is easy for serious emotional destabilization to follow.

School suicides related to bullying always grab headlines. Sometimes, they result in state laws, like in Massachusetts following the Phoebe Prince suicide. Without a doubt, suicides are a cry for help from young people. Schools are often too poor to have licensed psychologists available anymore. The opportunity to prevent is lost simply for budget reasons. Budgets reflect organization values. To ignore the message, as schools do, is to risk becoming a hardened institution incapable of empathy. How could it not adversely affect learning, the core mission?

Serial suicides at Foxconn, the Taiwanese employer hiring and exploiting Chinese workers on behalf of American high tech companies like Apple, also made headlines for a while. The story behind the story was that working conditions were inhumane in many ways including the prohibition of worker-to-worker contact on the shop floor. The employer eventually did raise salaries to be equivalent to rates workers once made only with overtime. But it is unlikely that production floor conditions were modified. Non-unionized workers lack the voice to demand a psychologically healthy workplace in any country, including the U.S.

Noteworthy U.S. workplace suicides

The 2010 University of Virginia Kevin Morrissey suicide grabbed headlines because his surviving sister dared to suggest that her brother’s boss had tormented him for 3 years. One journalism ethics professor suggested that suicide stories are taboo in the media because victims tend to be flawed, broken people.

Jodie Zebell was a conscientious 31 year old Wisconsin mammographer who was initially bullied by health clinic co-workers who resented her skill. The supervisor joined in. She took her own life months later in 2008.

Marlene Braun was an environmentally oriented doctoral scientist working her dream job for the Bureau of Land Management in California. She inherited a new boss with a bachelor’s degree and the political mandate to violate land stewardship ethics. He resented her skill, knowledge and ongoing relationships with everyone involved with protecting the land. She committed suicide in 2005.

Unfortunately the failure to report suicides keeps hidden several compelling reasons to change institutions that can drive an otherwise sane person to take her or his own life when there is no perceived way out.

Massacres, not Suicides

The American way of dealing with seemingly unsolvable personal and economic problems seems to be to direct violence toward others. According to one study conducted after the September 2008 beginning of the recession, there has been a 73% rise in domestic violence cases due to “financial issues.” State budget cuts are depriving women of support in dealing with partner violence when funding for shelters, sexual assault, and other social services.

And in a more familiar headline-grabbing style, a massacre occurred at a small firm in Connecticut this summer. It is safe to expect more to come in the future.

The challenge is for Americans and American media to recognize, and to not ignore, suicides and the underlying organizational causes that contribute to those decisions. It’s time to stop automatically assigning violence victims (and suicide is inwardly directed lethal violence) sole responsibility for the myriad of conditions that led up to suicide. Yes, the decision was ultimately the individual’s to make. However, suicide is not a snap, impulsive decision. It is the culmination of a series of negative events that led to the hopelessness. And like a victim of abuse, the greatest harm comes from prolonged, unremitting exposure to stress. Psychosocial stressors are not imagined. They are part of the environment — family, workplace, society — and external to the affected individual.

Causation is always a mix of external and internal factors. It is never completely the result of an individual’s personality. But much work remains to convince the public and media who are content with simple one-sided explanations that the mostly invisible situational/environmental/external factors contribute mightily, often outweighing personality as predictors.

Suicide is a social marker, an indication, that the society is mistreating its people while offering few ways to heal or to discover alternatives. Those who choose suicide are the “canaries in the coal mine” early readers of a toxic world gone awry.

We owe a great deal to the brave, desperate souls who took their own lives. To enoble their decisions, we must learn what they were trying to tell us through the ultimate sacrifice.

Redifining Global Competitiveness

Dr. Gary Namie suggests that an alternative meaning of “global competitiveness” be adopted in America. Less hardening, more humane treatment of workers as done by the globally competitive Europeans.

Download Podcast 18 (in .mp3 format)

Outsourced, NBC-TV show, premieres Sept. 23

From the network: “Outsourced” is a comedy where the Midwest meets the exotic East in a hilarious culture clash.

HaHa. Notwithstanding the crude stereotypes of Indians and the idiot American overseers who treat the workers like children (at least in the preview that the network must be proud to circulate publicly), there are serious problems facing Indian workers.

In India, the industry sector is called the ITES-BPO, information technology enabled services-business process outsourcing. India currently accounts for 46% of all global offshoring. The appeal, according to a 2003 NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) report, is “an unbeatable mix of low costs, deep technical and language skills, mature vendors, and supportive government policies.” Even with the influx of offshoring financial services, the industry still provides mostly standardized and routinized services of low complexity, emphasizing mass production and customer service.  To better understand the pressures faced by Indian call center workers, read Premilla D’Cruz’s 2010 article described elsewhere at this site.

The dilemmas facing Americans are more dire. Losing 500,000 more jobs in July 2010 and several million displaced since the great recession, laughing about offshoring or outsourcing domestic jobs is no laughing matter. Lost jobs in the U.S. means more than in most other industrialized nations. Everyone in the world who loses a job loses wages , but in the U.S. you also lose affordable health insurance when you need it most to cope with escalated stressors, you risk losing your home to foreclosure and for too many there is the loss of identity.

A movie produced by New Line, with shooting that began in July, 2010, is expected to a summer 2011 R-rated blockbuster with an all-star cast. The storyline according to one Hollywood “insider” trade publication:

Three best friends who, fed up with abuse from their employers, enlist the help of a scam artist called MF Jones to help murder them. Two of the horrible bosses are a coke-addled heir to a chemical company and a nymphomaniac dentist. The publication then gushes that almost all of the roles in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and ex-”Freaks and Geeks” star John Francis Daley are “great.” Then, seemingly without irony it states — “it’s a very funny, enjoyably mean-spirited piece of work, and with a cast like this, could be one of the better comedies of next year.”

The problem I have with the premise is how  “funny and enjoyable” is juxtaposed with “mean-spirited”? This semantic pairing baffles me. After decades of media pounding us with “sex and violence,” maybe Hollywood next wants to package funny and mean-spirited to go together. Wonder if bullied targets think the abuse they endure is very funny?

Don’t think I reject funny. Those who have seen me speak have seen my brand of humor. And I have spent lots of evenings in comedy clubs; I love slapstick.

But I resent the fact that before the media ever get around to seriously exploring workplace bullying in depth (NBC cancelled its airing of a full Dateline show on bullying in 2007), they want to trivialize it as if it were a joke.

Another funny hit, dilbert the comic strip, can be easily seen as mean spirited, too.

In conclusion, there’s money to be made laughing at, not with, the down and out during tough times. It’s a variation of the blame-the-victim theme rampant in our society.

Ted Genoways, VQR editor accused of bullying by suicide victim

At universities, people tend to think of teaching and research faculty and staff as the only employees. At the University of Virginia, the president supports a literary journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review, prestigious to poets and fiction writers. Kevin Morrissey, 52, the VQR managing editor had been hired by a young Ted Genoways, 38, new himself to the editor post in 2003.

On July 30, Kevin Morrissey committed suicide after a reported three years of torment by Genoways despite the two having a genuine friendship at the start of their work together.

There was a record of several calls by Morrissey to university institutional helpers (HR, ombuds, EAP, president’s office). Either his call for help was not answered or treated with indifference. Those familiar with Morrissey’s complaints said that the rationalization for Genoways was that creative people like him could be difficult to work with and were often bad managers! In other words, live with him, adjust to him, Genoways is indispensable. Note the abdication of responsibility by this employer for the safe working conditions of its employees.

Said one fawning former intern, “Ted (Genoways) is the creative genius … the fulcrum of discussions about the future of VQR and, honestly, the future of journalism … Ted is the star at the center of VQR‘s constellation.” A publisher familiar with VQR lamented that “A crisis like this  (triggered by Morrissey’s suicide) can be a death blow (sic), even to the strongest scholarly publication.”

The magazine had won awards and Genoways himself won a fellowship allowing him to be out of the office. His focus was on funding and enlisted the help of a 24-yr. old UV graduate, Alana Levinson-LaBrosse (she was so rich she gave $1.5 million herself to the university). Morrissey and she reportedly clashed as she, not Morrissey, was included in activities with Genoways.

Kevin Morrissey

Staff recalled Genoways screaming at Morrissey behind closed doors. Three VQR staffers even accompanied Morrissey to the president’s office to complain about Genoways. They were brushed off. There is evidence that Genoways sent Morrissey an e-mail accusing him of “unacceptable workplace behavior,” without specifications, ordered him to work from home and prohibited communication with other VQR staff. These are all classic tactics employed by bullies who enjoy privileged protection from the CEO (the former university president who left in July).  They not completely unlike torture. The tactics were probably retaliation for Morrissey and Levinson-LaBrosse fighting.

The only tangible response from the administration was an apology by the president’s chief of staff to VQR staff for witnessing the clash between Morrissey and Levinson-LaBrosse at a meeting. No apology to Morrissey. No other official response to Morrissey’s complaints. No holding Genoways accountable. No offer of counseling to Morrissey.

Morrissey’s death followed Genoways’ draconian decisions and one last denigrating e-mail on the morning of his suicide. In that e-mail, Genoways, the espoused “genius” and “star,” accused Morrissey of failing to help a contributor to a VQR story such that Morrissey put that man’s life at risk!

There was a report that some close to the situation warned the university that Morrissey might commit suicide.

Even after Morrissey’s death, the UVa’s official response to the request for complaint and response details from reporter Robin Wilson for the Chronicle of Higher Education (the source for this story), the university hid behind a faux shield of “confidential personnel records.” Morrissey’s surviving sister blames Genoways and the university and may file a lawsuit.

The negligent employer gets to bury the secrets to protect itself from being revealed.

Read Robin Wilson’s story:  What Killed Kevin Morrissey?

###

Epilogue

There’s even more to the Univ. Virginia tale. A couple of years ago, UVa recruited WBI (and others with extensive experience with university communities as well as being researchers and consultants, in other words, heavyweights in the field) to come to campus. UVa instead brought in a “motivational” speaker. At WBI, we pass on several on-site speeches when employers resist creating a solution for the problem that prompted the request in the first place.

The result at UVa was that nothing was done after the speech. The former President’s office was not engaged in discussions about bullying, and possibly the specific Kevin Morrissey complaints. If something had been in place, Morrissey would not have had to resort to pleading with HR and the other institutional helpers as his phone records indicated was done. HR may be implicated in Morrissey’s death. And the feel-good motivational speaker actually encouraged this negligent employer to believe that it had adequately addressed bullying on campus with a speech alone!  Get serious UVa. What will it take to get American employers to stop the carnage within the ranks?

When a woman passenger rose, before she was permitted, to get her carry-on luggage ahead of everyone else, Slater went to her to stop her. She swore at him and swung her bag that hit Slater. The frustrated (but unarmed) Slater did two unthinkable things. He got on the intercom and sent a public F*** you to the woman who had sworn at him so all the passengers knew. [Read the apology by a contrite veteran passenger who doesn't blame Slater.] He grabbed some beers from the cart (a self-defeating act for the admitted  alcoholic in recovery) and opened the exit door opposite the jetway and inflated the emergency chute and simply left. He made it all the way out of the airport and home where police arrested him. (What does that say about the TSA’s value?)

The dramatic exit was an inventive, and workplace-specific, way to simply leave the situation. It was a “take this job and shove it” move admired by many frustrated workers. Here is the animated version. Given his humble mumblings after release from jail the next day about how good most passengers are, he might have been more ashamed of what he had done and just needed to escape, to escape the only way possible before the jetway door was open.

I think we deserve to know the name of the belligerent, rule-breaking, and profane woman passenger from Pittsburgh. She’s the a**hole in this story.

Slater is a folk hero to the silent masses who suffer indignities from customers and bad bosses. Jet Blue, the employer, will probably can him. I hope his pension, if any has been earned from his quarter century of service in a tough customer service business, is intact. Deployment of the chute was the potentially illegal act that could bring 7 years of prison time. [Wow. Rapists don't serve an average of 7 years, murderers barely. For some reason, the experts say that chute deployment could have hurt workers on the ground.]

According to the NBC legal guy says in the Today Show segment below, Jet Blue might not want the difficulty of finding a jury to try workers’ hero Slater. He lost the job for now. Eager to see where he lands. Another airline picks him up to train attendants using his vast experience — of being in control and of losing his cool that one time. Just hope he doesn’t land his own reality show on the “d” list of cable channels.

The final point of mine is that this is a tale of two men frustrated at their jobs. Thornton had time to plan his aggression. His girlfriend believed he was lashing out a racist workforce that had mistreated him. A frustrated man with ready access to a private gun arsenal resulted in a protypical American massacre to redress his frustrations. The immediacy of Slater’s frustration could have led to an impulsive, unplanned violent episode. However, he had few options. The differences in personalities will never be adequately compared.

Different men, different outcomes. But one thing is certain — without guns present, no one got hurt. I support Slater and you can too.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Despite murky details, we feel confident only about following:

• Thornton was shown surveillance video (of a good quality according to Thornton) of stealing inventory at a scheduled morning disciplinary meeting the morning of the massacre

Skeptics wonder about the tape, but there was more than one witness to the showing. This is not to say that employers do not manufacture “evidence” of wrongdoing. They simply lie about events, making a rational defense impossible. However, they rarely go to the extent of producing a doctored videotape. This is a small business not in the tech business. Thornton was not a repeat offender, so they likely did not make such an expensive investment.

He was accused of stealing inventory and selling it.

• the beer delivery truck driver (Thornton) was given the option to resign or be fired (not really alternatives) with his union president, Bryan Cirigliano at his side

A humiliating moment to be sure for anyone. At least his Weingarten rights were preserved. Not much the union could have done if theft was confirmed.

• Thornton was being escorted away from the meeting room when he began shooting

This is the infamous HR “exit parade,” the “perp walk,” the banishment. We’re not sure if HR or security did the escorting. It is another form of employer humiliation.

• both employer and the union said that Thornton had not filed any previous complaints or grievances
Harassed workers rarely complain. The history of complainants being retaliated against ripples through the company grapevine and becomes legend. Fear alone suppresses the complaints. The ones who abuse the employer complaint/union grievance processes do so multiple times. They use the policies and contracts to harass the employer. They drive the union reps crazy to the point they start to refuse to file grievances that tend to embarrass the union. If Thornton had not filed formally before, he was not a chronic filer. Could he actually have been harassed and not filed? Certainly, for the reasons stated.

Therefore, the employer and union hiding behind the absence of formal complaints or grievances by Thornton is not proof that he was not harassed. In hindsight (which all of this speculation is), he would have been taken more seriously had he filed.

• Hannah’s mother, Joanne Hannah, claimed that Thornton told her daughter he had complained both to a company supervisor and a union rep

• Thornton’s girlfriend, Kristi Hannah, claimed that Thornton said he had complained to his union rep

If a union rep or steward does not like the member, he or she can block that member’s route to redress. By hearing a verbal complaint and failing to file a grievance, the rep keeps the disrespected member in her or his place. It’s not right, but it happens frequently. Union members often report to us that their union disregarded them as much as HR did. Did Thornton lie about telling his rep? We’ll never know until a union member comes forward with the truth. Unfortunately, he may have told the president he shot and killed that morning carrying the truth to the grave.

• Thornton’s girlfriend, Kristi Hannah, claimed that Thornton said he had complained to her about racism

She said he showed her cell phone photos of crude drawings on the workplace bathroom wall of a noose around his neck with the inscription “Kill the n-word” and reported overhearing a co-worker say he wanted “that n-word out of there.” Ross Hollander, the company owner, said “I can state to you unequivocally no racism claim was ever alleged.” Of course, this would be the post-event stance if the work environment was racist. The craziness in our current political world seems to embrace a return to racist times. There was a noose incident in mid-state Illinois this year that enraged the state NAACP because its perpetrators experienced no consequences. Believe it. It happens, and in the north.

• Thornton called the State Police 911 dispatcher to admit he did the shooting and that it was over (except for his suicide)

During the call, Thornton described the two handguns used to kill eight others as “two of my favorites.” He legally owned six registered firearms. Why in the post-massacre analysis does the media never question the incendiary mix of readily accessible lethal weapons and an emotionally volatile state. He also told the dispatcher, “We’re just talking, you’re gonna play something on the news, you know I’m gonna be popular…” This is a common theme to shooters. Their world was out of their control, the massacre is their way of restoring control. Thornton said “They treat me bad over here and all the other black employees bad over here too…So I took it into my own hands and handled the problem.”

• bullied individuals do not react automatically with anger as some believe

Anger would have been a sign that he was relatively bullyproof. He would not have been afraid to confront. Targets shirk from confrontation. That’s why it is silly to ask them to confront, or even learn to confront.

This not to be confused with Thornton potentially feeling powerless to counter whatever racism was directed his way. There were many against his few. We don’t know how the other black employees acted toward him. Were they also victims? Why or why not?

Thornton’s anger could have been a simple frustration-aggression response with little to no emotional component. Bullying involves emotional injury.

The initial reaction of targets of workplace bullying is often to turn inward. Personal shame (the result of attempts to humiliate you) dictates actions. Feelings are kept inside and rarely shared, even with partners. Only after a long period of time does anger bubble to the surface. The anger most likely comes from the symptoms of hypervigilance associated with PTSD. Hence the anger and rage displayed by traumatized military veterans that puts spouses in danger of violence. PTSD is often delayed and the effects last long after the traumatizing events. But notice how the source (the emotional injury) is different than a more spontaneous, hair-trigger response when someone without PTSD explodes. In the latter case, it may have more to do with an inability to control violent impulses.

• bullied targets are gentle souls, too “nice” for their own good, non-confrontive

Not sure about the research here, but wondering how many bullied targets are gun aficionados. Thornton loved his guns to the point that the handguns he took into the facility that fateful day were two of his “favorites.” Therefore, he didn’t own guns to have them gather dust in a case. On the day of the shooting, he had a shotgun in his car. Hand-eye coordination fans fire virtual guns in video games. Gun nuts use them not just to keep a sharp eye. They love the power gun use conveys to owners. Targets are victims of the abuse of power, rarely its practitioners. Who knows, maybe targets love guns for their power because they are powerless at work. All untested hypotheses.

• Thornton had a plan to restore order to his world, was not insane

This was about seeking justice to him. He didn’t spray the workplace with bullets. He targeted some for death and avoided other individuals. He chased one co-worker outside the building and had to shoot his way back in to keep up the slaughter. He also spoke on his cell for 10 minutes with his mother. She was unable to talk him out of suicide.

• the causal link between a toxic work environment and massacre as solution is an indirect connection at best

As facts filter in, there may have been a set of conditions at Hartford Distributors that could drive a sane person to consider killing others as a solution (not if that person has no access to an arsenal of weapons). For example, our academic colleague Ken Westhues posts a report about the Virginia Tech massacre. That student was tormented by one of the professors.

There does always seem to be a “story behind the story.” Our society (read superficial media coverage) prefers to discount all shooters as nuts. They all have chosen extreme solutions, but they were not all previously insane. Nor were most insane when shooting. The explanations are complicated because they involve at least four parts:
- an alienated individual (either who started that way or was driven to the state)
- a toxic work environment created and sustained by the employer
- the failure to find allies at work (from diffident co-workers, obstinate union reps who refuse to engage, indifferent employer/HR reps),  and
-the availability of weapons.

Kneejerk post hoc analysis is inadequate. The documentary Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal explores these factors to understand the why “going postal” happens so much. Thoughtful commentary by criminologist Alan Fox (Northeastern University) and psychiatrist Michael Welner provides the right level of analysis. I also address the role of work environment in the film. The film is 80+ minutes long. TV news segments about the shooting are usually no longer than 3 minutes!

So, let’s be careful to not equate workers targeted by bullying with shooters in workplace massacres. Not everyone with PTSD injures or kills his spouse. Not everyone with bipolar disorder is a danger to society. Bullied targets are more likely to retreat from society than to mount a guns-blazing deadly assault on peers.

On days when the weather is fine and there is relatively no wind, BP conducts up to a dozen “controlled burns”, torching vast expanses of the ocean surface within a corral of fireproof booms.

Biologists say such burns are deadly for young turtles because oil and sargassum – the seaweed mats that provide nutrients to jellyfish and a range of other creatures – – congregate in the same locations. The sargassum is also a perfect hunting ground for young sea turtles, who are not developed enough to dive to the ocean floor to forage for food.

Once BP moves in, the turtles are doomed. “They drag a boom between two shrimp boats and whatever gets caught between the two boats, they circle it up and catch it on fire. Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Ellis said. ….

Harming or killing a sea turtle carries fines of up to $50,000 (£33,000).”It is criminal and cruel and they need to be held accountable,” said Carole Allen, Gulf office director of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project.

This animal abusing corporation is the same one that hires beach cleaners from the ranks of distressed coastal residents and fishermen and forbids them to don respirators when handling toxic raw crude! Let’s quit making nice with BP and treating them respectfully when they obviously care not one whit about environmental endangerment and helpless creatures or the safety of human beings.

Read the original article.
Watch video interview of a witnessing boat captain. Interviewer: Catherine Craig.

Worklessness and health – what do we know about the causal

For an easy download of this document, go here.

Also read about the disturbing trend of employers refusing to hire the unemployed!

Unobligated Employers

If nothing else, BP and Goldman Sachs demonstrate clearly that U.S. employers have NO OBLIGATION to society or the world’s economic stability, so why should they care about little ole you? A Gary Namie podcast.

Download Podcast 16 (in .mp3 format)

An interesting group to target for imposing pain — workers who have lost their livelihood. Ironically, according to a National Employment Law Project report, “the Congressional Budget Office estimates that every dollar of UI benefits results in $1.90 of economic activity, making unemployment insurance one of the most effective forms of short-term stimulus.” The hypocritical Senate, driven entirely by the invisible hand of republican boycott, as part of the same stimulus package bill has left intact $32 billion worth of business tax cuts. That’s money lost to the US Treasury, given to business not available to normal Americans.

American politics at the state and federal levels has devolved into giving business whatever it wants with the misguided assumption that helping them will translate to jobs for Americans. The facts are that if they hire at all, they go overseas to minimize costs. To hell with the people who do the work but have been put out on the street by those same businesses! In the Senate the turned upside down priorities of government are on daily, gory display.

The relevance of this haggling over legislation that most Americans consider “making sausage” and not worthy of scrutiny is that it shows your elected officials shafting individuals (and who lost that living). Ignore at your own peril.

If only Tester and the others sought to punish BP for the crimes it is committing today and into the future.

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From the WBI 2000 survey of hostile workplaces (online, non-scientific) 30% of women targets of bullying reported symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); 21% of men targets. Psychological injuries are common in bullying cases.

Fortunately, most people experience intense anxiety, panic attacks, and depressive symptoms rather than the extreme case of traumatization when an individual’s coping responses are completely overwhelmed. PTSD is extreme stress. PTSD is characterized by hypervigilance (an edginess, heightened arousal, agitation, obsessivness, and anger), intrusive thoughts (nightmares, flashbacks, unpredictable interruptions of normal thoughts and feelings), and avoidance (a desire to not visit the same people, places and feelings associated with the traumatizing incidents). PTSD is falsely seen only as a war injury. People are traumatized by the horrors of war (killing and death, witnessed and perpetrated), but also by natural disasters and tragedies the disrupt routine lives.

People who join the military are especially at risk. All trauma and stress risks are magnified with unremitting, prolonged exposure to horrific conditions. It is noteworthy that Britain and Canada treats their military veterans more humanely than the U.S. To minimize the ravages of PTSD, tours of duty are shorter than one year and there is a limit to the amount of uninterrupted time that soldiers and sailors can spend in a war zone. American military leaders have been less caring. Though they sometimes publicly remark that the troops are worn out, “stop-loss” is used to deny the rightful end of contracted military time for soldiers eager to return to non-military society. Stop-loss is an exploitation of the government’s power to make its own rules as employer, not subject to any civilian laws. Stop-loss guarantees an over-exposure to horror that no human should have to bear. It is instrumental in creating the estimated 30-45% prevalence of PTSD among Iraq/Afghanistan veteran. When they can’t escape to healing respite back home, the likelihood of injury skyrockets.

Psychiatrist Dr. Kernan Manion treated traumatized Marine vets and warned his superiors of violence potential on bases and in neighboring towns. “If not more Fort Hoods, Camp Liberties, soldier fratricide, spousal homicide, we’ll see it individually in suicides, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, family dysfunction, in formerly fine young men coming back and saying, as I’ve heard so many times, ‘I’m not cut out for society. I can’t stand people. I can’t tolerate commotion. I need to live in the woods,’” Manion explained to reporter Dahr Jamail. “That’s what we’re going to have. Broken, not contributing, not functional members of society. It infuriates me – what they are doing to these guys, because it’s so ineptly run by a system that values rank and power more than anything else – so we’re stuck throwing money into a fragmented system of inept clinics and the crisis goes on.”

In 2007, Joshua Kors reported on the Army mental health corps’ refusal to own the responsibility for injuring veterans with PTSD (and even some with physical traumatic brain injuries). Instead of making the correct PTSD diagnosis for those vets so they could receive VA health benefits for long-term medication and treatment, some Army psychologists were deliberately labeling the injured as having personality disorders. A personality disorder is a permanent mental health problem, not an injury, and must have begun in childhood. Also the deceitful misdiagnosis prevented vets from VA benefit eligibility. Thus, the Department of Defense, as employer, put its employees in harms way, many are injured as a result, then the employer dodges liability by blaming the employee.

Substitute DoD with the name of your employer. You get hired to perform work and are assigned a supervisor or gang of co-workers who decide that it is more important to bully you than to allow you to do work. You seek relief. The employer denies its responsibility for the work conditions that have begun to harm you psychologically. If you do not escape and the exposure continues, the stress takes its toll on your health. When threats to your safety are severe, you risk PTSD. You find a therapist who correctly identifies your toxic workplace — the mistreating people in it as well as the way work is assigned with no regard for your safety or professional development — as the cause of the severe stress. You beg for relief but are not believed. Soon you lose the job you once loved for no reason other than the fact that some jackass arbitrarily hated you, most likely because your competence posed a threat.

Now from the military comes another tale of terror. Reporter Dahr Jamail posted his essay at the Truthout website. He writes about Eric Jasinski, a 23 year old who enlisted in 2005.  Jasinski’s Iraq tour ended in Dec., 2007. He was troubled and drinking heavily. A military counselor sent him to a civilian doc. He was diagnosed with PTSD by the civilian. He was given medications and waiting for his military contract to end in Feb., 2009.

However, the Army stop-lossed Jasinski adn he was given a month’s notice that he would return to Iraq. The military pharmacy issued a 90-day supply of medication. Another military counselor asked if he was suicidal. Jasinski said no. The hurried counselor said “well, you’re good to go then.” Jasinski knew that he could not serve again without treating his PTSD, so he went AWOL until Dec., 2009 when he turned himself in at Fort Hood, Texas. Jasinski asked for a medical discharge.

Instead, he had a March 31, 2010 court martial. He was sentenced to 30 days in the county jail, not a mental health facility as requested. The Army never did respond to his requests for help. He served 25 days and was released on April 24. Then, unilaterally without discussion or negotiation, the Army notified Jasinski that he would receive an “other-than-honorable” discharge that translates to permanent denial of VA benefits for the wounded soldier.

To better put in perspective the humiliation the Army heaped on this PTSD victim, read Jasinski’s personal statement written while in the Bell County jail.

“When I am taken out of jail back to Fort Hood for any appointments I am led around in handcuffs and ankle shackles in front of crowds of soldiers… which is overwhelming on my mind. My guilt from treating prisoners in Iraq sub-human and I did things to them and watched my unit do cruel actions against prisoners, so being humiliated like that forces me to fall into the dark spiral of guilt. I now know what it feels like to have no rights and have people stare and judge based on your shackles and I feel even more like a monster cause I used to do this to Iraqi people. Even worse is the fact that this boils down to the military failing to treat my PTSD but I am being punished for it… I feel as if I am being a threat to others or myself and still the Army mental health professional blow me off just like in 2009 when I felt like I had no choice but to go AWOL, since I received a 5 minute mental evaluation and was stop-lossed despite my PTSD, and was told that they could do nothing for me. The insufficient mental evaluation from a doctor I had never seen before, combined with the insufficient actions by the doctor on 9 April show the Army is not trying to make progress.”

Feel familiar? Neither did you do anything to warrant the banishment from your livelihood. Employers can do anything they want. PTSD victims are not whining delicate “teacups” like attorney Scott Greenfield suggests.

Gary Namie

What you can do:
Read the Dahr Jamail article

Learn about Chuck Luther’s group the Soldier’s Advocacy Group (SAG) of Disposable Warriors

Help the Iraq Veterans Against the War work for the proper and necessary treatment injured soldiers

Thank Eric Jasinski’s civilian attorney, James Branum

Read Joshua Kors groundbreaking report on abusive Army psychologists and psychiatrists

Tell Scott Greenfield his “teacups” smear is a cheap shot by a bullying attorney

The Foxconn factory in the southern China city of Shenzhen that manufactures our prized gadgets — iPhones, iPads, Dell, and HP products — is actually a self-contained city of 420,000 workers. In this crazy globalized world, American electronic gizmos are made by a subsidiary (Foxconn) of the Taiwanese firm (Hon Hai precision) that exploits low-wage mainland Chinese labor.

Thirteen Foxconn workers attempted suicide in the last year. Ten succeeded. All young people in their 20′s. There are a couple of stories behind the story that could teach American employers some lessons.

Wages begin at $130 per month, $300 per month with 120 hours overtime and everyone wants the more respectable pay. The jobs are so popular, 8,000 people apply every day to work there. All employers control working conditions. Foxconn, however, in the buyer’s market, doesn’t seem to worry about workers’ needs. Individuals are dispensable since replacements stand visibly by, waiting.

Alienation despite crowding

The typical American workplace analyst, coming from either an HR or corporate defense lawyer perspective, would speculate about personality weaknesses in the young despondent workers as the primary reason for the suicides. I call it misdirection.

Terry Gou, chairman of Hon Hai, reportedly said that managing 800,000 workers is very difficult. He is clueless about why so many of his workers commit suicide. On the surface, Foxconn is a good Chinese employer. It pays overtime and built new dormitories and swimming pools for workers. Similarly, the corporate response to the suicides has been superficial. Safety nets have been installed at the dorms to catch jumpers. Guards patrol the rooftops. And the most outlandish of employer requests was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald — workers have been told to sign letters promising not to kill themselves. Further, workers have to agree to be institutionalized for any observed “abnormal mental or physical state.” There you have it. Suicides are committed only by abnormal people.

Workers crammed side-by-side

However, some reports describe aberrant work and living conditions at Foxconn which are the corporation’s responsibility. A newspaper intern took a job there and found that workers stand for 8 uninterrupted hours at a fast moving assembly line. Each worker checks thousands of gadgets every day. Overtime days are 12 hours long, six days a week. Though workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder, supervisors do not allow them to talk to anyone. Said one 22 year old woman, “I feel like I have an empty life and work like a machine.” Company dormitory living conditions force nine workers into a single “apartment.” Turnover is so high and hours spent in living quarters so short that stable social relationships outside of work are nearly impossible. Dorm life is city life but no one is in a family. The intern’s report characterized the Foxconn employees’ world as “alienated.”