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

TOKYO (Kyodo) — A government panel studying measures to combat bullying at work recommended Monday that harassment by peers and subordinates be included in definitions of power harassment in the workplace.

In the government’s first proposal to define power harassment, often associated with abuse of power by bosses, the panel said in its report that power harassment could occur not only between people in different hierarchical positions but when there are gaps in expertise in specialized fields such as information technology.

The report, compiled by a working group of the labor ministry’s round-table conference, which was launched last July amid increased reports of harassment in the workplace, said power harassment is an “act that goes beyond the appropriate scope of work and inflicts mental/physical suffering or deteriorates the work environment.”

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry plans to reinforce measures against power harassment at work in fiscal 2012 starting April, including conducting a survey on the matter.

The number of consultations related to bullying or harassment at work brought to the attention of the ministry’s regional labor departments across the country has increased from about 6,600 cases in fiscal 2002 to around 40,000 in fiscal 2010.

The report said there are six types of power harassment — physical attacks such as assault, mental attacks such as threats, ignoring or leaving someone out of the loop, burdening someone with excessive work, deliberately giving someone very little work to do and prying into someone’s personal affairs.

The working group determined there is a need to expand the definition of power harassment as it found from interviews with companies and the examination of litigation that there are a growing number of cases in which workers are continually ignored by peers and where younger employees well-versed in IT harass people in more senior positions who are less knowledgeable.

But it also recommended that each workplace discuss problems because the definitions may not apply across the board.

Based on the working group’s report, the round-table conference, which also includes the participation of experts, is scheduled to compile a final report around the end of March.

via Panel says bullying by peers, subordinates also power harassment – The Mainichi Daily News.

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.

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

Tim O’Connell from the Association of Washington Business (state Chamber of Commerce), Gary Smith from the Independent Business Association, & Marie Clarke from the Attorney General’s office all oppose the anti-bullying bill.

Listen for the deliberate factual errors committed by corporate employment attorney (and union buster according to his online accomplishments) McConnell about the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. Smith and Clark simply distort the bill and ignore the fact that misconduct without severe health impact will not be actionable.

Assistant AG Clark makes the remarkable assumption that State agencies will be abusive and not be able to prevent being abusive, and therefore, will be held legally liable. They just can’t help themselves. Hmmm. So much for faith in senior administrators of state agencies. These three testifiers all shared a dismissive and arrogant disregard for the plight of traumatized workers subjected to abusive work environments, preferring to argue that current legal “protections” are adequate.

Senator Conway and Senator Kline counter, correctly, that current remedies are inadequate.

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=7569 By David Yamada, Worcester Business Journal, Jan. 9, 2012

Although workplace bullying falls into a gray area in terms of liability, I have drafted legislation that allows civil claims for those who can prove they were subjected to malicious, health-impairing bullying at work. In 2011, the New York Law Journal opined that it’s only a matter of time before such protections exist; some insurance companies are including workplace bullying in liability insurance policies.

In addition, labor unions are starting to raise concerns about it. In 2009, Massachusetts public sector unions representing some 21,000 state workers negotiated a “mutual respect” contract provision that covers bullying behaviors. The provision allows a worker to file a grievance over an alleged violation.

Too many employers dismiss concerns about workplace bullying. According to a 2007 national survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute and Zogby pollsters, 62 percent of employers either ignored complaints of bullying or worsened the situations.

Nevertheless, employers that want to minimize the likelihood of bullying can take these three concrete steps:

1. Send a message that bullying is unacceptable. The message must come from the top. Specific measures include drafting and implementing policies related to workplace bullying, offering in-house educational programs and presentations, and using effective “360-degree feedback” systems to evaluate supervisors.

2. Empower HR to handle bullying situations fairly and forthrightly. One of the most common remarks from targets of bullying is how the human resources department is “useless” in handling complaints about bullying and, in some cases, turned out to be complicit with the bullies. Effective preventive and responsive measures by HR are key components of any anti-bullying initiative.

3. Remove destructive bullies. Even if an incorrigibly abusive individual happens to be key in attracting business, increased productivity through better morale and less time lost to the gossip mill may make this a sound decision from a purely cost-benefit standpoint.

David Yamada is a professor of law and director of the New Workplace Institute at Suffolk University Law School.

So, here we educate site visitors about a key part of the HWB as introduced in the 21 states since 2003. The bill requires the “private right of action.” That means that individuals wanting to sue using the bill after it becomes law must rely on an attorney they find and hire. There need not be government involvement.

If you were to want to be a plaintiff in a discrimination lawsuit, you must first go through the federal EEOC with your complaint. The EEOC will eventually give you permission to sue with a “right to sue” letter. Then, your case would require you pay for a private attorney.

If you allege that your employer violated either a state or federal occupational safety regulation, you would necessarily file a complaint with your state’s OSH department or the federal Dept of Labor/OSHA. Government gets involved. Unfortunately, U.S. occupational safety and health regulations are scant. Worse yet, employer penalties for confirmed violations are laughable. Preventable death of an employee costs only $10,000! Fines are a joke. Inspections are pre-announced and toothless.

Federal OSHA has been de-fanged by the combination of (1) deliberate gutting of budget adequacy by political opponents of both parties (corporate loyalists) in Congress for many decades that dictates too few inspectors in a large country, and (2) a reluctance to regulate and punish unsafe employers that converted to OSHA’s push to help employers “comply.”

Here are the arguments in favor the “private action” provision contained in the HWB.

1.) When state agencies process complaints for citizens, it costs the State money. Staff time is required for intake interviews, data coding, investigations, adjudication, appeals, and case completion. State money is better spent on requisite social services during austere times.

Our appeal to legislators to enact the HWB involves persuasion and convincing. One of the bill’s most attractive features is that it will be “revenue neutral.” It will not cost the state money when it becomes law.

2.) A second reason to elect private right of action over state enforcement is the transparency that court filings provide. Employers can be held accountable via lawsuits and press attention. Bullying situations may be resolved to preserve positive public relations by employers.

With state involvement, especially using OSH violations, accused employers and individuals are assured secrecy under the cloak of confidentiality. Similarly, retaliation of complainants (a routine practice) is kept hidden from view.
Secret internal complaint handling by employers is one of the factors accounting for workplace bullying’s prevalence. Abuse conducted behind closed doors can be denied and not dealt with. That prevalence was demonstrated in two national representative (scientific) surveys in 2007 and 2010 by the Workplace Bullying Institute.

3.) Third, state agencies have slow bureaucratic processes. Even if we assume state staff are expert investigators, current agency cases languish for years. Proceedings are drawn out when employers contest jurisdictional issues. For example, a person using the state is stalled while the employer argues over whether the case is governed by workers compensation laws or disability or should be in civil court. Years pass. No progress.

4.) Fourth, state and federal OSH violations result in insufficient penalties to discourage future instances of health-harming abusive conduct in American workplaces. When cases require retributive justice to ameliorate bullying, gentle recommendations or calls for voluntary change fall short.

Additionally, the health-harm effect threshold found in the HWB is not a simple statement about what is required to ensure that workplace bullying happens. Bullying happens long before health harm is demonstrable. However, if one wants to use the courts to seek justice, there is an additional requirement. It is not enough to have been bullied to file a lawsuit. I think we all agree that courts should not be clogged with trivial (hurt feelings) cases. Rather, when bullied targets are traumatized and seriously impaired, the probability of being taken seriously by the court increases.

5.) State agency directors are political appointees. Governors bring their own partisanship to state governance. When a particularly rabid anti-worker governor gets elected (in 2010, this is exactly what happened in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, South Carolina). It is certain that no state agency would faithfully investigate workers’ complaints of abusive mistreatment by employers who have contributed to the Governor’s election campaign. In other words, prosecution of investigations and enforcement will depend on the political leanings of the administration in power at the time.

6.) State involvement permits free complaint filing by individuals. Genuinely bullied targets would want to file, but bullies will likely use the process to attack their targets, this time with the state’s help. The beauty for bullies is that the state would absorb costs. No attorney need be retained. It’s free to make trouble for others.

Thus, state involvement increases the risk of frivolous complaints. Whereas a reliance on private right of action forces individual plaintiffs to pay for an attorney. The cost prohibitive nature of lawsuits screens out cases without merit, and courts can easily dismiss cases without merit. Free filing exposes the process to risk from bullies determined to abuse the process.

Given the above 6 reasons, we discourage state lawmakers from abandoning the “private right of action” provision of the HWB. This is not the time to strain already scant state fiscal resources.

Gary Namie
Healthy Workplace Campaign

For another tutorial on the HWB, read this article.

For another tutorial on the HWB, read this article.

Hope this answers the long-standing question.

Check out the variety of recording devices that can be easily hidden.

EVERYTHING we accomplished in 2011 was because of our talented staff, allied professionals and volunteers who loaned us their particular expertise.

No one at WBI does just one thing; all of us have multiple roles. New hires, Sean Lunsford and Daniel Christensen, the comforting voice callers to WBI first hear, joined Dave Phillips, our technical guru, and Jessi Eden Brown, the WBI professional coach. Sean is a techie himself, with a degree in computer science, but will serve primarily as the newest consultant on our team, with training and certification in workplace bullying from us.

The WBI technical trio — Dave, Daniel, Sean:

• redesigned, modernized and consolidated our family of 7 principal websites in 2011 with WBI as the portal site

• 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

We have lost our minds, but we may also be losing our hearts. Lamenting the ease with which we tear into others. Borrowing a verse from the song “My Grown-Up Christmas List” to fit the theme.

Download Podcast 23 (in .mp3 format)

In the Instant Poll, we asked:
For targets of workplace bullying: who is your greatest supporter?

Respondents had to pick their major supporter, making only one choice from the following options.

Spouse/significant other, result = .318

Myself, result = .179

A coworker, result = .164

Immediate family (parent, sibling, child), result = .127

No one, result = .119

Therapist/medical professional, result = .077

Spiritual leader, result = .013

Family — partners and immediate relatives — were credited as the prime source of support by 45% of respondents.

Interesting is that a voluntary reliance upon oneself is given the second highest rating (18%). This could be a healthy reliance, an introspective journey, one characterized by strength and deliberate purpose. Of course, this counters the vast anecdotal record of targets who call WBI for help and who overestimate their power to rectify their employer-generated problem.

The “No one” gives support option (chosen by 12%) suggests that those targets are involuntarily left alone to deal with the bullying situation that resulted from the combination of efforts by several do-nothing, intervention-averse people. They may have asked for help and been denied. Hence, they were isolated.

Families are present for targets in 45% of cases; while 30% of bullied targets are left to cope alone.

Your reactions?

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.

"Yes" says Dr. George Guiliani, professor of Special Education at Hofstra University

"No" says Dr. Paul Friday, head of Shadyside Psychological Services, Pittsburgh

You decide.

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.

Workplace bullying has become rampant because it is driven by a buyer’s market in jobs.

In my professional practice of supporting clients in planning their retirement, I am increasingly experiencing clients and prospects who talk about workplace bullying scenarios. When I ask whether they are referring to sexual harassment, age discrimination or cause-based performance issues, they more frequently refer to being abused by practical jokes, harassment, intimidation and threats of job loss and downsizing. I have clients who have lost their jobs or have been forced to quit due to a narcissistic manager who has enjoyed virtually unrestricted rein in threatening job loss or career damage.

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., contrasted the difference between tough, accountable management and bullying by defining it as “… bullying is a level of misery that falls on disproportionately few.” Certainly, none of us have to be sociologists and economists to understand the harm that workplace bullying can cause. Morale issues, organizational sabotage and productivity declines would be a good start for a list of rational reasons to support a call for legislation to curb this serious problem.

In Massachusetts, the issue of infringement on dignity by employers is coming to a head with legislation written by Suffolk University Law professor David Yamada. House Bill 2310 and Senate Bill 916 — The Healthy Workplace Bill — was the subject of a Statehouse hearing by members of the Committee on Labor and Workforce Development this past summer.

The basic premise of the bill is to create a legal claim for bullying victims who can establish that they were subjected to malicious, health-harming behavior. It also provides defenses for employers who act preventively and responsively with regard to bullying.

Considering that this nation endured hard fought conditions that ushered in one of the greatest surges in human dignity legislation starting with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I think it is time for employers and business owners, empowered with the economic leverage of job rationing, to be held accountable for their transgressions.

Joe D’Amore

Groveland

A manager calls an important meeting with no time to prepare, making co-worker appear incompetent. She ridicules him in front of his peers and jumps at the chance to criticize his work. She’s a bully. And she’s setting up a co-worker to fail.

For all the publicity surrounding schoolyard bullying, and the impact it can have on a child’s emotional well being, there’s precious little discourse about the equally pervasive problem of bullies in the workplace. Often, it’s in the exit interview where employers get their first hint that something is wrong, since that’s the first time many feel emboldened enough to speak freely. At that point, it’s often too late to save that employee, but it does give employers a chance to turn things around for the rest of their workforce.

Managers who seek to sabotage or humiliate their underlings are a challenge to any organization, but their impact is disproportionate for small businesses, which can ill afford the costly turnover associated with a toxic culture — much less the loss of staff buy-in so critical to an upstart’s survival.

“In a larger corporation, the bully only reaches a small proportion of people, but the effect is magnified in a small company because they touch everyone,” says Gary Namie, president of The Work Doctor in Bellingham, Wash., a consulting firm that helps companies develop anti-bullying policies. “There’s no escape from them and when the target wants to asks for relief there’s no one to go to, so they are much more vulnerable.”

Workplace bullying is a bigger issue than most employers think.

A 2010 survey by Zogby International for the Workplace Bullying Institute found that 35 percent of U.S. workers (an estimated 54 million Americans) have been bullied at some point in their career.

The survey, which notes bullying can occur between co-workers or between a boss and a subordinate, found that 62 percent of bullies were men and 58 percent of targets were women.

The majority (68 percent) of bullying is same-gender harassment, the survey found, noting women bullies target women 80 percent of the time.

“Bullying at work is a widespread problem,” says Joel Neuman, professor of management and organizational behavior at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “It’s not just physical aggression. More often than not it’s psychological or verbal aggression.”

Indeed, workplace bullying takes many forms.

According to Neuman, it is generally defined as any persistent form of aggressive behavior, particularly verbal abuse, which seeks to humiliate, undermine or ostracize another.

Many bullies, for example, take credit for their target’s work, pepper them with trivial tasks, or criticize their performance in front of their peers, making the target appear incompetent.

The Workplace Bullying Institute notes that victims tend not to be the weakest member of the team, but the most veteran and competent person in the workgroup because they are viewed as a perceived threat.

“A very common bullying tactic is social isolation or marginalizing their target by withholding information they need, treating them as a social pariah, or excluding them from social events or work-related functions,” says Neuman.

Eventually, he notes, such behavior creates health problems.

According to the Zogby survey, 45 percent of those who have been bullied at work say they suffer stress-related health problems, including panic attacks, clinical depression, anxiety, and even post-traumatic stress. And they use paid time off frequently for “mental health breaks,” creating a heightened burden for smaller companies that need all hands on deck.

For small business owners, the first step to ferreting out a bully in your office is to recognize the signs. Don’t be fooled, says Namie. Bullies are masters at “managing their impression upwards” and making themselves appear indispensible.

If you notice that one or more of your employees has shifted from enthusiastic and confident to woeful and tentative, it’s time to intervene.

“In a small business, there is no excuse not watching your people closely and knowing their quirks and personalities; how they show loyalty and enthusiasm,” he says. “When a person is targeted by a bully, those things disappear. They start walking on eggshells. They hang their head. They look depressed and powerless.”

Call that employee into your office immediately, says Namie, and discuss candidly what you’ve observed. Ask what you can do to help.

“Targets often feel ashamed so they won’t come out with it right away, but if you make it safe for them to share they will,” says Namie. “You have to do some investigating.”

Indeed, some 40 percent of bullied individuals never tell their employers about the problem, the Zogby survey found.

Part of that reason could be that employees are afraid of their bosses. Paul Hellman, founder of Express Potential, writes that bosses should not underestimate the fear they can instill in employees who are afraid to say the wrong thing. Hellman suggests that bosses can lessen fear by being upfront about what they are asking, and what they expect. And being open to what employees have to say, says Hellman.

If you are certain that a co-worker or manager is bullying someone on your team, separate them from their target right away, either by giving the target (not the bully) some paid time off or moving the target to a different group, says Namie.

“Put the bully to the wall and ask why they did what they did,” said Namie. “Don’t ask ‘if’. Ask, too, how their conduct is related to the interest of the company and make them prove it’s connected to your mission of either profit or public service.”

If they can’t, follow through with disciplinary action — including a written warning, suspension or termination.

Whatever you do, don’t tell the bully and target to work it out on their own.

“If they could have confronted the bully or defended themselves they would have done it already, so telling them to work it out is dooming the person in the one-down position,” says Namie, noting a boss and a subordinate are not on equal footing.

To prevent bullying before it starts, it often helps to draft a code of professional conduct that spells out the kind of behavior you expect from your staff, as well as disciplinary procedures for failure to adhere, says Neuman.

“It’s essential to have some kind of policy in place that defines acceptable and unacceptable conduct,” he says.

For smaller businesses, with fewer resources, though, it can be just as effective to share your expectations with your troops verbally — and unequivocally.

“Declare that you’re not going to tolerate this behavior or put up with it for even a minute,” Namie says. “Tell them that if you see it they’re going to get fired. Whether codified in a policy for done more informally, there needs to be a line drawn in the sand.”

Though the body of research on workplace bullying in the U.S. remains small compared with that of Europe, which has studied the problem for decades, awareness is on the rise.

Over the last few years, in fact, 12 states have introduced legislation based on the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill.

Business owners can put a stop to bullying in their own offices, and do their bottom line a favor, by learning what to look for and how to deal with it when they see it – up to and including sending the bully packing.

“The bully might even be your favorite employee but ultimately, they are just too expensive to keep,” says Namie.

###

Read original article CNBC.com

[See post to watch Flash video]

Stress caused by an abusive manager has a major impact on an employee’s partner, a study has found. This in turn affects the marital relationship and then the worker’s entire family.

The report also showed that the longer a couple had been together, the less impact the abusive boss had on the family.

Some 280 employees and their partners were questioned for the study. Three-quarters had children living with them.

Bullying behaviour was classed as tantrums, rudeness and criticism in public.

Workers were asked how often they had been put down by their manager or had anger directed at them. Their partners were then asked how much tension there was at home and how often the couple argued.

Professor Merideth Ferguson, of Baylor University, in Texas, said: ‘It may be that as supervisor abuse heightens tension in a relationship, the employee is less motivated or able to engage in positive interactions with the partner and other family members.’

The report’s authors said the study highlighted the need for firms to send an unequivocal message to managers that bullying behaviour will not be tolerated.

Professor Dawn Carlson, of Baylor University, in Texas, said: ‘These findings have important implications for organisations and their managers.

‘The evidence highlights the need for organisations to send an unequivocal message to those in supervisory positions that these hostile and harmful behaviours will not be tolerated.

‘Employers must take steps to prevent or stop the abuse and also to provide opportunities for subordinates to effectively manage the fallout of abuse and keep it from affecting their families.

‘Abusive supervision is a workplace reality and this research expands our understanding of how this stress plays out in the employee’s life beyond the workplace.’

via How stress from a bullying boss ‘could harm your marriage’ | Mail Online.

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.

Nasty bosses and mean co-workers can make work a living hell, and working moms are often targets. Here’s what employees and companies need to know about bullying-and how to fight it.

Stephanie Simpson thought she was pretty tough. She felt good about the way she coolly managed a number of hotheaded bosses, many of them elected officials. So when the now 33-year-old mom of two boys became executive assistant to the mayor of a small city north of Seattle, in 2006, she figured she’d handle this job as well as the others. At first it was just the occasional mean crack: In meetings, the mayor would sometimes shut her down with remarks like “Don’t worry about that, it’s above your pay grade” or “I don’t need your opinion.” And when she told him she was pregnant not long after being hired, he snipped, “You should’ve planned better.” When she returned from maternity leave the nasty pokes and pointed personal comments ratcheted up-to the point where co-workers started expressing concern. Her boss insidiously complimented her on her appearance, saying she “looked much better” now that she wasn’t pregnant, and made fun of her full-spectrum “happy light”-even after she explained that it had been prescribed by her doctor to help with postpartum depression. Yelling and swearing became part of his routine, as did calling her with ASAP demands on her lunch hour when she was breastfeeding her son.

The abuse escalated when Stephanie asked to be considered for a promotion, a move that seemed to enrage the mayor, who demanded to know why she wanted the job when she was “doing the mommy thing.” after she returned from her second maternity leave, he refused to acknowledge her presence, communicating with her only through other staffers. “He iced me out completely,” Stephanie says. “He stopped including me in meetings and told key people not to talk to me. He told them I had ‘baby brain.’ For the first time, I was afraid. I couldn’t do my job. I felt confused and crazy.”

Bullying isn’t only a schoolyard problem. It’s raging in the workplace as well: “Thirty-five percent of all adult American workers have directly experienced bullying-that’s 54 million people,” says Gary Namie, co-founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute WBI in Bellingham, WA. Women are bullied more than men, and when it comes to working moms, the stat leaps. in a new Working Mother survey, 55 percent of our readers say they’ve been bullied at work. A tight economy and tough job market only fuel this problem, as supervisors become frantic and stressed about making their numbers and workers shy away from speaking out against abuse for fear of job loss. Bullies can be bosses, yes, but so too can co-workers or even direct reports. What distinguishes them is their pattern of repeated personal attacks, from verbal abuse and yelling to work sabotage see “Bullying Defined”. For those who experience it, workplace bullying can be worse than sexual harassment-a kind of “stealth” abuse that’s just as damaging to its victims but rarely addressed in corporate policy. What’s more, except in extreme cases, workplace bullying is perfectly legal.

Horrible Bosses

When Nicole Richter took a job as an executive assistant to the head of a family-owned Fort Worth bank-holding company in 2008, the HR staffer told her she should run the other way; her new boss was notorious for going through aides like Kleenex. Nicole figured she could handle the challenge—until she was in the thick of it. When the boss was in a bad mood, he’d prowl around picking on people, turning the office into a scene from The Devil Wears Prada, with employees emailing back and forth, “Watch out, he’s coming your way!” but mom of two Nicole, 29, was his primary target. “He’d be nice for a while, then flip, like Jekyll and Hyde,” she says. And when her boss was bad, he was very, very bad: screaming, throwing her work on the floor, saying she was stupid, accusing her of mistakes he’d made himself, criticizing her relentlessly while refusing to tell her how to make things right.

The abuse got worse, to the point of extreme, after Nicole and her boss moved to a new office isolated from the rest of the staff. One day, he asked her to get a particular book for him. She looked everywhere but could only find one with a similar title. When she offered it to him, he took it from her and shoved it into her stomach so hard that she stumbled backward. “I was absolutely stunned,” Nicole recounts. “I went to the HR person, who said she’d seen this kind of thing happen over and over for years.”

Nicole’s experience is classic. while workplace bullying is multidirectional—a top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer phenomenon—bosses are the perpetrators as much as 80 percent of the time. “Research shows that when you give people more power, they become more focused on their own needs and may act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” says Stanford University professor Robert Sutton, PhD, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss. That cluelessness and lack of empathy can devolve into bullying. and it’s not just men: Women make up 38 percent of workplace bullies, according to the WBI study—and they target other women 80 percent of the time. In our Working Mother survey, more than half of respondents say women are more likely to be the bully at work—and that working moms are the most likely targets among all women.

Mean Girls

Jeannie Flynn* is a teacher, one who teaches kids at her suburban Iowa middle school not to bully. “But bullying is ongoing in my own department,” she says, describing a clique of teachers who, like the mean girls in the movie, have used gossip and exclusionary tactics to create an in-group that leaves those who aren’t like them out in the cold. “We’re supposed to function as a team, all working together and sharing materials. But it doesn’t work like that,” says Jeannie. The reason for the clique’s power, she believes, comes down to money and social status in their small community, as well as time. Jeannie, 32, has a 2-year-old daughter and a husband who often travels for work, so she finds it harder to stay late or come into school on the weekends, as the clique members do. “I tell my students they don’t have to be somebody they’re not just to have friends,” she says, sadly. “But that’s something I’m struggling with myself.”

Women are thought to be better team players than men—but not if they’re bullies, says Namie. “Women bullies tend to direct their energies toward splitting up the work team, using divide-and-conquer games or pitting worker against worker. and they tend to be hypercritical.”

Sick Workplaces

“It was like an abusive marriage,” says Traci Carter of her previous job as a child protective services investigator in Florida. “Everybody I worked with felt beat up.” the intensity and sheer volume of the agency’s work turned supervisors into ineffective allies at best, and screaming, vicious-email-shooting monsters at worst. But Traci, 33, a single mom of one now living in New York City, managed to handle the situation—until she got pregnant. “Our days started at 8 a.m. and often didn’t end till 10 p.m. or later,” she explains. “We were on call, and sometimes the call came in the middle of the night. Once I was pregnant, the job became unbelievably difficult.” She asked to be reassigned to office work, but her supervisor told her there was nothing she could do. at seven months into her pregnancy, she found herself responding to emergency calls in terrible neighborhoods in the dead of night—alone—and more than once she was threatened. “I told my boss, but she was pregnant, too, and as stressed out as the rest of us, because she was getting beat up by her boss. All she’d say was ‘Work it out!’ ”

Bullies aren’t just individuals with a behavior problem, says Namie. “The workplace culture is the most important precipitating factor in bullying. decades of research show an individual’s free will is easily trumped by circumstances engineered by others. We react and respond to situations—but we forget how much they elicit our behavior. The work environment, with its rewards or negative sanctions, informs the way people act more often than staff personalities do.”

Sadly, most organizations have yet to address bullying directly. Only 3 percent have an anti-bullying policy in place and faithfully enforce it, says namie. organizational cultures that don’t discourage bullying, or that even tacitly encourage it (using harshness as a “motivational” tool, for instance), pay a steep price. Even mild forms of negative behavior, if they become a pattern, can lead to major consequences, according to Christine Pearson, PhD, and Christine Porath, PhD, authors of The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It. In their nine years of research, they found that about half of affected employees will cut back on work effort or time, a third will decrease quality, two thirds will waste work time worrying about the offender, and one in eight will quit the job. If, say, 1 percent of the employees at one large computer company were to experience uncivil behavior, the cost would run about $12 million a year.

The effects of bullying on children have made headlines in recent months, but workplace bullying is an issue that doesn’t receive much attention. Yet, it’s a growing problem, partly because Internet cyber-bullying can reach beyond the workplace walls and into employee’ private lives.

Costs of bullying

According to surveys by the Work­­place Bullying Institute (www.workplacebullying.org) and the Employment Law Alliance (www.employmentlawalliance.com), between 33% and 44% of employees have experienced bullying at work.

Victims can suffer physical or emo­­tional harm that interferes with their professional and personal lives. Employers, in turn, may suffer the costs associated with decreased attendance, increased medical and insurance claims, legal claims and lost productivity and opportunity costs resulting from demoralized and distracted workers.

Studies also show that employees working in intimidating environments are less likely to speak out about po­­­­tentially dangerous or otherwise costly errors.

All of this can affect an employer’s bottom line and competitive edge.

Will legislation help?

A movement to legislate against workplace bullying is gaining mo­­men­­tum. In May 2011, Min­ne­sota became the 21st state to propose a workplace bullying law. While no state has yet passed legislation, New York came close last year.

Advocates of such legislation argue it is needed to address legal gaps. While the most extreme bullying and bullying based on protected class status may be unlawful under current laws, it is generally not against the law to be an equal opportunity jerk.

Opponents of anti-bullying legislation counter that it is impossible to adequately define illegal bullying and that the bar for claims will be set too low. Employers, mindful that it’s impossible to ensure universal workplace civility, worry that anti-bullying laws will generate a flood of frivolous litigation stemming from legitimate actions, such as efforts to discipline poor performers.

Despite the ongoing debate, the proposed legislation in New York drew bipartisan support. That proposed law, which was similar to legislation proposed in other states, required that bullying be severe, carried out with malice and unrelated to any legitimate business interest. It also modeled employer obligations after existing obligations under discrimination laws, providing employers with legal defenses for their efforts to prevent and promptly respond to bullying. It is not yet clear whether workplace bullying legislation will be en­­acted, but New York’s near-passage of a law has led some commentators to predict such legislation is in our future.

There appears to be public support for such legislation. In 2010, surveys by the Workplace Bullying Institute and the Sunday newspaper magazine Parade indicated that as many as 90% of respondents favor such legislation.

7 steps to stop bullies

Given these trends, employers should, if they have not already done so, start paying attention—both to get ahead of potential legal obligations and to mitigate the high business costs of bullying.

Some steps employers might consider taking include:

1. Adopt a “no jerks” rule. That’s the first step advocated by Robert Sutton, author of the colorfully titled book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Sutton de­­fines a jerk as someone who oppresses, humiliates, de-energizes or belittles a subordinate or a colleague.

[WBI comment: Better and more practical still is the employer roadmap found in The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels & Snakes from Killing Your Organization.]

2. Adopt and en­­force an anti-bullying policy. Such a policy should include reporting and response procedures akin to those used for har­assment. To avoid contract claims, however, policies should include contract disclaimers.

[WBI: Anderson is right about this. See our approach at Work Doctor, Inc.]

3. Avoid hiring bullies in the first place. Including potential peers and subordinates—not just potential managers—in the interview process may help prevent bullies from being hired. Studies indicate that bullies often target those with less power, so peers and subordinates may be better positioned to spot troubling behavior in interviews.

4. Treat bullying as a performance problem. Don’t reward or promote bullies. Doing so sends a message that bullying is accepted and not a bar to success. Instead, reform or get rid of bullies whenever possible. No matter how valuable an employee seems, the real and significant costs of bullying, if quantified, often outweigh a bully’s perceived value.

5. Train your employees on the company’s expectations regarding bullying. You might also train em­­ployees on how to engage in constructive, respectful confrontations and debates.

6. Use available counseling resources. Those might include anger-management counseling and employee assistance programs.

[WBI: This advice is much shakier.]

7. Take steps to prevent violence. Most bullying does not turn violent, but bullying can be a precursor to violence by the bully—or by the ­bully’s frustrated and angry target. Consider forming a threat-assessment team to address violence risks as they may arise.

###

Author: Megan Anderson, Esq., is a principal at Gray Plant Mooty in Minneapolis. She concentrates her practice in employment law counseling and litigation. Contact her at (612) 632-3004 or megan.anderson@gpmlaw.com.

Kudos to sportswriter Dave Zirin, always a cut above, for pointing out that the highest paid players were not willing to allow owners to contract future and discarded players for as little as $75,000 a year. Yes that means the richest among them (count Kobe in) stood unanimously to stick up for future generations.

Zirin wrote:

Maybe they’re fighting for a reason so basic, we’ve missed it. Maybe it’s because they overwhelmingly come from the ranks of the working poor, have career lengths of six years and have been facing off against the ranks of true generational, aristocratic wealth in all its arrogance, personified by the snide, oozing contemptuousness of David Stern. Maybe they’re just tired of being treated as less than men by the people who write their checks.

Maybe they just hate to lose. NBA players: welcome to the 99 percent.

So, don’t dump on the players for having a strong union willing to work on members’ behalf. That’s what all bullied targets want who have a union. Work for me. Look out for my benefit.

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

Order between Nov. 21 and 30, receive a $5 discount ($34.95). See the product description at this site.

Bullying isn’t just confined to teens; adults in the workplace are targeted, too.

I recently met a remarkable woman who has a lot to say about a kind of adult bullying that hits straights as well as LGBTS, that hurts men as well as women, that harms older and less connected workers the most, and that is so pervasive it’s called “The Silent Epidemic.”

Esque Walker, who lives in Corsicana and drove up to Dallas recently to give a Saturday morning presentation on workplace bullying, has an undergraduate degree in health information management, a masters in healthcare/health information management and a doctorate in public policy and administration.

She also has a score of certifications and areas of expertise.

She has been working diligently for the passage of the Texas Healthy Workplace Bill, authored by David Yamada on behalf of the Workplace Bullying Institute. It’s hard going, as you can imagine.

So far, Dr. Walker has been unable to even get a meeting with Gov. Rick Perry. Perhaps he is too busy campaigning. More likely, if his many aides have put her name and credentials before him, he has retreated into his good-hairyness.

Remember: He scraped through Texas A&M with Ds; she has a Ph.D.

But the governor is not the only impediment to getting this bill in place. So far, Dr. Walker and her associates have spoken with a great many Texas state senators and representatives. Not one has agreed to sponsor the bill.

Dr. Walker was herself the target of workplace bullying some years ago. But instead of simply taking the abuse — as most women and many men have done over the years — she aligned herself with others who understood the issues involved.

So, what are the issues?

To begin, Dr. Walker asserts that adult bullying is based on the bully’s need for power and control. It’s closely linked with competitiveness; the bully may resent the target’s appearance, education, personality or any number of facets of the other person’s being. He or she definitely does not want the target to advance.

So how do you know you are targeted, assuming the bully does not actually taunt or threaten you, as happens so often to children and teens?

You start with power disparity; the bully may have a higher status, longer tenure or perhaps corporate protectors to give him or her a sense of strength.

Then you look at four other criteria: repetition, duration, intensity and escalation.

Workplace bullying, says Dr. Walker, usually plays out in a predictable way. First, the bully criticizes you or gets someone above you in the pecking order to do so. Next, the bully involves others, usually four to six people who may see you as a threat or just want to curry favor with the boss.

Then, no matter what you do, it is not enough or not good enough, and coworkers are not allowed to “help” you. Eventually you are fired — after being told, “You are not a team player.”


Here’s how it looks by the numbers:

• 62 percent of bullies are men (who may bully other men, straight women or, of course, LGBTs).

• 58 percent of targets are women.

• 18 percent of adult suicides in the European Union are attributed to workplace bullying.

• An estimated 1 million Texans are bullied at work every year.

As the economy has worsened, pushing out older workers has become the norm; counselors report the escalation, although putting a number to the pain is virtually impossible.
So what to do if you are the target?

First, document everything, with specifics of person, time, place and comment or event. Second, do not go to your organization’s human resources person or department; HR works for the company and could care less about you.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or your union representative — if applicable — can help; the latter may be especially important in education and medicine, where power disparities and bullying are common.

The Workplace Bullying Institute (WorkPlaceBullying.org) publishes a newsletter and other materials that can offer insight plus specifics. The Dallas Public Library has books by Gary Namie and Ruth Namie, Ph.D.’s known for their groundbreaking research and writing on workplace “jerks, weasels and snakes.”

And of course Out & Equal has done and continues doing great work on behalf of our community.

Final thoughts: The worst that can happen is that Texas will continue to allow vast amounts of cruelty in offices, factories, fields and stores. The best that could happen is that our next Legislature will pass the Healthy Workplace Bill, recognizing the problem, mandating anti-bullying education, and allowing victims to sue.

Meanwhile, if a workplace bully is making you frightened and depressed, find a counselor in whom you can confide. And don’t wait ’til tomorrow. Do it today.

###
Read another story about Esque Walker

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

While at the HWB website, click on the NY State page to see that Assembly bill A 4258 has 74 sponsors!!!

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

Registration details.

Playback Sessions: Friday, November 18, 2011 to
 Thursday, November 24, 2011, 9:00 a.m. – midnight EST

About a third of the U.S. workforce has fallen victim to workplace bullying. Learning to mitigate the problem means creating a more open work environment and crafting a stern anti-bullying policy.

The image of the schoolyard bully is heavily ingrained in our culture. Name a television show centered on American youth within the last half century, and it’s more than likely that at least one episode will be dedicated to the smaller, scrawnier kid doing his very best to avoid — or in some instances, defeat — the intimidating figure.

While the notion of the big, bad bully has been spotlighted in a number of television shows and movies, the practice in real life is undeniably serious. At the school level, instances of bullying have been attributed with causing a range of societal harms: absenteeism, violence, youth suicide and the like.

Although constant attention is given to youth-related bullying at schools, the less-talked-about form of bullying is that which occurs in the workplace.

According to a 2010 survey from the Workplace Bullying Institute, a research firm and consultancy on the subject, 35 percent of U.S. workers — or an estimated 53.5 million Americans — have experienced some form of bullying in the workplace, while another 15 percent claimed to have witnessed it.

“[It’s] epidemic; however, it is still a primarily un-discussable topic in organizations, and that’s why so many people are driven out in silence and without acknowledgement,” said Gary Namie, the director of the Workplace Bullying Institute and a trained social psychologist and business consultant.

Different from workplace harassment, which is generally considered a form of illegal discrimination, bullying is “often directed at someone a bully feels threatened by,” according to an April 2011 report by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries titled “Workplace Bullying and Disruptive Behavior: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

“The target often doesn’t even realize when they are being bullied because the behavior is covert, through trivial circumstances and isolating actions that occur behind closed doors … While harassment is illegal, bullying in the workplace is not,” the report states.

In fact, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute, bullying is four times more prevalent at work than harassment.

“We define it as abusive conduct — health-harming, abusive conduct that takes the form of repeated mistreatment [or] verbal abuse or threats, intimidation or humiliation,” Namie said.

Aside from the negative impact workplace bullying has on people — high stress, absence, reduced self-esteem, depression, sleep problems — bullying can cause turnover in an organization as well as a loss of productivity. High costs associated with investigations of potential ill treatment or, in some cases, legal action are also common.

The Workplace Bullying Institute breaks workplace bullying into different categories.

• The “screaming meanies.” These office bullies may be yelling or cursing at their target in public. Namie dubbed this the “Bobby Knight” approach in reference to the famously irate and emotional former head coach of Indiana University’s men’s basketball team.

• The constant critic. This individual tries behind closed doors to distort the appraisal or evaluation of a particular employee, claiming that the target is incompetent. “That starts to shatter the person’s sense of integrity and they’ll fall apart in a matter of a few months,” Namie said.

• The “control freak.” Oftentimes bullies deem themselves the “gatekeeper” to all resources; they in turn bully by refusing to allow access to these resources to certain employees, potentially hindering those employees’ work performance as a result.

This begs the question: Why hasn’t more attention been placed on the issue? For one, bullying isn’t technically illegal, and in many of the cases may be difficult to detect — the culprit will almost always deny any accusation. But another reason may be political: Those in management positions often end up taking on the role of the bully, so employees may be afraid to report instances they deem as bullying so as not to lose favor with their superiors.

This is something many employees may not want to do, given the frail economic environment. With the job market in disarray, employees may be staying in a poor job situation longer, leaving them subject to more abuse and harm on behalf of a workplace bully. Namie said in the past, it was more common for abused employees to quit and take their talents elsewhere.

Additionally, equally due to the scarcity of jobs, workers may be growing meaner at work, trying to blow down anyone in their path if it means greater job security and standing. “An otherwise very kind and gentle person [could become] a wholly terror at work if they believe that’s what it’s going to take to stay employed and get ahead,” he said.
Hampering Job Growth?
 

Others claim that a more acute form of workplace bullying takes place after an employee leaves. This may occur when a prospective employer conducts reference checks, and the former employer offers negative feedback.

Most companies have a policy where only titles and dates of employment of a former employee can be verified upon a reference check. The idea is that any other feedback — whether it is positive or negative — could create potential legal trouble for the company.

Still, many fail to abide by this, harming unemployed individuals’ chances of getting back into the workforce, said Jeff Shane, vice president of Allison & Taylor, a reference checking company.

Shane’s firm gets hired by clients, many of whom are unemployed, to conduct reference checks to make sure former supervisors are not giving negative feedback to potential employers. Those who do offer negative feedback — and whose corporate policy is strictly against the practice — are documented and might receive a “cease and desist” letter, threatening further legal action. Even if such unfavorable information is factual, if the company has a strict policy on the matter, legal action can be taken, Shane said.

“We have found, unfortunately, that about half of the thousands of checks we conduct do indeed come back with some form of negative information,” he said.
Being Proactive Pays Off
 

Preventing traditional workplace bullying, however, is more complex. According to the Washington State Department report, employees can regain control of the situation by first recognizing or acknowledging that the bullying is taking place. The report then recommends keeping detailed documentation on specific occurrences.

As for talent managers, encouraging office open-door policies and starting awareness campaigns on the subject is a starting point. Crafting detailed and compliant anti-bullying policies that differ from a firm’s anti-harassment policy is also one way to start to mitigate the problem, the report said.

Namie, through the Healthy Workforce Campaign, has been championing that a bill get passed to make bullying in the workforce unlawful. The bill, titled the “Healthy Workplace Bill,” has been introduced in 21 states since 2003. Some states have taken more kindly to the bill than others, but it has yet to pass. “We’re getting closer,” Namie said.

Despite efforts to get legal action taken on workplace bullying, prevention must go further than policy or law. The root of the problem is cultural. Organizations need to take a hard look and evaluate if the work environment they’ve laid out is enabling the behavior.

“Until the executive team is willing to say, ‘We don’t need to be abusive to be successful,’ [anti-bullying programs] will go nowhere,” Namie said.

Frank Kalman is an associate editor of Talent Management magazine. He can be reached at fkalman@talentmgt.com.

Read the summary of the British study | Read the 2010 WBI U.S. Survey results

1. Sexual harassment violates state and federal laws. Harassers pose a legal liability to employers. Therefore, employers will pay cash settlements to avoid court battles and to silence complainants. If you are bullied but there is an underlying gender or race or age difference, do not ignore it. Forget bullying and use the law that exists to compel the employer to pay attention.

1a. Bullying at work is status-blind harassment. It does not require that the recipient be a member of a group protected by anti-discrimination laws. It is more prevalent and often is experienced in addition to illegal harassment, but it is not yet illegal in any state in the U.S. Therefore, contrary to point #1, employers do not face the same risks of defeat in court, so rarely is a bullied target ever paid.

2. Harassment complainants are paid settlements and typically fired for having dared to complain. Before the separation, though, they almost always suffer retaliation for having the courage to complain.

2a. Bullied targets are fired, constructively discharged (made more miserable than a reasonable person should be expected to tolerate), and thrown out the door without getting a penny. Their post-complaint retaliation led to nothing positive for them.

3. Harassers typically keep their jobs or are promoted. They are allowed to deny their actions because settlement agreements always begin with a clause stating that there is no admission of guilt.

3a. Bullies, in all but 4% of cases, keep their jobs or are promoted. Like harassers, they abuse with impunity.

4. Sexually harassed workers who agree to take cash not only lose their jobs, but they are “gagged” by the terms of the agreement to never speak about their experiences again. This allows harassers to become serial harassers. With the benefit of silence, other unsuspecting employees have to endure the degradation because the employer has not made the harasser quit. The complaint to settlement cycle is repeated, costing the employer more money just to retain the a-hole harasser.

4a. In the rare event that a bullied person wins a severance agreement, she or he is typically gagged. However, by keeping your head during the emotional turmoil that swirls around the complaint-retaliation-settlement sequence of events, you can tweak the agreement terms. Agree to never divulge “the terms of the agreement.” But limit the gag clause to not saying that you received a paltry $35K or $45K as did the Cain complainants. Otherwise, you are free to tell the world how that employer back your bully-harasser and made your life hell.

5. Harassers lie to victims, to their bosses, to legal counsel, to counselors, to investigators, to arbitrators, when being deposed, when testifying in court, to judges, and to juries.

5a. Bullies do the same.

6. Harassment victims are not believed, even when they were paid settlements because the employer feared the legitimacy of their claim. Employers will always say that legal counsel made them pay simply because it is cheaper to settle than to take the battle to court. The truth is, employers can wear down any plaintiff who challenges them. They only pay settlements when they think they will lose.

6a. Bullied targets are viewed by the employer and alarmingly by the public as the “troublemakers.” Why? All they did was insist on dignified treatment at work. Not special treatment. To not be treated abusively.

“Ill treatment” included: unreasonable treatment (reported by 47%), denigration and disrespect (40%), 33% experienced both unreasonable treatment and denigration and disrespect, and 6% experienced violence.

The news headline was that “one million UK workers have experienced violence at work.” Using the prevalence estimates from this new study and Office of National Statistics’ number of private and public sectors workers (29.1 million in July), we arrive at the numbers of people experiencing:

- Unreasonable treatment: 13.6 million
- Denigration and disrespect: 11.6 million
- Violence: 1.7 million
- Both unreasonable and denigrating and disrespectful treatment: 9.6 million
- All three categories: 1.4 million
- Denigration & disrespect and violence: 291,000

The questions which appear below included a modified list of items from the Negative Acts Questionnaire which is a checklist of behaviors that academics use to operationally define bullying. In other words, rather than ask people if they think they were bullied (which actually leads to an underreporting because research shows that people do not want to admit it happens to them), the surveyers relied on the behaviors checked to determine if the respondents were bullied.

With respect to individual survey items, 29% of the sample were given unmanageable workloads or impossible deadlines and 27% had their opinions and views ignored. Employers, managers or supervisors were responsible in over two-thirds of incidents. Coworkers were the primary culprits when withholding information which affected performance.

The two most frequent denigration and disrespect experiences were to be shouted at or having someone lose their temper (24%) and being treated in a disrespectful or rude way (23%). More than 20% of people experienced three or more types of misconduct in this category. Regarding sources, managers were responsible in 40% of cases, in 27% of cases clients, customers or the public were perpetrators, while coworkers were 22% of the sample.

In this British study, men in the middle of their careers were the most likely targets. Disrespect rose as the size of organizations rose.

Targets of disrespect were likely to have psychological disabilities. Of course, the researchers made clear in the report that whether the psychological problems were the cause of the disrespect or the result of it could not be determined. Disrespect for this group of targets came from the public in half of the cases and from coworkers in the other half.

Gay, lesbian and bisexual employees were as likely to be disrespected at the same rate as for people with disabilities. In addition, LGBT workers were the workers subjected to the most violence.

The combination of unreasonableness and disrespect (reported by 33% of the sample) is the closest approximation to workplace bullying. The antisocial behaviors depicted by items in those two categories, derived from the NAQ, exclude physical violence. Bullying necessarily stops short of battery — physical violence. The UK prevalence is nearly identical to the US prevalence (35% in the 2010 WBI US Survey and 37% in the 2007 WBI Survey). Both studies were scientific national samples from their respective nations.

Four case studies of organizations are included in the Report. One: a large financial services company; Two: a large National Health Service public agency; Three: a logistics and communication company; and Four: a global engineering company. Each of these anonymous employers offer examples of how and why having policies to address bullying is inadequate.

The final section of the Report focuses on prevention and intervention strategies. In this regard, the authors show remarkable insight that is all too rare among academic researchers. First, they rightly conclude that the notion that employers can find an easy “one size fits all” methodology is wrong. An over-emphasis on policies and enforcement, the HR-led solution, overlooks informal solution opportunities. We heartily concur. Policies, the “lines in the sand,” are necessary, but insufficient if not supplemented by true organizational commitment.

The second major conclusion is that ill treatment thrives when managers in the trenches fail to intervene or to manage properly. Managers can and must stop it. When management abdicates responsibility, ill treatment flourishes. This is the same conclusion we draw in our book, The Bully-Free Workplace (Wiley, 2011).

We are proud to count Prof. Duncan Lewis, co-author of the study, from the Business School at the University of Plymouth, as a WBI colleague.

Download the Report.

Below is a result table showing the results for each of the 21 questions in the British Workplace Behaviour Survey.

November 15, 2011, from 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, ET
Hosted by BNA, Bureau of National Affairs. CPE & HRCI credits available.

Register online or call 800.372.1033, option 6, then option 1

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.

29% chose the option: “Bullying becomes illegal (a law is passed)”

28% chose the option: “The bully is punished or terminated”

13% chose the option: “The bully quits”

13% chose the option: “I’m out of the situation permanently under any circumstance”

11% chose the option: “I get separated from the stressful situation/location”

7% chose the option: “I get a severance/separation agreement to leave”

Note: the percentages do not total 100% because respondents could choose more than one option.

Interpretation

The two options tied as the most frequent were the delight from seeing the bully punished/terminated and finally having a law against workplace bullying passed. Both are possible, but difficult to accomplish. First, in only 3% of bullying cases are bullies terminated or even punished, according to a 2009 WBI online study. They bully with impunity, no personal accountability.

Second, we know that according to the 2010 WBI national survey, 64% of the public supports the passage of anti-bullying laws for the workplace. At the time of this Instant Poll, 11 states did have current bills. (Visit the Healthy Workplace Bill website to track progress and to see which state may become the first in the U.S. to pass the legislation.) It is heartening to see the level of support for a law from those with experience being bullied. They know more than others how much having a law might have helped them.

Targets, known to be 98% of the people who complete surveys on the WBI website, may be holding out for rare events before they allow themselves to say “I won.”

It is not surprising that targets, hungry for justice, define negative consequences for the bully as the standard for success in 41% of cases. Either the bully quits or is punished or terminated. Again, in the real workplace, these outcomes are rare.

About one-third (31%) considered getting away from the toxic, health-injuring situation a victory. Separation is the most likely ending of the bullying (66% of the time for women, 49% for men, according to the 2010 WBI national data) — whether voluntary or as the result of target termination or constructive discharge (being driven out against their will).

From our experience at WBI meeting and coaching thousands of bullied targets, we know that in order for people to move on to their personal post-bullying lives, they must give highest priority to their health. Employers do not want to provide the safety required to work in abuse-free environments. So, it is important for individuals to reclaim control over their safety. If that means getting out, it can be perceived as having “won.”

The most beneficial separation is one in which the employer sends you off with a severance agreement. Only 7% think this connotes “victory.” In our experience, this is often the best outcome ever possible. Perhaps targets are not even thinking they can ask for severance. But you always should. In fact, demand severance for your years of loyal, excellent service. You are not choosing to leave. Your productivity has been prevented by the bully. For this, the employer should pay.

Severances are larger when there is a component of illegal discrimination among the tactics. Even without a basis to threaten a lawsuit, you can still demand severance. Don’t leave without trying.

Conclusion

Bullied targets, the majority of whom lose their jobs, are waiting for rare adverse consequences for their bully before they feel that they can claim “victory.” A less attractive set of options, though much more likely to happen, involving separation ranked second. Targets chose separation with severance as the least likely way to define “victory,” despite the positive benefits it carries for targets. The survey findings suggest that targets are unnecessarily hard on themselves waiting on unlikely outcomes before they believe they have “won.”

Note: This survey was an online, non-scientific poll. Characteristics of respondents necessarily restrict extrapolation of results to only bullied targets and not to the general population.

Our Reluctance to Help the Less Fortunate Than Ourselves

Two authors of an academic paper wrote an article for non-scientists in Scientific American called the Last Place Aversion Paradox: The surprising psychology of the Occupy Wall Street protests. The authors note that since the recession began in 2008, public support for economic redistribution (raising the minimum wage) has fallen.

I describe the paradox in this Podcast.

Download Podcast 21 (in .mp3 format)

Simply put, people near the bottom of a distribution are the LEAST likely to agree to help those at the bottom. Seems being next-to-last triggers fears that if those below receive a helping hand, they themselves will be passed up and become the new bottom. It’s an aversion to being last. That fear makes the next-to-last group the most selfish, the least generous.

You can read the research article: “Last-place aversion”: Evidence and Redistributive Implications by I. Kuziemko, R.W. Buell, T. Reich & M.I. Norton in draft manuscript form.

Equally sad is other 2011 research that found that group members choose to banish altruists from their groups even though altruists contribute more and take less than others. They do this because altruists, the givers, raise the ethical standard to a higher level than the group can tolerate. By comparison, regular group members look more selfish, so they kick out their more valuable members who pose an imagined threat.

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.

For HR or anyone conducting post-complaint investigations to accurately get to the bottom of bullying incidents, that person must look beyond the target for work environment factors, including the bully’s ability to unilaterally conduct a campaign of interpersonal destruction without interference from bosses. Unfortunately, flawed and deceitful investigations do not make the effort to get beyond the obvious. And the most obvious and observable factor is the target, the individual. That’s why they are typically blamed and the bully held blameless.

In attribution jargon, intangible work environment factors are less salient when compared to looking at a real person, the target, in this case. The bias is called actor-observer. Actors, the people to whom things are being done see the environment (external to them) as causal. Observers, commit the fundamental attribution error and see the person as causing (and thus deserving) the misfortune.

Another attributional bias is gender bias. Decades ago, a key study demonstrated that both men and women were more likely to explain success attributable to internal (personal, dispositional) factors when the actor was male and attributable to external (circumstances made success easy) factors when the actor was female. In other words, men got personal credit for brilliance, while women were either lucky or had an easier time of it.

I was disappointed to read in a Psychology Today blog by Azadeh Aalai about a 2011 study that found

Men in typically female roles such as nurse benefit from the glass escalator effect: They’re rated as more competent, more likable, less hostile, and more deserving of promotion than men in ‘male’ positions. Women who jettison tradition for jobs like VP of finance, however, are ranked negatively across all measures—and perceived as less deserving of promotion.

Women are known to experience the limiting glass ceiling effect. Aalai writes that women constitute 66% of the workforce but hold only 15% of senior positions. Women still make only 75.5 cents for every dollar that men earn (a stagnancy since the 1990′s).

I’m saddened that no matter how competent a woman is, she is held to a different, and perhaps unattainable, standard than for a man. Worse is that men actually get a boost from breaking the gender stereotype role.

This is worse than economic stagnancy. It’s a cultural unwillingness to learn from generations of bright women who succeed. Much of the political dialogue is regressive, suggesting that a return to the “good old days” is desirable. Well, I don’t think for many people, the “old days” ever passed. They are still here. Women are kept in check while men are given free reign to break boundaries.

Harry Chapin, the late folkie, in his song Why Do the Little Girls about disparate socialization of boys and girls, wrote “the girls were told to reach the shelves while the boys were reaching stars.”

Girls

The cited research finding came from the article Hirsch, M.L. (2011 October). Gender Contender: The ups and downs of flouting gender norms at work. Psychology Today, 50-51.

I found “a zany brainy look” at the serious subject of gender bias from the Center for WorkLife Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law. It’s called Gender Bias Bingo! Download it. GBB’s glossary of terms is below.

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.

It reminds us all that bullies erode profits and prevent balanced budgets because of their meddling. Their misconduct leads to avoidable:
- turnover of the wrong people (the skilled and threatening (to the bullies) ones),
- absenteeism for mental health days,
- presenteeism by the resentful,
- increased healthcare utilization,
- skyrocketing workers comp and disability insurance claims, and
- litigation expenses (defense and settlement costs).

Available as a button or magnet.

Illegitimi non carborundum, Latin for Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down (well, close enough)

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

by Erika C. Collins, New York Law Journal, Oct. 24, 2011

The United States has had status-based harassment and discrimination laws in place for decades, well in advance of most other countries. Though the United States has taken several measures to protect those who are harassed in the workplace based on “protected categories,”(1) it has not introduced legislation to assist those who are “bullied” in the workplace, but do not have such a protected status on which to base a claim. Recent surveys indicate that a significant portion of U.S. workers may fall into this category; 35 percent of U.S. workers reported experiencing workplace bullying, the majority of which was same-gender harassment.(2)

Currently, there is no state or federal law to fill this gap in coverage. The first anti-bullying piece of legislation, the “Healthy Workplace Bill” (HWB), was introduced in California in 2003. Since then, 21 other states, including New York, have proposed bills based on the HWB, though none have yet been enacted. The New York State Legislature, however, is considering such a bill. A bill establishing “a civil cause of action for employees who are subjected to an abusive work environment” provides a remedy for victims of harassment that is not based on a protected category and holds employers civilly liable for maintaining abusive work environments.(3) If the bill is passed into law, New York will become the first state in the country to recognize a cause of action for workplace bullying, though several states have considered such legislation in the past.

Other countries have been more proactive in combating workplace bullying. In particular, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France and Japan have introduced new legislation or have interpreted existing legislation to address bullying in the workplace.(4) This article summarizes New York’s proposed bill. It also analyzes workplace bullying laws in place in Sweden, the UK and France as examples of treatment of workplace bullying outside the United States. Finally, this article provides recommendations to multinational employers that are faced with complying with developing bullying laws.

Healthy Workplace Bill

The New York State Legislature introduced an anti-bullying bill in 2010, which passed in the Senate,(5) but was put on hold in the Assembly. In early 2011, an identical bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly and Senate,(6) and is currently under consideration. Supporters of the proposed legislation are hopeful that New York will be the first state to pass it, prodding other states to follow its lead.(7)

The bill would amend the New York Labor Law by providing legal redress for employees who are subjected to an “abusive work environment,” which exists when an employee is “subjected to abusive conduct that is so severe that it causes physical or psychological harm.”(8) The bill defines “abusive conduct,” as “conduct, with malice, taken against an employee by an employer or another employee in the workplace, that a reasonable person would find to be hostile, offensive and unrelated to the employer’s legitimate business interests.”(9)

A single act will not constitute abusive conduct unless it is “especially severe or egregious,”(10) similar to the standard for hostile work environment claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.(11) Furthermore, the bill requires employees to notify their employers of the abusive conduct.(12) After receiving such notice, employers must eliminate the abusive conduct, and may not retaliate against individuals who participated in the complaint process.(13)

The bill does provide employers with two alternative affirmative defenses. First, an employer may have an affirmative defense against a claim if it can demonstrate that it exercised reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct the abusive conduct and the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of the appropriate preventative or corrective opportunities that it provided.(14) This defense is not available if the abusive conduct culminated in an adverse employment decision with respect to the complaining employee (e.g., termination or demotion); however, the employer can assert an alternative defense that any such decision was consistent with the employer’s legitimate business interests.(15)

The remedies available under the bill include reinstatement, removal of the offending party from the complainant’s work environment, reimbursement for lost wages and medical expenses, compensation for emotional distress, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees.(16) However, in cases where there was no adverse employment decision, emotional distress damages are capped at $25,000 and punitive damages are not available.(17) As an additional safeguard against unjust enrichment, the bill precludes employees who have collected Workers’ Compensation benefits for conditions arising out of an abusive work environment from bringing a claim pursuant to the law for the same such conditions.(18)

Sweden’s Ordinance

In 1993, Sweden became the first country in the world to enact specific anti-bullying legislation. The Ordinance on Victimization at Work,(19) enacted as part of Sweden’s occupational safety and health laws, offers protection against “victimization,” which it defines as “recurrent reprehensible or distinctly negative actions which are directed against individual employees in an offensive manner and can result in those employees being placed outside the workplace community.”(20)

Unlike New York’s proposed law, the ordinance does not provide a private cause of action for aggrieved employees; instead, it imposes administrative obligations upon employers to prevent victimization, immediately intervene when such misconduct becomes apparent, and attempt to engage in a collaborative process to resolve conflicts.(21) Employers who fail to comply with these obligations may be fined and/or imprisoned for up to one year.(22)

United Kingdom Act

Like the United States, the United Kingdom has not enacted legislation specifically to combat workplace bullying. However, British courts have interpreted an existing anti-stalking law, the Protection from Harassment Act (23) (PHA), as providing redress for victims of workplace bullying.(24) The PHA prohibits individuals from pursuing a course of conduct that either amounts to harassment, or that they should know amounts to harassment.(25)

Courts have interpreted the statute’s vague definition of “harassment” as conduct: (i) occurring on at least two occasions, (ii) targeted at the claimant, (iii) calculated in an objective sense to cause distress, and (iv) that is objectively judged to be oppressive and unreasonable.(26) However, even if the complained of conduct constitutes harassment under this objective test, vicarious liability for the conduct is not automatic; employer liability must be “just and reasonable in the circumstances.”(27) Whether or not an employer has implemented a harassment policy and procedures is one factor courts may consider in determining whether the imposition of vicarious liability is reasonable.(28) This judicial consideration is similar to the first affirmative defense under New York’s proposed law, which is available to employers that take measures to prevent and promptly correct abusive conduct.

There also is a statutory affirmative defense similar to the “legitimate business interests” defense provided in the New York bill, which is available to defendants who can show that the complained of conduct was: (i) pursued to prevent or detect a crime; (ii) legally required; or (iii) reasonable under the circumstances.(29) The PHA provides for remedies similar to those available under the New York bill, including injunctive relief and compensatory and emotional distress damages.(30) Unlike the New York bill, however, there is no cap on the damages that courts may award aggrieved employees. Significantly, a court recently awarded a victim of workplace bullying a record-setting $1.6 million in damages under the PHA.(31)

France’s Law

In 2002, France enacted the Social Modernization Law, which introduced provisions to the French Labor Code that provide civil and criminal penalties for “moral” harassment.(32) The law sets a higher standard for actionable conduct than New York’s proposed legislation does by expressly providing that a single act, regardless of its severity, is not enough to constitute moral harassment.(33) Furthermore, the conduct must have the purpose or effect of degrading the employee’s right to dignity, affecting the employee’s mental or physical health, or compromising the employee’s career.(34) The law places an affirmative obligation on employers to take all necessary actions to prevent moral harassment,(35) and prohibits them from retaliating against employees who report moral harassment or who refuse to be victims of moral harassment.(36)

Labor tribunals have construed the Social Modernization Law as holding employers strictly liable for actionable conduct, even if they implemented measures to prevent moral harassment.(37) Thus, unlike New York’s proposed legislation, there are no affirmative defenses available to employers. The law also provides for the automatic nullification of any employment contract termination resulting from moral harassment.(38) Additionally, labor tribunals have ordered employers to pay damages for breach or “disloyal non-performance” of an employment contract based upon a failure to prevent moral harassment.(39)

Steps Employers Should Take

The practical implications of the global trend aimed at combating workplace bullying are very concerning for both U.S. and multinational employers. To safeguard against litigation and liability for potentially large damage awards, employers should consider taking the following steps:

• Broaden workplace policies to prohibit abusive conduct and retaliation against any employee raising a complaint.

• Include a requirement that employees report abusive conduct, and provide a specific and clear procedure that offers employees multiple avenues to complain about abuse.

• Train all managers on how to handle reports of abusive conduct, and the consequences of retaliation.

• Take immediate and effective action to rectify all retaliation complaints.

• Continually review and, if necessary, revise employment policies to ensure compliance with applicable workplace bullying laws and regulations.

###

Erika C. Collins is a partner at Paul Hastings in New York where she chairs the international employment law practice group. Mina Maisami, an associate with the firm, and Shaira Nanwani, a summer associate with the firm, assisted in writing and editing this article.

Endnotes:

1. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, race, color, religion, sex, and national origin are protected categories. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects workers who are 40 and older from discrimination, and the American with Disabilities Act protects disabled workers. Under the Genetic Information Predisposition Act of 2008, employers are prohibited from using information regarding someone’s genetic predisposition to disease in making employment decisions. Veteran status is also a protected category under the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act. Finally, many states also include sexual orientation as a protected category.

2. Results of the 2010 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey, WORKPLACE BULLYING INSTITUTE, http://www.workplacebullying.org/wbiresearch/2010-wbi-national-survey/ (last visited July 25, 2011).

3. S. 4258, 2011-2012 Reg. Sess. (NY); A. 4258. 2011-2012 Reg. Sess. (NY) See “History of the Healthy Workplace Campaign, HEALTHY WORKPLACE BILL, http://www.healthyworkplacebill.org/states.php (Oct. 4, 2011).

4. See Katherine Lippel, “The Law of Workplace Bullying: An International Overview,” 32 COMP. LAB. L. & POL’Y J. 1, 1 (2010); Jessica A. Clarke, “Beyond Equality? Against the Universal Turn in Workplace Protections,” 89 IND. L.J. 1219, 1259 (2011).

5. Sen. 1823 B, 2010 Sess. (N.Y. 2010).

6. Assemb. 4258, 2011 Sess. (N.Y. 2011); Sen. 4289, 2011 Sess. (N.Y. 2011).

7. See Tina Susman, “State Bills Against Workplace Bullying Gain Traction,” L.A. Times, March 18, 2011.

8. Sen. 4289 §761, 2011 Sess. (N.Y. 2011).

9. Id. (providing the following examples of abusive conduct: “repeated infliction of verbal abuse, such as the use of derogatory remarks, insults and epithets; verbal or physical conduct that a reasonable person would find threatening, intimidating or humiliating; or the gratuitous sabotage or undermining of an employee’s work performance”).

10. Id.

11. See David C. Yamada, “Workplace Bullying and American Employment Law: A Ten-Year Progress Report and Assessment,” 32 COMP. LAB. L. & POL’Y J. 251, 262 (2010) (describing the domestic interdisciplinary coverage of and responses to workplace bullying and discussing decision of the HWB author to base the standard on that of hostile work environment claims).

12. Sen. 4289 §761, 2011 Sess. (N.Y. 2011).

13. Id.

14. Id. §764. This affirmative defense is similar to the Title VII affirmative defense created by the Supreme Court in Burlington Indus. Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742 (2008) and Faragher v. Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998).

15. Id. (providing the following examples of legitimate business interests: “termination or demotion based on the plaintiff’s poor performance,” or a “reasonable investigation of potentially dangerous, illegal or unethical activity”).

16. Id. §766.

17. Id. See also Yamada, supra note 2, at 265 (stating that this safeguard “has the effect of discouraging extensive litigation and promoting quick resolution”).

18. Sen. 4289 §769, 2011 Sess. (N.Y. 2011).

19. SWEDISH NATIONAL BOARD OF OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH, VICTIMIZATION AT WORK, ORDINANCE (Arbetsmiljoverket [AFS] 1993-17) (Swed.).

20. Id. §1.

21. Id. §§4-6. The accompanying guidelines suggest that management set standards for good behavior by example and clearly communicate to employees that victimization in the workplace is unacceptable.

22. See Frank Lorho & Ulrich Hilp, Bullying at Work 15-23 (European Parliament Directorate-Gen. for Research, Working Paper SOCI 108 EN, 2001), available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/workingpapers/soci/pdf/108 en.pdf; Helge Hoel & Stale Einarsen, “The Swedish Ordinance Against Victimization at Work: A Critical Assessment,” 32 COMP. LAB. L. & POL’Y J. 225, 240 (2011).

23. Protection from Harassment Act, 1997, c. 40, §1 (Eng.).

24. See Majrowski v. Guy’s & St. Thomas’s NHS Trust, [2005] EWCA (Civ) 251, ¶56 (Court of Appeal); Green v. DB Group Servs. (U.K.) Ltd., [2006] EWHC 1898 (Q.B.).

25. Protection from Harassment Act, 1997, c. 40, §1 (Eng.).

26. See Susan Harthill, “Bullying in the Workplace: Lessons From the United Kingdom,” 17 MINN. J. INTL L. 247, 285 (2008) (citing Green, [2006] EWHC 1898, ¶ 152).

27. Majrowski, [2005] EWCA (Civ) 251, ¶57.

28. Id. ¶59.

29. PHA §1(3).

30. Id. §3(2).

31. Green, [2006] EWHC 1898 (Q.B.).

32. C. TRAV. art. L. 122-49.

33. Id.

34. Id.

35. Id. art. L. 122-51. One measure that employers must take is preparing a written document displaying workplace rules, which includes a provision prohibiting moral harassment. Id. art. L. 122-34.

36. Id. art. L. 122-49.

37. See Loic Lerouge, “Moral Harassment in the Workplace: French Law and the European Perspectives,” 32 COMP. LAB. L. & POL’Y J. 109, 122-27 (2010) (analyzing moral harassment cases before French Labor Tribunals).

38. C. TRAV. art. L. 122-49.

39. Lerouge, supra note 31, at 123.

Bob is the proverbial bully (Bobette when a woman). He operates freely without risk of being punished or terminated. So, every week is Freedom Week for bullies. Since Bob is free 52 weeks a year, dear executive, please use this one week, Freedom from Workplace Bullies Week, to end your relationship with Bob that makes life miserable for everyone else except you and Bob. It will take courage, of course. Here’s why and how to do it.

Bullies torment and abuse others with impunity. They do so because they have spent months, even years, groveling at the feet of a higher-ranking sponsor. That is, they torment down the org chart, but ingratiate (brown nose, ass kiss) up the ladder. All of their time is spent managing their sponsor’s impression of them. While targets keep their noses to the grindstone doing the work they love, the nose of bullies hover near the rear ends of their chosen sponsors. That’s how Bob makes himself indispensable.

On balance, several people have tried to tell you about Bob before. You didn’t believe them. They brought you news about Bob you couldn’t stand to hear. It hurt you to hear, but they were reporting the emotional abuse Bob foisted on them. You had several fired for daring bring this information to you. Others quit out of desperation. Bob convinced you that they all were faulty and he alone is competent.

If you ask anyone other than Bob about the talent lost to your organization, you will find that Bob has been lying to you. Good people were driven out or were demoralized and dehumanized, then left. All of this was kept from you by Bob. In his narcissistic world, only he mattered.

Truth is, Bob has been too expensive to keep. You’ve paid dearly to retain him — lawsuits settled, turnover and replacement of key players, and lots of lost productivity. Just ask your Risk Manager or legal counsel.

So, there is no rational reason to keep Bob any longer. You may worry about a lawsuit from him if you begin to suddenly hold him accountable. Worry less. Take advantage of the “employment at will” principle. He’s gone when you say he’s gone. Will he survive? Yes, he will land on his feet. With that instant stroke of moral courage, you will send a message to all others who work with you that you care more about them than you care about the single person whose lips have been firmly planted on your behind.

And while you are motivated to change the work climate for the better, besides removing Bob, consider drawing a line in the sand, defining the boundaries of unacceptable conduct. With that commitment, you will have a behavioral standard to which all the future Bobs (and there will be many emerging in the future — think whack-a-mole) can be compared. When they fail to act in an acceptable manner, cut them before the losses mount.

Finally, in the future, long after Freedom Week ends, believe the employees who report to you that they have been subjected to abusive conduct. They are not the likely liars. Bullies are the liars. Grow a thicker skin and stop showing your neediness to the cruel people willing to exploit you as they subordinate others.

Good employers purge bullies; bad ones promote ‘em.

Visit the gallery of proclamations.

California cities: Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, South Lake Tahoe, Culver City, Pittsburg, Antioch, Torrance, Burbank, Carson, Placerville, Palo Alto, and El Dorado County

Texas cities: El Paso, Corsicana, Longview, Killeen, Galveston, San Marcos, Sante Fe, San Antonio, Arlington, New Braunfels, Bedford, Bridgeport, Midland, Rockwall

Throughout Freedom Week, the Texas Healthy Workplace Advocates are hosting an informational table at the state capitol lobby in sight of all passing lawmakers.

Connecticut cities: New London, East Haven, Newtown, Milford, Torrington, Bethel,
Central Connecticut State University

An October 20 6:30-8:30 pm. presentation: “Is Connecticut Ready for Healthy Workplaces?: A Forum on Law, Psychology, and Society’s Response to Abusive Conduct in the Workplace.” Speakers include Tom Witt of New York Health Workplace Advocates, and Vicki J. Magley, Ph.D. Department of Psychology-University of Connecticut. Diloreto 001.

Ohio city: Steubenville

Virginia cities: Newport News, Portsmouth, Norfolk

West Virginia cities: Weirton, Morgantown

A lunchtime power point presentation “Workplace Bullying” by Staff Council member and West Virginia Healthy Workplace Bill State Coordinator Lana Cooke will be given for WVU Classified Staff from noon to 1 p.m. on the following dates: Oct. 17, 401 Marina Tower Conference Room; Oct., 19, Coliseum Jerry West Lounge; Oct. 20, 1 Waterfront Place Visitor’s Center/Theater 1st floor

Oct. 18: WVCUPA-HR Board at the fall WVCUPA-HR Conference, Stonewall Resort Conference Center

Take a moment to sign the Healthy Workplace Bill WV Online Petition

Washington county: Snohomish

Wisconsin city: LaCrosse

State Rep. Kelda Roys & State Sen. Spencer Coggs introduced the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill in the Wisconsin legislature on Oct. 17.

Massachusetts: the HWB Coordinators are introducing new ways to get involved, including our all-new Street Teams, where you can help spread the word at other organizations’ meetings, 5ks, parades, and more. Get all the details at the MA Healthy Workplace Bill website.

Oregon: Celebrate Freedom from Workplace Bullies Week by attending 2 days of workshops in Portland. Dr. Denise Haugen, WBI Affiliate, will be presenting! Find more information at the CNRG website.

Rep. Kelda Roys

Contact Rep. Roys, Wisconsin Assembly (608) 266-5340.

- 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.

STEUBENVILLE – A Steubenville man is hoping to build grassroots support for an initiative that would curb workplace bullying.

John Smurda, state coordinator for the Ohio Healthy Workplace Bill, said the protections built into the proposed legislation are long overdue.

“We’re light years behind other countries,” he said. “Australia, the U.K. they’re way ahead.”

Workplace bullying is defined as “repeated, health-harming abusive conduct” by bosses, co-workers or both. It can take the form of verbal abuse, threatening conduct, intimidation and humiliation as well as deliberately stabling someone else’s job performance, all of which can lead to to stress-related health damage, emotional injuries and career harm.

According to the U.S. Workplace Bullying Institute, 35 percent of the American work force an estimated 53.3 million people have reported being bullied at work, while another 15 percent say they’ve witnessed a bullying incident. The institute says another 50 percent say they’ve never experienced or witnessed bullying.

Other sources put the percentage of bullied workers closer to 70 percent.

And while 21 states are considering bullying legislation West Virginia is on the list, Ohio and Pennsylvania are not none have adopted it. So far, Smurda said they haven’t found a lawmaker to sponsor the legislation in Ohio.

“They call it the ‘black plague’ of this century,” Smurda said. “It causes a lot of mental health issues a lot of suicides are attributed to bullying and a lot of unions are adopting preventive measures for workplace bullying. The big thing is employers, even though they have a policy in place for harassment, they don’t know quite how to deal with a person dealing with harassment. What we’re trying to promote is if you see bullying going on, speak up.”

Among other things, the proposed legislation would ensure employers understand what constitutes an abusive work environment as well as how they can correct it, and gives victims an avenue to sue their tormentors as an individual while holding employers accountable.

Smurda also said Freedom From Workplace Bullies Week, which is Sunday through Oct. 22, is a chance to get word out that victims don’t have to be silent, witnesses can speak up and employers can correct and prevent the problem.

“What bullying really is is psychological violence,” he said. “It’s health harming, and employers need to realize … how much the sick days and hospital cost.”

via Herald Star.

After Steve Jobs died last week, TNT aired the 1999 movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley.” While the made-for-TV drama highlights the late Apple co-founder’s many accomplishments, it also portrays him as a cruel, disparaging boss.

Various news media outlets have cast Jobs in a similar light. In July 2010, The Toronto Star ran a piece titled, “Jobs Is a Genius and a Jerk.” The year before, Broadway Books published “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” in which author Alan Deutschman describes Jobs as “an abusive, egomaniacal boss fond of meting out public humiliations.”

There are also recent examples. An article on Gawker.com published after the tech guru’s death says Jobs bullied and manipulated employees. And Noah Wyle, who starred in “Pirates,” wrote a piece published last week on Forbes.com that tells of a meeting he had with Jobs and several Apple executives. “They all—I don’t want to say they live in fear of him—are certainly are subservient to his will and whim,” the actor wrote.

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on Jobs and these accounts.

The accounts share a common theme: Even the most successful of entrepreneurs may be unable to avoid earning a reputation as a bad boss when such is the case.

Research suggests that bad bosses – the bullying kind, to be specific — are somewhat common. An estimated 53.5 million Americans – or 35% of the U.S. workforce — report being bullied at work, according to a 2010 study commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an employee-rights group in Bellingham, Wash., and conducted by polling firm Zogby International. The findings also show that 62% of bullies are men and 58% of targets are women.

The same Institute also reports that since 2003, 21 states have introduced healthy workplace bills aimed at curbing bullying. However, none has been passed into law.

via Bad Bosses Can’t Hide Behind Entrepreneurial Success – In Charge – WSJ.

This begs the question: do these kids grow up to be workplace bullies, or does the workplace make its own class of bullies? Tell us what you think in the comments section.

New York (CNN) — A new study commissioned by CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” found that the stereotype of the schoolyard bully preying on the weak doesn’t reflect reality in schools.

Instead, the research shows that many students are involved in “social combat” — a constant verbal, physical and cyber fight to the top of the school social hierarchy.

To read more visit: CNN study: Schoolyard bullies not just preying on the weak – CNN.com.

A Bettendorf businessman, branded as the “boss from hell” by some of his employees, offered prizes to workers who could predict which of them would next be fired.

A state judge has called that a “deplorable” act and sided with the company’s ex-employees.

William Ernst, 57, the owner of a Bettendorf-based chain of convenience stores called QC Mart, sent all of his employees a memo in March, outlining a contest in which the workers were encouraged to participate. The memo read:

“New Contest – Guess The Next Cashier Who Will Be Fired!!!

“To win our game, write on a piece of paper the name of the next cashier you believe will be fired. Write their name [the person who will be fired], today’s date, today’s time, and your name. Seal it in an envelope and give it to the manager to put in my envelope.

“Here’s how the game will work: We are doubling our secret-shopper efforts, and your store will be visited during the day and at night several times a week. Secret shoppers will be looking for cashiers wearing a hat, talking on a cell phone, not wearing a QC Mart shirt, having someone hanging around/behind the counter, and/or a personal car parked by the pumps after 7 p.m., among other things.

“If the name in your envelope has the right answer, you will win $10 CASH. Only one winner per firing unless there are multiple right answers with the exact same name, date, and time. Once we fire the person, we will open all the envelopes, award the prize, and start the contest again.

“And no fair picking Mike Miller from the Rockingham Road store. He was fired at around 11:30 a.m. today for wearing a hat and talking on his cell phone. Good luck!!!!!!!!!!”

QC Mart cashier Misty Shelsky of Davenport was shocked by the memo — although, she says, Ernst had a long history of unprofessional conduct with regard to lower-ranking workers.

“This guy was the boss from hell,” Shelsky told The Des Moines Register. “He treated pretty much all of us like dirt.”

Shelsky said she and her store manager, along with a few other employees, quit as soon as they saw the memo and realized it wasn’t a joke or a prank.

“It was very degrading,” she said. “We looked at that, then looked at each other, and said, ‘OK, we’re done.’ ”

When Shelsky applied for unemployment benefits, Ernst challenged the claim, saying she had resigned voluntarily. The dispute led to a recent hearing at which QC Mart Area Supervisor Anna DeFrieze testified that the contest was created by Ernst because his employees weren’t following company rules.

“None of them were doing their job,” she testified. “They’ve repeatedly been told not to use their phone while they’re working, that bad language is totally unacceptable and, you know, playing video games while you’re working is not acceptable. They just broke all those rules.”

Shelsky testified that she and her colleagues quit due to the hostile work environment created by the contest.

“My entire store was up in arms over it and that’s why we all left,” she testified.

State records show that at least two QC Mart employees sent letters to company managers objecting to the contest. One worker wrote that the contest was “bizarre and unprofessional.” Another worker wrote that it had “created an atmosphere of distrust, intimidation and paranoia.”

Administrative Law Judge Susan D. Ackerman sided with the workers, calling the contest “egregious and deplorable.” Shelsky was awarded unemployment benefits.

“The employer’s actions have clearly created a hostile work environment by suggesting its employees turn on each other for a minimal monetary prize,” Ackerman ruled. “This was an intolerable and detrimental work environment.”

Ernst could not be reached for comment. DeFrieze declined to comment on the case.

via Firing contest by boss leads employees to quit | The Des Moines Register.

Sticks and stones may break my bones…but words won’t break my spirit!

Research conducted by the U.S.-based Workplace Bullying Institute is interesting. According to WBI, “35 percent of U.S. workers report being bullied at work…15 percent have witnessed it…68 percent of bullying is same-gender harassment; 58 percent of targets are women; and 80 percent of the time, female bullies target other women…”

What is workplace bullying and why does it happen? Ray Williams calls bullying “North America’s silent epidemic,” and says “bullying involves the conscious repeated effort to wound and seriously harm another person—not with violence, but with words and actions.”

There are three components to the bullying triad: bullies, victims of bullying, and witnesses or bystanders.

Bullies

The vast majority of bullies are bosses—managers, supervisors, and executives.

Ray Williams suggests that bullies are Type A personalities: competitive and driven, and often lacking in emotional stability.

“Above all, bullies crave power and control” Williams says, and they “seem oblivious to the trail of damage they leave behind, as long as their appetites for power and control are fulfilled.”

My theory—I call it the been there, done that (BTDT) victim’s theory and it’s based on personal experience—is that bullies are insecure, unsure of their own abilities and threatened by a show of independence and confidence in the workers they bully. Unable to reveal their feelings of inferiority to same-level colleagues, and smart enough to not bully upward against their own bosses, bullies vent their insecurities upon their subordinates.

Bullies choose as targets those subordinates who display a confidence gained through experience on the job or through achievements in life outside the workplace, a confidence that threatens the insecure bullying superior.

Victims

The BTDT victim’s theory is supported by research at the Workplace Bullying Institute, which calls itself “the first and only U.S. organization dedicated to the eradication of workplace bullying.” According to WBI, “the targets of office bullies…are the highly competent, accomplished, experienced and popular employees…”

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, suggests a higher percentage of female bullies and targets is due to women’s “open jealousy and envy.” Women, Namie suggests, are “hypersensitive and hypercritical, focusing on tiny details. Those details are then used as a basis to “tear into each other.”

Independent workers pose the greatest threat to bullies. When targets refuse to be controlled and intimidated, the abusive behaviour escalates. When the typical victim of bullying has had enough, realizes that neither the bully’s superiors nor Human Resources will do anything to stop the abuse and quits the job, the workplace often loses the best, the brightest and the most experienced.

Bystanders (Witnesses)

Co-workers often know when one of their number is being bullied. Either they see or hear something, or a victim confides what is happening.

Why doesn’t somebody do something?

Ever notice an accident off to the side of the road as you are driving? Ever look over, curious to know what happened but glad it wasn’t you in that mess?

If emergency services are on the scene most drivers continue past the accident scene without stopping. Somebody else is looking after things.

If authorities are not on scene, and if it is safe for you to do so, you might stop to see if help has already been called and if there is some comfort you can give until professional helpers arrive to do their job. But if the situation poses a threat to your own safety, you are less likely to become directly involved.

Bystanders are often useful and compassionate at the scene of a workplace collision, too. They listen to the victim and blanket her with sympathy. But it is a rare worker who will put his or her own workplace well being in jeopardy by giving a detailed, objective, eyewitness account of bullying incidents to authorities. We live in perilous economic times. Many workers are afraid to draw a bully’s attention away from the usual targeted victim toward themselves.

This self-interest on the part of bystanders is understandable, but ultimately not helpful to a bully’s victim.

Albert Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

Read more at Suite101: Workplace Bullying—The Triad: Bullies, Victims and Bystanders

A lawyer jokes that she “gets angry for a living.” In the midst of a particularly bad day at the office, a real estate agent vows to channel her anger into making that next sale.

Most of us would prefer a tenacious fighter on our side in a legal battle. And business owners probably wouldn’t mind a bit of passion in their sales force. But would we want that same “angry” lawyer or sales rep as a boss? Probably not. Yet plenty of people, particularly young men, view anger as an effective management tool.

“People care about their work so you’re going to have conflict and you’re going to have anger,” says Donald Gibson, a professor of management at Fairfield University.

Anger is positive about half the time, Gibson says. It can spur creativity and competitive zeal. Perhaps most importantly, it can expose unfair labor practices and flaws in products and procedures. At the same time, he warns, anger can undermine trust between coworkers or lead to overly cautious work practices.

“In many organizations there is an anger asymmetry,” Gibson says. “Supervisors can express anger, but workers can’t. Doctors can express anger, but nurses can’t. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Anne Kreamer, author of “It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace,” thinks the traditional view of anger as evidence of passion needs to change. “The culturally accepted notion that angry people are in control is false. Anger is a sign that someone has lost control,” Kreamer says. “Angry work environments don’t make people snap to and work well together. Persistently angry workplaces drive good people away.”

In my mid-20s I worked for a boss who was famous for his temper. He threw books across the room, and even chairs and staplers, when he got angry. If an employee gave him bad news, he was likely to explode — screaming and pounding his fist on her desk. At the time, his rage seemed like a humiliating secret his employees shared. But after leaving that job, I discovered many outside our office knew about the temper tantrums. My secret became my workplace war story and my ability to survive, a badge of honor.

The most effective way to avoid angry outbursts in the modern workplace, says Vicky Oliver, author of “Bad Bosses, Crazy Coworkers, and Other Office Idiots,” is to “up the etiquette quotient.”

“We work in a no-door, no-wall environment. We’re working longer hours than ever. We’re thrown together with people for eight, nine, 10 hours a day,” Oliver says. “So how do you respect people’s boundaries? How do you maintain a healthy emotional distance where there is no physical distance?”

Because conflicts are inevitable in the workplace, particularly in an economy where fewer employees are shouldering more work than ever, Oliver advocates the creation of buffer zones. Announce your presence when you approach someone else’s cubicle, and ask permission to enter. Such niceties can help create a more collegial, less angry atmosphere, especially if they are still observed during disagreements.

Another effective strategy to avoid office flare-ups is to create some emotional distance between you and your coworkers. Consider e-mail, an especially volatile source of workplace anger. If you receive a tersely worded e-mail and feel compelled to fire back a scathing reply, Oliver advises delaying your response as long as possible (without jeopardizing project deadlines, of course). Leave your desk, take a short walk, or go on an errand. If you simply cannot resist writing a biting e-mail retort, then write one, file it in your draft folder — and leave it there. Later, take a look at that angry draft and extract only the information that addresses the work issue, stripping out all the emotional language you possibly can.

“Reframe the conflict or issue as a problem to be solved,” Gibson says, “but that’s difficult when you’re in the throes of anger.”

n e-mail or in person, try to use the adrenaline rush that comes from angry exchanges as motivation to articulate your point of view in an assertive — never an aggressive — way. “If you lash out, no one will remember the source of the conflict, but everyone is going to remember your behavior,” Oliver says.

Keep in mind that people express work frustrations in a variety of ways — from tears, to cracking jokes you may feel are mean-spirited, to sudden expressions of rage. “When you think of the difference between effective and ineffective anger, a lot of it is in the intention,” Kreamer says. “Blaming and bullying anger are not effective.”

According to surveys conducted by the Workplace Bullying Institute (www.workplacebullying.org), one in six U.S. employees has been the target of bullying during his or her career. Bullying differs from other forms of workplace anger. “It’s repeated, it’s malicious, it’s intentional,” says Katherine Hermes of Connecticut Healthy Workplace Advocates. Often the target is isolated from other members of the team, does not receive information or resources needed to do their job, or is belittled in front of others.

Because bullies often target more than one person, you may find allies at work. But be careful, Oliver warns. Coworkers may see the opportunity to ally themselves with the bully by reporting what you’ve said against her. “It’s tempting to vent to your coworkers, but it’s always dangerous to play the gossip game. The gossip wheel tends to work against you,” Oliver says. “You have to remember that there are a variety of personalities in any given workplace, including opportunists.”

Instead, Oliver says, create a support network outside of work. If your workplace has an employee assistance program, consider taking advantage of its confidential services.

If these strategies fail, you’ll need to alert your HR department. Before you do, make sure you can demonstrate a documented pattern of abusive behavior. Emphasize how the bully’s behavior is affecting your productivity. Do not focus on how the behavior makes you feel uncomfortable or try to present an “It’s him or me!” scenario.

“HR may still look at you as a whistleblower, but sometimes the whistle has to be blown,” Oliver says. “The tide is turning on all bullying behavior. It’s easier to talk about it than it used to be.”

If all else fails, begin to work on an exit strategy, Kreamer says, because “chronic, caustic anger always has a price, and that price is almost always your well-being.”

The harming effects of workplace bullying can go further than mere embarrassment. A target may become psychologically injured after long-term abuse.

According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, "workplace bullying is repeated, health-harming mistreatment that takes one or more of the following forms: verbal abuse; offensive conduct/behaviors (including nonverbal) which are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating; and work interference (sabotage) which prevents work from getting done."

Workplace bullying has devastating effects on the targeted individual. Not only does one feel that their job is in jeopardy, they may also start to feel physically ill and emotionally harmed.

Bullying poses great liabilities to employers, including:

• Occupational health and safety violations;
• Actions for negligence or intentional infliction of mental suffering; or
• Defamatory actions.

Another concern that arises from workplace bullying is stress-related illness. These illnesses can range over many categories. It is not uncommon for people under extreme stress to develop symptoms of heart disease (i.e. high blood pressure), gastrointestinal disorders (i.e. irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers) and many other ailments. The stress that results from bullying can lead to long-term illnesses; some ailments by affect an individual for life.

Bullying and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

As a result of the negative feelings associated with workplace bullying, targets are at a very high risk of developing mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorder. Their way of living is attacked for no apparent reason and often, the attacker is intent on harming the target for no apparent reason. Targets may endure abuse day in and day out for months or even years. This abuse harms their overall health. While depression and anxiety can be debilitating, targets may experience symptoms that are different. Yet finding a fitting diagnosis causes a bit of a controversy among some professionals.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) describes symptoms that result when a person is involved in a short-term or single traumatic event. Examples include accidents, natural disasters, assault, attempted murder and rape because these are considered to be of short duration. However, the trauma related to workplace bullying is not an isolated, short-term event.

Long term or chronic events that span a period of months or years tend to develop symptoms that vary from PTSD. There is usually more intense psychological harm when one experiences repeated trauma. There may be complete changes to one's concept of who they are and in their ability to cope with stressful situations.

During long-term traumas, people are held in physical and/or emotional captivity. They are under the influence of their abuser and unable to get out of the situation they are in. Examples include:

• Prisoner of War camps
• Long-term domestic violence
• Repeated, severe physical abuse
• Childhood sexual abuse

Some psychologists believe that a different term, Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), should be used to identify trauma that is repeated or long-term. Bullying targets may show symptoms that are similar to PTSD and/or C-PTSD. For this reason, researchers of workplace bullying believe that bullying should be considered an example of captivity.

C-PTSD is not a recognized diagnosis in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It should be noted, however, that the main difference between the two types of PTSD is the cause of the disorder in the patient. Symptoms of the two types are much the same. For this reason, therapists may diagnose bullying targets with PTSD, allowing patients receive treatment.

The Symptoms of Complex PTSD

Above all, to be considered for a diagnosis of C-PTSD, the target must experience an extended period under the control of another person. After this has been established, other symptoms must be taken into account.

According to Julia M. Whealin, Ph.D. and Laurie Slone, Ph.D., in the May 22, 2007 version of the US Department of Veterans Affairs site, Complex PTSD, there are symptoms that would occur if someone has been chronically victimized, including:

• Persistent sadness, explosive anger; inhibited anger; suicidal thoughts;
• Forgetting traumatic events or reliving them. Feeling detached from one's mind or body;
• Feelings of helplessness, shame, guilt and stigma. One may feel that they are different than other people;
• Attributing total power to the abuser. Preoccupation with the perpetrator, possibly becoming obsessed with revenge;
• Social isolation, distrust in others or repeatedly searching for a rescuer; and
• A loss of faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.

Other difficulties that may be experienced by people with C-PTSD include:

• Avoiding topics related to the trauma due to feelings that are too overwhelming;
• Abusing alcohol/other substances to avoid and/or numb feelings/thoughts associated with trauma;
• Self-mutilating and/or other types of self-injurious behaviors.

Workplace bullying is a serious issue due to the harmful health issues it causes. People have committed suicide and/or harmed others while in the throes of PTSD episodes. One should consult their doctor and/or a mental health professional if experiencing symptoms, especially feelings that cause one to be a danger to self or others.

Originally posted at Suite101

Four months after a grand jury report said workplace bullying was a problem within county government, a recent survey of about 500 employees said much the same.

Sixty percent of the county employees surveyed said they had been bullied at work, while 69 percent said they had witnessed bullying. Forty-four percent said they were yelled at while working and 43 percent said they were retaliated against for speaking up.

“I have been a victim of a long-term bullying and I’m here on behalf of those who are afraid to step forward,” said Gary Lowery, a biomedical equipment technician with the Ventura County Health Care Agency who spoke Tuesday before the Ventura County Board of Supervisors.

Lowery was one of about 30 members of the SEIU Local 721 union who presented the report card on bullying to the supervisors, asking that they take action to stop what some described as a pervasive problem. They wore purple union shirts and held up signs reading, “It’s not OK” and “Bullies are expensive.”

“The system does not work right now,” Perry Morefield told the board as he gave a list of things that should be changed to combat bullying. “It will make the county a more acceptable and more effective place to work.”

Much as the grand jury recommended, the SEIU — which represents about 4,200 of the county’s 8,000 employees — wanted the board to come up with a concrete policy on how to deal with bullying. Morefield also demanded mandatory training for managers, third-party oversight of grievances, a centralized human resources department and meetings between the union and department heads.

Ventura County CEO Michael Powers said the county was going create a policy addressing the problem over the next 12 months, as well as start a new hotline to report misconduct. The county also will try to educate people on what resources are available for those who feel they are being bullied.

“We share your belief that you deserve an open and positive workplace,” Powers said, adding that with 8,000 employees, problems are bound to happen. “I don’t think this is a pervasive problem, but one instance is too many.”

Emmett Faulconer, a supervisor in the biomedical department at Ventura County Medical Center, said he’s hopeful, but after 20 years with the county, he is dubious. The union will continue to put pressure on the board for change and to make managers more accountable for bullying, he said.

Faulconer said when he had a problem with a manager who was doing offensive things, he complained a number of times and nothing was done. It was only after he and other employees went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which told them they had a right to sue, that any action was taken, he said. Faulconer said that manager still works for the county.

Morefield said when he complained that his supervisors were doing things in violation of health privacy laws, he was told he was going to be transferred to a different department. He said he had 15 minutes to move nine years of files and work.

He argued that the human resources managers are part of the “old boys and old girls network,” who just protect the other managers.

After the seven SEIU employees spoke before the board, many of the representatives who were in the audience marched around the normally staid government center, waving signs and chanting: “What do we want? Respect! When do we want it? Now!”

via Bullying a problem within county government, union says » Ventura County Star.

This summer USA Today columnist, Anita Bruzzese, reported a false claim that a new survey found “up to 70 percent of working adults say they’ve been bullied at some point in their working lives,” citing Civility Partners LLC as the source. The same 70% prevalence rate was repeated by a Fort Worth, Texas TV station on Sept. 26. Repeating a mistake does not make it right.

Here are the facts behind the exaggerated prevalence rate.

When one visits the Civility Partners website, the reader gets several stats about prevalence. The three mentions of a 70% or greater rate are:

- 75% in a 1997 journal article by Norwegian researcher Stale Einarsen (whose study used a single almost all-male industrial org in which 7% met the definition of being bullied, not 75%!) This statistic is a misquote.

- 71% of people reported experiencing workplace “incivility” (which no authority accepts as equivalent in severity as, or level of harm produced by, bullying) from a very narrow sample of employees working within a single federal court system (which does not approximate a nationally representative sample of workers)

- 74.1% of respondents from the Corporate Leavers Survey that the Civility Partners website author described as asking “what forms of unfairness were experienced at a former employer, 74.1% of respondents named bullying…” This must be the figure Civility Partners gave the USA Today reporter that has been spread around without correction.

Here is the requisite fact checking that neither the media nor Civility Partners conducted.

The highly credible Level Playing Field Institute founded in 2001 is a nonprofit that promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces. With support from Korn Ferry International, in 2007, LPFI conducted its Corporate Leavers Study: The Cost of Employee Turnover Due Solely to Unfairness in the Workplace. LPFI commissioned Knowledge Networks to poll a representative 19,000 person sample of the U.S. population. If the work had ended at that stage, the survey would have been a “scientific” one the results from which could be extrapolated to the entire U.S.

Instead, LPFI was interested only in a narrow subset of the population — professionals and managers (salaried, non-entry level adults aged 18-64) who had voluntarily quit work or who had volunteered for layoff within five years of the survey. They were “Leavers.” This was a special, non-representative group. 1,700 people were left from the original screening to complete the survey.

Because LPFI is concerned with fairness, they considered the following acts evidence of unfair treatment: being publicly humiliated, being passed over for a promotion, being compared to a terrorist, being asked to attend more recruiting or community-related events, being bullied (no clarifying definition found in the research report), having your identity mistaken, and receiving unwelcome questions about skin, hair or ethnic attire.

The only respondents asked to complete the survey were those who said that they left their jobs ONLY DUE to unfairness. That very limited sample of people were asked three related questions — which forms of unfairness led to leaving, which forms led to strongly discouraging others from seeking work with that former employer, and which forms led to discouraging others from purchasing the previous employer’s products or services.

For the managers and professionals completing the main survey, 13.5% said they experienced bullying at their former employer. It was the third least frequent factor given for leaving. [Compare this statistic with the WBI 2007 prevalence statistic of 12.6% of all American adults who said they were currently being bullied with an additional 24% saying they had been bullied before.]

On page 7 of the LPFI Corporate Leavers Survey report, a graph shows that 74.1% of those who reported being bullied told others to not go to work at that former employer’s workplace. The report described these particular responses as “recruitment related reputation costs” to employers. Nearly three-fourths of those who were bullied became impediments to corporate recruiting by the former employer. Read the previous sentence carefully. It is not the same as saying that 74% of the 1,700 survey respondents said they were bullied at work. Nor should one compound the error by suggesting that a nationally representative survey indicates that 74% of the workforce reports being bullied.

Finally, of those who reported being bullied and ONLY left their former employer because of perceived unfairness, 48.7% urged others to boycott that employer’s products or services.

I hope this clarifies the results of the Corporate Leavers Survey as misinterpreted by Civility Partners and embellished by the media for sensationalism.

Workplace Bullying is a major social problem of epidemic proportions. The only two national surveys that represent its prevalence among all American adults (employed and not employed (that would include those who “left” jobs) beyond just managers and salaried workers) were the ones produced by the Workplace Bullying Institute and conducted by Zogby International in both 2007 and 2010.

Read the actual Corporate Leavers Report for yourself.

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

Mediation, when agreed to by both parties, is a prefunctory second step in the EEOC case filing process. Both the target and employer agreed. I accompanied the target as her advocate. The day prior, we reviewed all details of her bullying ordeal and the impact on her life. Most important was her decision about her demands. She created combinations of cash settlement amounts, number of months of health insurance continuance, and pension-related contributions. She had high, medium and low payout combinations. We thought she was prepared for anything and was willing to negotiate.

Mediation was a day-long process. The mediator was a kind woman. Her background as a social worker offset, for us, her term as a judge. Her experience in mediation was extensive. She met with the target first to learn about the case because the EEOC form required only limited information. She put us at ease by offering the choice of face-to-face or shuttle mediation. The target wanted the mediator to go back and forth between us and the employer and their attorney in separate room. We never did see the other side that day.

After discovering the basic facts of the case, told partly by me to eliminate much of the emotion, relying on the target for correction of details, the mediator asked what the target wanted to reach a settlement. The mediator stated that we could be open with her since all communication in our room was confidential. She pledged to not tell the other side what she knew and to carry only the messages forward the target approved. We shared the high and medium settlement figures, implying that our opening gambit would be to ask for the highest amount to be made whole.

Thus began the expectation lowering process. Despite her stated sympathy for the target’s plight, the mediator clearly stated that complainants, in all the hundreds of cases involving her, NEVER collected such a huge amount. I think the target asked for 3 years salary and health benefits. The mediator left us to ponder what she said was an “unreasonable” demand. It was not yet time to negotiate settlement amounts.

The mediator left for her initial session with the employer. She returned with news that they did indeed attend willing to settle. She then directly addressed the target with news that the opening bid from not only this employer, but ALL employers, will be $0 (zero). We asked if that was fair. She said that was simply how the mediation-with-employers game is played.

We were so wrapped in the details the rest of the day that involved 22 mediator shuttle trips between the sides, we missed the big picture, the injustice. Mediators uncritically accept and perpetuate the dominance of employers in mediations by allowing the opening bid of $0.

The rest of the day was spent by the mediator racheting down the target’s demands. Evidence was suddenly questioned and discounted by the employer. Because the mediator personally felt attached to one aspect of the demand, she clung tenaciously to that piece to the end. However, when the target asked her to be as strong regarding more months of salary, she chose to not fight for it. Everything that was within the mediator’s personal boundaries set by experience, tempered by resistant, defiant employers, was achieved by the mediator. But she could not and did not advocate for the target when the demand conflicted with what she, the mediator, considered “reasonable.”

And that’s how it happened. The target was lucky to have a mediator who agreed to put the employer reps in a separate room. She was lucky that the mediator did not discount her story at the start (though she did accept the employer’s denial of mistreatment). However, the veteran mediator achieved a settlement much closer to $0 than the lowest settlement amount the target had prepared herself to accept.

The mediator was a good person, but one does not go to the EEOC to find a friend. The case ended for the target feeling jilted. It is true that she got more than zero, but the employer must have left feeling that it was a good day.

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.

Dignity, Deservedness & ‘Lucky’ Jobs

Dignity at work is a human right, not a privilege that has to be earned. In these tough economic times, it is important to not let others tell you that it is an unnecessary luxury.

Download Podcast 20 (in .mp3 format)

Everyone has experienced a bad day at the office when people are yelling and screaming at each other in frustration. But, if one person is the target of constant verbal and emotional abuse, it can escalate into a troubling case of ‘workplace bullying.’

Many small business owners refuse to acknowledge workplace bullying, preferring to hope the antagonist will eventually stop picking on a targeted co-worker. But, if you do nothing, the situation usually worsens, creating serious health and emotional problems for the bullied worker—and financial stress for employers, according to experts in the field.

If business owners don’t deal with bullying at work, it could result in a violent act. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about two million violent crimes occur at American workplaces every year.

“There’s a real bottom line reason for business owners to take this problem seriously,” said David Yamada, professor of law and director of the New Workplace Institute at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. “If you are working in close quarters and things are tense and combative, it’s likely to affect everyone’s morale.”

An expert on workplace issues, Yamada authored the ‘Healthy Workplace’ bill, which has been introduced by legislators in 21 states. Currently, 16 versions of the bill—which aims to protect bullied workers from abusers, extending legal protections currently not available to them—are under review in 11 states. Most people think federal employment and discrimination laws protect workers from bullying, but they don’t, according to Yamada.

Being bullied at work makes life miserable. Experts say bullied workers suffer from anxiety, hypertension, depression and other stress-related illnesses. A 2010 Zogby study revealed that about 35 percent of all adult Americans have been bullied and 15 percent of the population has witnessed workplace bullying. The survey was authored by Dr. Gary Namie, Ph.D., and his wife Ruth.

Considered experts on workplace bullying, they have written extensively on the topic and consult with companies dealing with bullying issues. Their newest book, The Bully-free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels and Snakes from Killing Your Organization, provides readers with an in-depth look at the problem and several strategies for dealing with workplace bullying.

“Bullying runs rampant in small businesses,” said Namie. “The owner wants to avoid conflict and doesn’t know what to do. They prefer to tell the abuser and the target, ‘you guys work this out.’”

Namie said he became interested in workplace bullying issues after his wife, Ruth, who is a psychologist, was bullied at work. “Our research shows 66 percent of women who are bullied at work lose their jobs,” said Gary Namie. “Forty-one percent quit, and 25 percent are fired.”

People bullied at work feel trapped—similar to someone suffering from domestic violence. It’s often worse for a bullied worker who feels he or she has to take the abuse because they really need the job, especially during this lingering economic slump.

How do you know if you have a bully in your midst?

“Bullying is a hostile, repeated behavior meant to make people feel badly,” said Carolyn Fedigan, a Boston-area human resources consultant who helps clients deal with bullying problems.

“I’ve dealt with a CEO who would regularly say to his secretary, ‘What, are you stupid?’”

Fedigan said some bullies take a more subtle approach. “They leave people out of communication loops, they spread gossip or single people out for the silent treatment,” she said.

No matter how distasteful it is, business owners can’t turn their backs on the problem. “There is a real financial cost to companies that let this toxic behavior continue, “ said Fedigan. “Bullied people take sick leaves, go out on disability and lose productivity.”

She said many business owners tolerate a bully if the person is a great salesperson or clients love them. “Sometimes the boss is scared of the bully,” she said. “They worry about the cost of turnover, of recruiting and training a new person.”

Business owners have to put their foot down and say, ‘We don’t accept this kind of behavior.” She said it’s important to have a written policy prohibiting workplace bullying. It’s also important to encourage your employees to report any inappropriate or bad behavior. “You have to have the kind of environment where employees can tell the boss what’s happening to them.”

Companies often hire Fedigan to counsel bullies. She works one on one with them, delving into why they are acting inappropriately towards a colleague. “Often, they have no idea they are a bully,” she said. “They think it’s an okay way to behave.”

Consider drafting an anti-bullying policy for your business that defines the problem and then:

Provides a procedure to report incidents.
Includes a ‘no retaliation’ provision.
Encourages employees to report incidents.
Informs employees that violations may result in discipline.

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!

When push comes to shove, workplace bullies are costing the company money. And that’s a good focus when dealing with them.

As a species, it seems we’re doomed to interact with jerks.

It happens in high school, and we think, “Once I get to college, things will be different.”

Then it happens in college, and we think, “Once I get a job, people there will be more mature.”

Not so much. Jerks abound, and, as fate would have it, the workplace is as much a breeding ground for bullies as the playground.

While much has been done in recent years to address bullies in the schoolyard, the issue of bullying at work remains largely under the radar. In fact, because of a work culture that often rewards aggressiveness, bullies have a nasty tendency of succeeding at work.

“This is one of the great undiscussables in the American workplace because it seems if you haven’t experienced it, you’re likely to believe it doesn’t happen,” said Gary Namie, a social psychologist and co-founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute. “What we’re seeing is a lot of abusive conduct, but it’s accepted as routine in the American workplace.”

Last year, Namie commissioned the polling group Zogby International to survey U.S. workers. The research found that 35 percent of the country’s workforce has experienced bullying on the job, and another 15 percent has seen it happen.

The remaining 50 percent of respondents had neither seen nor experienced bullying, a statistic that Namie said makes it hard for some to relate to the problem. He calls it a “silent epidemic.”

“So often in the workplace the feeling is, ‘Hey, you’re an adult, handle it yourself,’” Namie said. “They sometimes even blame the victim. But you know what? We said that for domestic violence for a long, long time until they criminalized it. So people need to stop the silly rationalizations.”

To be clear, “workplace bullying” doesn’t apply to acts of violence.

“What separates bullying from workplace violence or harassment is the fact that the bullying is something that’s done on a continuous basis,” said Timothy Dimoff, founder of SACS Consulting & Investigative Services, an Ohio-based company that specializes in high-risk workplace and human resource issues. “It’s constant and repetitive; someone who’s using different means of harassment, whether it’s complaining about the person, spreading rumors, blaming them, encouraging others not to talk to the person. It’s more psychological and emotional abuse.”

Think about your workplace, and there’s a good chance you’ve seen this or dealt with it. In the most severe cases, a manager tries to sabotage an employee by taking credit for work or writing a negative performance review. More routinely, a co-worker or manager picks away at an employee, making cracks about them in front of other people, demeaning them even in subtle ways.

This behavior may seem routine in a world of snarkiness, but when it happens day in and day out, and when the targeted person feels unable to fix the situation, it can lead to serious physical and mental health problems. Consider how difficult it might be, particularly in this job market, for a victim to protest the way a manager is treating them.

“Many people nowadays feel really locked in,” Namie said. “Like there’s no escape route, and that just makes the situation worse.”

The fact is, some folks will find themselves in situations where the only way out is to quit. That’s obviously a worst-case scenario, but if a bully is making your life so miserable it’s affecting you physically and mentally, you’ve got to cut ties and take care of yourself.

Before that, however, there are steps you can take to try to put the bully in his or her place.

“They need to take it to their human resources person or their immediate supervisor,” Dimoff said. “If they don’t get any results, then they need to go to somebody higher. In the meantime, they need to document when these things happen, where they happen and what was said and done. If they don’t write it down, it’s hard to remember details, and things get distorted. When management sees an employee come in with this in writing, they react much more quickly and thoroughly to it.”

Namie suggests that the target look for ways to quantify the harm a bully is causing a company. How many people has the person driven away? How much work time is eaten up contending with problems relating to the bully?

“You want to be able to tell the executives that the bully is too expensive to keep; actually present the business argument that the bully is too expensive,” Namie said. “What can discredit the person who is the target is emotionality. The emotionality is scary to management. So you make a dispassionate argument.”

Of course, management is, or should be, responsible for creating an environment that repels bullies.

“The company needs to have policies and procedures against bullying and workplace violence, and they need to let those procedures be very well known to their management and employees,” Dimoff said. “Companies need to work on creating a more positive culture. In positive cultures, we don’t see the bullying. People work together and don’t resort to negative tools.”

Namie’s Workplace Bullying Institute is pushing a Healthy Workplace Bill, which is being considered in 11 states, that would crack down on office bullies and clearly define what it means to have an “abusive work environment.” You can learn more about the bill at healthyworkplacebIll.org.

A final point: If you think a bullying co-worker is trying to make you a target, be proactive.

Bullies, at the end of the day, are cowards. They feed off people who put up with their abuse. So the moment someone begins to pick at you, stand up to them. Let them know you won’t tolerate improper treatment.

The alternative is to let it go, and that’s almost guaranteed to not end well.

From the Chicago Tribune

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?

Over the years people have been asking for a better variety of anti-bullying decals, buttons, etc. We’re doing our best to add more options for you. New to the BullyBusters Store: Bumper-Stickers!

Now you can spread the word about workplace bullying everywhere you go! There are seven designs to choose from. Visit the BullyBusters Store for full details.

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

The national disgrace that the U.S. lags behind the rest of the industrialized world continues.

When our colleagues don’t invite us to lunch, gossip about us, are condescending or otherwise rude to us at work, the impact can be so intense that we take our problems home, affecting our families and partners who in turn may also take the stress to their workplaces, a new Baylor University study reports.

“I didn’t expect to have such strong findings in this study. The research shows if we are treated poorly at work, we see the world as a less bright place and it’s hard to shake it off,” says study author Merideth Ferguson, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business whose research was published online in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. “When this happens daily or chronically, it eats away at people’s self-esteem and they are less optimistic about their lives and the future.”

A stressed employee often shares work frustrations with their spouse or partner, and the partner feels desperate to fix it, Ferguson says. But that’s unrealistic, and the feelings of helplessness can build more stress. Additionally, she explains, the stressed and distracted worker may neglect family responsibilities and the ongoing issue also can affect marital satisfaction.

“This phenomenon jumps workplaces,” she says. “It goes from the workplace to the home to another workplace.”

James Powell, 36, of Detroit, understands how deeply work incivility can impact a happy home. About five years ago, as he vied for an executive-level position at a national retailer, a co-worker competing for the same position spread rumors Powell was breaching company policy and shirking his duties. He became depressed when he couldn’t figure out how to stop the jokes and gossip.

“I was consumed with work; it was my life,” he says. “I came home and complained about work every day. After a while, everybody – my wife, sisters and the rest of my family got so tired of it, they started telling me to shut up. My wife was telling me to just quit and asking how I could let people treat me that way. It really affected her.”

He says his world came crashing down soon after a holiday party, where the co-worker and others teased his wife, saying she was too pretty to be with him. He says she internalized the stress and jokes, and their marriage started breaking down. As a result, she began missing work and having problems on her job. The couple separated and eventually divorced. He got the promotion, but the work problems remained so intense that he resigned his position.

“I’m still suffering from it,” he acknowledges.

Ferguson suggests employees facing work incivility contact the human resources department, seek help from an employee assistance program or get outside counseling to help manage work-related stress. She also advises finding ways to avoid taking the stress home.

“Counseling sometimes helps you keep from stressing your family,” she says. “Exercise, go out with friends who are not co-workers, then go home to your family and be relaxed. It’s a trial and error thing; you have to find what works for you.”

Unfortunately, says Ferguson, who is working on a similar study on supervisor abuse, being treated poorly at work may lead to a decision to cut ties with your employer.

via Life Inc. – Workplace drama can damage your home life.

HuffPost Education, 8/19/2011

A Pennsylvania photographer has chosen not to photograph a group of high school girls for their senior portraits after she found evidence of the teens bullying other students on Facebook.

Jennifer McKendrick, from Indiana County, Pa., wrote on her own Facebook page earlier this week that she came across another Facebook page with nasty comments from four high school girls whose names matched her scheduled clients.

She emailed the girls and their parents to cancel their senior photo shoots, while including screenshots of their comments to explain why she was calling off the session.

McKendrick wrote more about her decision on her personal blog in a post titled “I Won’t Photograph Ugly People.”

“I mean how could I spend two hours with someone during our session trying to make beautiful photos of them knowing they could do such UGLY things,” McKendrick writes. “Realistically, I know by canceling their shoots it’s not going to make them ‘nicer people’ but I refuse to let people like that represent my business.

“The photographer told WTAE-TV that the comments she saw were more than just targeting other students for appearance.

“It was beyond ‘your clothes are ugly’ or ‘you don’t have any brand clothes’ or ‘you are ugly, your hair is not right,” McKendrick told WTAE-TV. “It was vicious. It was talking about sexuality.”

Her Facebook page has since been flooded with hundreds of comments from people supporting her decision.

McKendrick blogs that she hasn’t received backlash for her decision so far, but she’s prepared if she does. Two of the teens’ parents responded to her with apologies, noting that they were surprised by their daughters’ actions.

“If you are ugly on the inside, I’m sorry but I won’t take your photos to make you look pretty on the outside … I simply don’t want to photograph ugly people,” she writes.

via Jennifer McKendrick, Pennsylvania Photographer, Refuses To Photograph Teen Bullies.

August 18, 2011

As soon as I heard my friend&#