Allegations against the PM have brought this issue into sharp focus. Gabrielle Fagan investigates just how prevalent it is in the British workplace. Read the article in the Halifax Evening Courier.

The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) launched the U.S. workplace bullying movement in mid-1997. Starting in 2001, WBI principals began lobbying for legislation as amateurs. The work has grown into a national network of volunteer Coordinators in 29 states with varying levels of advocacy experience. WBI directs the citizen lobbyists to unify the message. WBI provides Coordinators with training, materials and the text of the HWB.

Suffolk University Law Professor David Yamada authored the HWB for WBI in order to provide employees with an avenue for redress when health-harming abusive conduct is not addressed by Civil Rights laws. Additionally, the bill does not mandate employer action or government involvement. It does reward good employers with freedom from vicarious liability when they take proactive steps to correct and prevent severe bullying behavior. The only employers who should fear the law are the ones that rely upon abusive tactics to manage.

Though 16 states have introduced several versions of the HWB since the first California bill in 2003, no state yet has passed the bill into law.

New WBI design now available as either pin or magnet.

Visit our button store. New lower pricing with shipping included.

A new book accuses British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of throwing temper tantrums. What do you do when the boss is a bully?

He’d punch walls and angrily stab chairs with pens. Frequently, he’d yell at his staff, once pulling a secretary out of her chair for typing too slowly.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has a volcanic temper, according to a new book, The End of the Party, in which political journalist Andrew Rawnsley describes a series of tirades during Mr. Brown’s second and third terms in office.

The book was excerpted in Sunday’s Observer, the same day Christine Pratt, the head of the National Bullying Helpline, revealed that Mr. Brown’s staff had called her service .

In the Prime Minister’s defence, Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson told the BBC that Mr. Brown is a leader who “gets angry, but chiefly with himself.” Downing Street staff have described a leader who is simply passionate about his work.

The allegations have stirred experts in the growing workplace-bullying industry, and some say “passion” is the cop-out du jour for intimidating bosses.

“Passion can justify any over-the-top emotion. The message is that everyone else should learn to live with it. That’s what it’s like in a bullying environment: Everyone walks on egg shells, but all cater to the Grand Poobah,” said Gary Namie, founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute.

Dr. Namie, who works with WAVES, a human resources company that deals with workplace bullying (for Canadian employers), describes the behaviour as “health-harming mistreatment” and “psychological violence.”

According to a 2007 study by the institute of 7,740 Americans, 37 per cent had been bullied at work, and 39 per cent of bully targets suffered clinical depression. Bullies are often bosses: 72 per cent, the study said. Forty per cent of those are women who target other women; men appear to split their bullying evenly between the sexes.

It seems the man has a temper,” said Gerard Seijts, professor of a leadership course at Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ont. Prof. Seijts said hotheads can get far in leadership because no one stands up to them. “Often times, it requires a lot of courage for people around a leader to speak up. … But every time we don’t correct people on their behaviour, we raise the bar for our moral outrage. If we treat this as acceptable, what becomes unacceptable? Maybe slowly, [Mr. Brown's] behaviour became unacceptable.”

Dr. Namie noted that human resources staff can only go so far to resolve the conflict. “Bullying is not an HR problem. It’s an executive-team, administrative, leadership problem, and unless and until they want it to stop, it’s not going to. HR hears all the complaints but they don’t have the power to create a new policy and to enforce it.”

Dr. Namie said the biggest mistake that bullying targets make is to let “the bully sink the claws in” the first time around.
“The bully is testing the water. The failure to confront that is what convinces the bully you’re an easy mark. Unfortunately, what makes a target a target is they didn’t see it coming. They’re constantly surprised.”

Asher Adelman said one way to avoid bosses with volcanic tempers is pre-emptively. “It’s very rare for a workplace to improve its culture. Usually, when things go bad, they only get worse. For the most part, aggressive, abusive managers don’t change their behaviour,” said Mr. Adelman, founder of eBossWatch.com, which lets job seekers troll a database of anonymous posts about bad bosses.

The site has rated the top worst bosses for 2009, including a water distribution superintendent who held a four-hour, profanity-laced meeting and instructed employees to hit each other, a football head coach who broke another coach’s jaw during training camp, and an airline CEO who screamed at his employees in front of hundreds of customers lined up at the airline’s check-in counter, ignoring a sign that warned passengers: “Abusive behaviour towards staff will not be tolerated.”

A physician demands that a prescription be filled despite proof that it has been prescribed from faulty information; an intimidated ER nurse doesn’t dare speak up when a life-threatening condition is  overlooked; a surgical team stands knowingly, yet silently by as a surgeon makes a life-threatening  error ; despite the plea of a mother, nursing staff refuse to challenge the doctor’s written order resulting in the  senseless death of a  toddler; a senior nurse refuses to assist a junior nurse  as a critically-injured patient slips away. What is the common factor in these, and  other similar and actual situations?  Workplace bullying.  In  medical environments, personnel often couch it in more benign language:  intimidating and disruptive behavior.

Workplace bullying involves repeated health-harming mistreatment usually directed toward underlings or peers, but affecting the quality of patient care and life in general.  Workplace bullying falls into one or more of  the following categories:  work sabotage, verbal abuse, or conduct that is threatening or intimidating or humiliating. Conduct that is in opposition to  the employer’s legitimate business interests, workplace bullying levies real costs, financially, emotionally, physically, and in every other way.  In the medical work place it contradicts professional ethics, including the Hippocratic Oath, for it severely compromises patient safety and quality care.

Bullying is about the bully, not the target.  The bully puts his/her personal agenda of controlling another human being above the interests of patients and the employing medical organization.  A bully’s weapons of choice often include deliberate humiliation, the withholding of critical resources or information, social manipulation, and professional sabotage.

What are the myths that allow the destructive behaviors to continue and thrive?

Myth 1:  Bullying behavior is not prevalent.

Intimidating behaviors are increasing at an alarming rate.  A survey conducted by the Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP) found that 88 percent of the medical practitioners surveyed encountered condescending language or voice intonation, 87 percent encountered impatience with questions, 79 percent dealt with reluctance or refusal to answer questions, 48 percent were subjected to strong verbal abuse, 43 percent  experienced threatening body language, and 4 percent reported physical abuse.  Intimidating and disruptive behavior involves more than  one or two offending individuals in a given medical organization.  Thirty-eight percent of respondents reported that three to five individuals were involved in negative encounters and 19 percent reported that more than five individuals were involved in negative encounters.  Moreover, only small differences between male and female respondents showed up in reports, with male respondents somewhat more reluctant to confront a known intimidator, and female respondents somewhat more willing to ask for help in dealing with a known intimidator.

Myth 2:  Targets deserve or ask for abuse. Smart people don’t become targets.

Individuals most often targeted by bullies prove to be independent, skilled, bright, cooperative, nice, ethical, just and fair people.  In fact, targets are often amongst the most highly skilled, competent, and altruistic individuals.  Bullies, driven by their own personal insecurities, perceive skilled and competent coworkers as a threat.  Bullies tend to thrive in environments in which (1) there are opportunities to behave in a cutthroat, zero-sum, manner, (Note 1) (2) there is a pool of exploitable targets (typically those people with a pro-social helping orientation), and (3) negative personal consequences are negligible, and (4) perpetrators  are rewarded for their bullying behavior by those who collude with the intimidation, or those who are afraid to challenge the bully.

Myth 4:  Bullies are worth keeping around.

Bullies are exhorbitantly expensive.  Conservative estimates and  prevalent data indicates that bullying medical practitioners cost organizations over a million dollars per 50 employees per year in turnover costs alone.  Damages to organizations also include poor morale, low productivity, and difficult recruitment and retention of quality workers.  The ability of health care workers to work as a team is compromised, the quality of patient care is diminished, and lives are needlessly lost.  Medical lawsuits invariably accompany the substandard medical care produced by such sabotage, and the cost in this regard may be incalculable (Note 2) .

Negative impacts specifically on Targets and their families include damages to psychological and physical health, financial stability, social support systems, and professional growth opportunities.  In a survey conducted by Zogby International, 45percent of targets reported stress-related health complications, ranging from depression and PTSD to cardiovascular diseases and neurological compromises.  The greatest harm comes from prolonged exposure and 44 percent reported suffering from workplace abuse for more that 1 year.

Myth 5:  Employers generally recognize the harm done to their organization and deal effectively with bullying behavior.

In the vast majority of cases, bullying  stops only when the target loses his/her job either by quitting, being forced out, or transferring to stay employed.  But it’s only a matter of time before the bully identifies a new target. The bully infrequently (Note 3) endures negative consequences.  According to the Workplace Bullying Institute national scientific survey, the Target quits 40 percent of the time, the Target gets fired 24 percent of the time, and the Target transfers 13 percent of the time.  The Bully is punished only 23 percent of the time.  And 62 percent of employers ignore the problem altogether.   According to the ISMP survey, only 39 percent of medical practitioners felt that their organization dealt effectively with intimidating behavior.  Medical corporate cultures typically do not  deal effectively with workplace bullying.

Myth 6:  There are legal protections against workplace bullying in the United States.

The United States remains the last among western democracies to have no anti-bullying laws for the general workforce.  If mistreated employees who have been subjected to abusive treatment at work cannot establish that the behavior was motivated by race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, or age, they will  likely find no legal protections against such mistreatment.  According to the WBI survey, workplace bullying is four times more prevalent in the United States than illegal harassment.

Myth 7:  Bullying is just part of the medical culture necessary to maintain quality patient care.

According to the ISMP survey, a remarkable 40 percent of clinicians have kept quiet or remained passive during patient care events rather than question a known intimidator. Forty-nine percent of respondents reported that intimidation had altered the way they handle order clarifications or questions about medication orders.   Forty percent simply assumed that a questionable order was correct or asked  another professional to speak with  an intimidating prescriber. Seven percent reported being involved in a medication error in which intimidation clearly played a role.

At the release of a Sentinel Event Alert by the Joint Commission establishing a zero tolerance policy, Dr. Mark Chassin, President of JCAHO, stated:  “The Joint Commission has maintained a database of serious adverse events for many years and in continuously analyzing those data, we find that failures of simple communication among caregivers underlie many, many of these adverse events. One of the most important barriers to good communication is the intimidating and disruptive behaviors we’re talking about today.

The ignoble history of tolerance and indifference to intimidating and disruptive behaviors allows this type of behavior to go unchecked.  By giving tacit permission, health care organizations are condoning workplace bullying. At last,  the Joint Commission has insisted  that enough is enough (Note 4) . Safe patient care is dependent on trust, teamwork and a collaborative work environment among caregivers. The space for intimidating and disruptive behaviors shrinks daily for workplace bullies, no matter what their reasons  and no matter who they are. Some have argued that the stress of delivering health care in life or death situations excuses the behavior of bullies. Yes, there are very real stresses in health care because the stakes are high, and health care professionals are often pushed to the breaking point mentally and physically.  But responsible professionals agree that there’s a right way and a wrong way to manage that stress (Note 5).”

Intimidating and disruptive behaviors in no way contribute to quality patient care. Rather, they undermine patient safety and devastate staff morale.

Myth 8:  There is nothing that can be done about bullying in the medical workplace.

Don’t fall into the  trap of believing that  abuse in the medical workplace is a necessary evil that cannot be addressed.  Each of us can make a difference:  First, we can support laws that make health-harming workplace violence illegal.  Second, we can support organizations in establishing and enforcing appropriate policies.  Third, we can pay attention to those around us.  There is safety in numbers and in unity.  Bullies try to divide and conquer in order to exert their will.  We can refuse to participant in their social manipulation tactics.  We can ask questions, insist on answers, and verify facts when coworkers appear to be targeted.  We can support ethical behavior.  We can treat all of our fellow coworkers with the dignity and respect that they deserve.  We as a community can and must demand that our medical workplaces become bully free zones.

Reference Notes:

[1] The Joint Commission Teleconference on Disruptive Behavior Among Health Care Professionals, Wednesday, July 9, 2008.  Available online:

http://www.jointcommission.org/NR/rdonlyres/CE6FE184-1088-4C89-BA21-2522E886B754/0/DisruptiveBehaviorConf7908.pdf.

[2] The Joint Commission (2008).  Sentinel Event Alert: Behaviors that Undermine a Culture of Safety.  Issue 40: July 9, 2008. Available online:  http://www.jointcommission.org/SentinelEvents/Sentineleventalert/sea_40.htm.

[3] Institute for Safe Medication Practices:  Survey on workplace intimidation, 2003.  Available online: https://ismp.org/Survey/surveyresults/Survey0311.asp.

[4] Intimidation: Practitioners speak up about this unresolved problem (Part I),  ISMP Medication Safety Alert!  From the March 11, 2004 issue.  Available online:  https://www.ismp.org/Newsletters/acutecare/articles/20040311_2.asp.

[5] Gary and Ruth Namie, “The Bully at Work”, Sourcebooks Inc., 2009.

Denise Halverson, PhD, is Utah State Coordinator for the Healthy Workplace Bill Legislative Campaign

As a follower of the workplace bullying phenomenon, you are invited to join the new IAWBH organization. Tell your friends. Begun at the biannual conference held in Montreal in 2008 (described at this site), this group which was primarily limited to academic researchers in the early years is now reaching out to a broader constituency — clinicians, practitioners, non-academics.

The next conference is June 2-4, 2010 in Cardiff, Wales. WBI will be represented with Dr. Gary Namie and Prof. David Yamada delivering keynote addresses and presenting papers.

When she was 21, she ended an argument with her younger brother with a fatal shotgun blast. She was not charged. Then, in 1993 when she was a researcher she feared a negative evaluation of her dissertation (which she had just submitted) by her supervisor, Paul Rosenberg. Mysteriously that supervisor received a pipe bomb in the mail shortly thereafter. She was questioned and then cleared by the ATF. Her current husband, with whom she has four children, was present in her life during the prior incidents.

She had been denied tenure and had repeatedly complained about it at department meetings prior to Feb. 12. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Dr. Setzer, the chemistry department chair, said he had heard from biology department colleagues in biology that there were concerns about her personality.  In meetings, Setzer remembered, she would go off on “bizarre” rambles about topics not related to tasks at hand—”left-field kind of stuff.”

According to Boston Globe reporters, she was a freaky neighbor with a low tolerance of noise and children who frequently called the police on her neighbors.

Conclusion: as in most workplace homicides, it’s not the bullied targets who do the shooting, it’s an aggressive person with too little impulse control and access to weapons. An armed bully is a dangerous person.

Startling to non-academics is that a Harvard PhD biologist is capable of murder or being subjected to a work environment that may have driven her to think her only option was to kill colleagues. Where one goes to school has nothing to do with her costly decision. However, we shouldn’t be surprised according to the North American expert on faculty abuse is Ken Westhues at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Visit his well-documented site for insights.

Professors are among the most egocentric groups around. Highly funded research faculty (the kind who rarely teach lowly undergrads) can be campus superstars. Professors who are excellent teachers experience second-class status except in community colleges. Department chairs (the first-line supervisors in the managerial hierarchy) typically couldn’t manage a shift at McDonalds. They either allow interpersonal problems to fester without relief or supervise with a command-and-control style because they lack skill to do otherwise.

Short tutorial on the three levels of professorhood. Entry-level, Assistant Prof (usually straight out of graduate school) for 4-6 years, subject to publish or perish pressure. Associate Prof is a person granted tenure by their department peers, based on their performance record, though also very prone to political sabotage and trickery by insecure peers who can control a disliked peer’s economic future. Tenure = Hard to fire, job security status.  Professor is the title earned by Full professors that at about 10-12 years into their careers. It connotes senior status.

The  majority of teaching positions in the academe are part-time, without benefits, and not earning seniority toward tenure: teaching associate/assistant (the grad student teacher), instructor, adjunct professor, lecturer, visiting professor.

The shooter was 44 years old. Why was she still an assistant professor (PhD in 1993, hired at University of Alabama, Huntsville in 2003) after 7 years? Her archived faculty bio page does not state her graduation year. She was an inventor of devices. She and her husband ran a business that involved devices. She might have felt that begging for tenure was beneath her, that based on her external experience as well as her science, she was entitled to tenure. But the sparse list of recent publications in peer-reviewed journals seems a likely basis for tenure denial.

Too few details are clear. Stay tuned for an update. It’s an educated guess that there was a series of insults or disgraces prior to the horrific day.

For an insightful academic’s insider view, visit Prof. David Yamada’s blog

Check news coverage:  WHNT-TV,  WAAY-TV

Imagine that. A sane single parent not wanting to deploy. What an upside down world when seen through a mother’s eyes.

The essence of the MEG test is the measurement of the dynamic synchronous neural (bundled) interactions, an essential aspect of the brain function. MEG Dewars (caps) are helmet-shaped and contain as many as 300 sensors, covering most of the head. Then, complex statistical analyses of the data are required to differentiate activity across various areas of the brain to identify specific patterns.

MEG can detect neuronal events with a precision of 10 milliseconds or less, while fMRI, which depends on changes in blood flow, has a lower precision of several hundred milliseconds. MEG also accurately pinpoints sources in primary auditory, somatosensory and motor areas.

Research on brain–machine interfaces has been ongoing for at least a decade. During this period, simultaneous recordings of the extracellular electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons have been used for direct, real-time control of various artificial devices. Thinking about moving an arm is converted to moving an artificial limb — neuroprosthetics restores mobility in severely paralyzed patients.

MEG has been used to diagnose Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia, Sjögren’s syndrome, chronic alcoholism, facial pain, and multiple sclerosis.  “Communication patterns are very different from disease to disease,” says Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos from the Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center and University of Minnesota. “So the different diseases create disturbances in the communication that can be used as a fingerprint, a signature, for the disease.”

For years, the diagnosis of PTSD, has been a subjective process involving mental-health professionals conducting structured interviews with patients suffering PTSD-like symptoms.

In a Jan. 2010 issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering, Georgopoulos and his research team reported the successful diagnosis of PTSD using MEG. The Minnesota researchers used MEG to assess 74 U.S. military veterans believed to be suffering from PTSD, along with 250 subjects not thought to be suffering from the condition. Distinctive brain patterns indicating PTSD were found in 72 — or 97.3% — of the 74 people diagnosed with PTSD through the traditional interview process; false positives turned up in 31 of the 250 subjects (12.4%) without PTSD. The findings counter the popular notion that PTSD is not a real disease but a fabricated disorder. The neuronal patterns revealed a distinctive communication pattern, the “PTSD fingerprint.”

Georgopoulos likens the MEG test for PTSD to diabetic blood-glucose monitoring tests to keep their disease under control. “The test is totally safe — there are no magnets, no isotopes — you can do it as frequently as you want,” Georgopoulos says, adding that it also doesn’t require dredging up the traumatic events that generate PTSD. “The whole thing takes literally a minute.”

This most recent application of neuroscience to the world of stressed and traumatized individuals seems profound. However, the question remains about how to distribute the technology and methods to medical practitioners for practical use in the field.

The Jan 2010 J Neural Engr article |  MEG explained at Wikipedia

Brain-machine interface: Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, 530–540 (1 July 2009) | doi:10.1038/nrn2653

MEG detecting diseases: J Neural Eng. 2007 Dec;4(4):349-55. Epub 2007 Aug 27

Photo (c) Robin Holland

Academic historian, author, activist & playwright Howard Zinn died on Jan. 27, 2010 of a heart attack. His work inspired us WBI citizen lobbyists with his 2007 essay “Are We Politicians or Citizens?” Said he, “We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth.”

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an academic and veteran of the military not afraid to stand against war, for peace. For daring to speak peace, he was considered too “left.” As historian, he wrote the history of the U.S. from the perspective of oppressed groups and the requisite struggles for social justice. Too much for the disenfranchised, the underdogs, thus too “left.” In “The People Speak” which aired on the History Channel, actors read quotes from historical figures reclaiming democracy for America based on Zinn’s work. Too uppity and diverse and in-the-face of the rich and powerful, thus too “left.” A critic of nativism, blind patriotism and symbols when the nation’s actions and practices render patriotism hypocrical. Way too “left” by threatening to expose American exceptionalism and arrogance.

He will be missed. Here are some tributes. Democracy Now.  Videos about how he wanted to be remembered. And was insulted with NPR’s inclusion of an ad hominim attack of him during his obituary segment. Remembered by his former student Marian Wright Edelman as a man who “taught us to be neither victims nor passive observers of unjust treatment but active and proud claimants of our American birthright.”

North America’s expert on psychopathy is Robert Hare. The documentary, The Corporation, explores the premise that businesses behave maliciously and without conscience. This DVD is recommended viewing.

Hare draws the analogy between people and corporations.

- superficial, style over substance
- grandiosity, we’re number one, none better
- manipulative, that’s what PR is for
- lacks empathy, hey it’s “just business” to rationalize cutthroat competition
- lacks remorse, anything goes if not caught, bonuses after economic crash
- does not accept responsibility for actions taken
- impulsive and reckless, especially in the absence of regulations
- focus on short-term, quarterly stockholder gains are all that matter
- poor behavioral control, irrational and quick to rage
- ignores consequences of their actions on others (the climate, workers, economy)
- actions harm others, anti-social

Read his essay on the topic.

1. The employer can do whatever it wants! Contract? Fuggedaboutit.

2. “Executive” is a meaningless marketing term — useful only for bathrooms, ranks of chefs in a restaurant’s kitchen, office furniture, and overpriced upgraded junk (SkyMall crap) misleading consumers to think they are getting something better for their money. Truth be told they rarely came up from the ranks by knowing the business. And they remain remarkably out of touch with those who work for the corporation. NBC exec Jeff Zucker runs the network that is watched by the fewest viewers. He runs an unsuccessful business by his industry’s own best measures.

3. Employers routinely lie to, and betray, employees. Jeff Zucker made Conan wait 5 years dangling the promise of hosting the Tonight Show when Leno left as an incentive for Conan to be “loyal” to the network. Then, he repays the loyalty with termination after 7 months. So much for integrity.

4. Employers who trash workers risk sabotage. Few of us can get even as Conan did in a very public way — on the air.



A postal worker, Ray Miehlke, contacted LSJ columnist Schneider with reports of a “reign of intimidation at the U.S. Postal Service’s Collins Road facility,” and a complaint of a physical assault by his supervisor which was found to have “no merit” by USPS spokesman Jim Mruk. To explain his willingness to speak up while others are intimidated into silence with threats of retaliation, Miehlke said “I’ve lived my life not putting up with bullies.”

Abusive workplaces are not rare at the Post Office. See the following articles posted here:

Another USPS Tragedy The 2010 Murder by Proxy documentary An arbitration where the Post Office defended the bully supervisor claiming the Violence policy does not apply

The Feb. 4 Schneider article:
Postal worker’s bullying allegations draw attention
February 4, 2010
Lansing State Journal

In a recent e-mail to me, electronic technician Steven Ray Miehlke described a reign of intimidation at the U.S. Postal Service’s Collins Road facility.
“We work … in fear,” Miehlke wrote. ” … Threats, verbal abuse and physical assault are everyday occurrence in the work place. These things are … accepted (and) encouraged.” Miehlke, who lives in Mason, cited several supervisory “bullies” at the facility who “attack women employees most often.”
In a subsequent interview, Miehlke, a 15-year veteran of Collins Road, said an angry supervisor struck him with an elbow and pinned him against a conveyor line Jan 22. Miehlke filed a formal complaint, and was instructed to send his statement, along with a list of witnesses, to postal inspectors in Detroit. He did so.
Proper channels
Responding to my questions this week, Postal Service spokesman Jim Mruk said my inquiry had been “forwarded to human resources, the inspection service and the office of the inspector general, who will investigate the matter.”
Mruk responded to my follow-up inquiry by directing me to inspector Andre Brown, in Detroit. Ultimately it was inspector Wylie Christopher who said he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation, adding, “Something is being done.”
But late Wednesday Mruk phoned me back to say the investigation on the Jan. 22 incident – as well as an earlier incident – was complete and inspectors found “no merit” to Miehlke’s claims. “There was no assault,” Mruk said.
Earlier, Mruk said: “There are two sides to every story. Anytime we receive information that there is a problem in the work place, it’s taken seriously. We’re confident the matter will be investigated and appropriate action will be taken.
Miehlke said the supervisor he named in his complaint had been transferred from Collins Road immediately following my inquiry. Mruk called it “purely coincidental.”
No word
Mruk agreed to relay my request for an interview to that supervisor, but I didn’t hear from him Wednesday. Absent that interview, I won’t name him here.
In his e-mail Miehlke wrote: “Officially, there is a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards even the mildest forms of intimidation. We have been told, ‘Threats or other types of verbal abuse will not be tolerated. Anyone interfering with you as you work will be removed from the building. Intimidation and bullying will be dealt with harshly. Any physical contact will be considered an assault.’
“Unless the bully is a supervisor.”
Miehlke said he doubted his fellow employees would speak up on the record, for obvious reasons. My attempts to interview two of them confirmed his assumption. So, why is Miehlke willing to speak out?
“I’ve lived my life not putting up with bullies,” he said.
Call John Schneider at (517) 377-1175, send a fax to 377-1298 or e-mail jschneid@lsj.com.

“We want to relate to each other and to our families as good, moral, just people who do the right thing and then we go out to the corporate culture and it’s this horrible dog-eat-dog, greed, anything-goes culture.” Victor Fresco, show creator

“Delivers a potent mix of shocking truth, honest analysis and dark humor”
COMING TO THEATERS IN 2010

Feature documentary Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal offers a provocative examination of the possible role of hostile work environments in mass murder incidents, starting with the earliest USPS mass murder-suicide in 1986.

At a time when tensions are rising again in the Postal Service and in other workplaces across America, Murder By Proxy is a simply a must-see film.

Spread the word, forward the link to this announcement to your friends

· Conference Board survey: U.S. worker satisfaction at 45% new 20 yr. low

· Dec. 2009, U.S. employers shed 85,000 more jobs – 17.3% of Americans are unemployed, underemployed or discouraged

· 37% of U.S. workers are bullied and in 2009, 28% said the abuse worsened with the recession

· Number of suicides by those who lost their identities and life purpose when their economic status was reduced to rubble — unknown, but surely rising.

All the happy talk about an economic recovery (for the publicly funded mega-banks) is balderdash in light of the reality for working people. Let’s drop the Dow Jones number obsession and start measuring what counts in real people’s lives. Until there’s an active social movement, the politicians will continue to cater to corporations.

I was making great money, loved my job and my customers, the retirement plans, and the company car. All this experience yet nothing prepared me for the unexpected environment I entered into at age 48.

“Borrow trouble for yourself, if that’s your nature, but don’t give it to your neighbor.” –Rudyard Kipling

Perhaps Rudyard Kipling knew something about bullying…He didn’t want it, nor did I.

I didn’t know it was workplace bullying until I saw Dr. Gary Namie on Good Morning America in 2004. By then I was in so deep…my health had suffered while I tried to keep working in the dog eat dog world of pharmaceutical sales. Having been a nurse and respiratory therapist for nine years had taught me strong work ethics and giving 110% in all situations as my work could mean the difference between life and death.

Having two successful businesses for 13 years prepared me for long hours, determination, positive energy, working independently, focusing, and achieving goals. All this experience yet nothing prepared me for the unexpected environment I entered into at age 48.

I was making great money, loved my job and my customers, the retirement plans, and the company car. Being a single mom raising three children, paying college expenses, the house payments, the pool, yard, and cleaning services, $500 a month utility bills, insurance, groceries, and family vacations caught me in a hamster’s wheel of life – a series of repetitive motions.

I knew I was in a desperate situation when I told my son to sue the company I worked for if I suffered a heart attack. I was angry. Here I was working for the top medical company in the world yet the bullying increased with every success I achieved. Management decided my fate and I was told I would never be promoted. I could leave if I didn’t like it. I had the all American dream and lifestyle that was slowly killing me.  How could I change my life and survive on less money? The answer came, but not easily.

Perhaps if I had seen Dr. Namie’s segment on hostile work environments and workplace bullying a few months (or years) earlier I would have been able to “name it” and take action, while I had a choice. My wake up call came after I had a complete meltdown and was immobilized in bed for days on end. Clinical depression, anxiety, panic attacks, body aches, shortness of breath, sweating, nightmares, sleeplessness, weight gain, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a burned out thyroid were the result of “hanging in there” way past what management had in mind for me. I became one more statistic as part of the 30% of people who additionally develop PTSD from bullying. In the end, they succeeded…I left my job, but not by choice.

I became totally and permanently disabled. The stigma of mental illness in our society is damaging in itself and one that will decrease only through education. PTSD is an injury not an illness but many people do not understand the difference; nor do they seem to care to understand.  By not seeing an injury or illness one denies it even exists and the person with a psychiatric injury or illness may even be labeled as a malingerer. Sure, it’s just what I always dreamed of, all 35 working years in my medical related career.

After four years of discrimination litigation, five “Independent Medical Exams” paid for by the employer, retaliation and loss of disability pay when the trial ended, ongoing litigation to get benefits reinstated, five years of psychiatric care, loss of my home, car, and $30,000 in legal fees paid from savings…life has changed, yet, I am thankful!

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  George Elliot

Life after workplace bullying is one of daily adjustments. I have learned that less is more and money does not buy time, health, or happiness. I have also learned to ask for help if I need it. This has been the most difficult adjustment, as my experience was to be a giver. It is much easier to give than receive; but now I see the joy in others as I accept help and love from family and friends. I am more humble. I see the small things are the most important things…I have time to smell the roses, play with my grandson, read, listen to music, take long baths, watch the birds and butterflies, walk my Labrador and write about him too.

Miller’s Red Vest is my illustrated children’s  book about my yellow Labrador becoming a Psychiatric Service Dog (PSD). We have a special commitment to look after one another…if Miller sees me become anxious, he nudges me. He protects my space and watches me when we are in public. Having him with me helps me to focus on him when leaving home and lessens my fear.

Miller is a working dog and allowed to go in public places as any other service dog. He travels with me and flies in the cabin as my service dog. While traveling abroad I saw the need to write a book about invisible injuries to teach children (and adults). Not all disabilities are visible to the eye but they are still real. Miller tells his own story of becoming his best friend’s service dog.

As I seek ways out of the depression and anxiety I experience; I write about Miller. The process of writing has also brought my sister and me closer together as a writing team and support system. Writing Miller’s story gives us hours of creativity and collaboration, laughter, and tears, as Miller leads us through his journey to help me overcome the effects of workplace bullying.

Miller’s Red Vest is the first in a series of children’s stories about Miller’s adventures and how he teaches people about bullying, discrimination, and how to become more understanding of invisible injuries. He expresses how important his job is and what it means to wear his red vest.

Copyright 2010 Cheryl Ward

The holidays are supposed to be about peace and goodwill, Dr. Namie comments on how society may be changing its support of bullies.

Download Podcast 14 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

New audio tale from a successful plaintiff with painful lessons to share

Download Podcast 13 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

Listen in our Audio Section

Bullied targets tell us all the time that they seek justice. In fact, the most frustrating aspect of bullying of adults by adults is the injustice. it is unjust that bullies enjoy the backing of executives & owners. it is unjust that the best performing, albeit  least politically oriented, workers are designated for harm. It is unjust that few laws or policies address bullying. Injustice (a much lesser form than bullying) has been shown to increase the risk of coronary heart disease by 40% (read C2 article in the WBI Research Library)

This violation of fairness disgusts targets and affected family members. But justice rarely comes from lawsuits, judges and courts. One California woman did prevail, however, against a state agency in court. She worked in law enforcement and absorbed the full force of the agency and the state attorney general’s office when she fought back. Listen to her account of that experience. Listen to her wisdom about the process so that you know what to expect if you ever contemplate filing a lawsuit.

Listen to Rebecca H, a plaintiff against the state of California, who shares painful lessons from filing a lawsuit and actually winning in court.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

(Note: This is updating a previous post to a podcast.)

We started the Legislative Campaign to enact the anti-bullying bill in states in 2001. In 2010, we will add to the count the 17th state to introduce some version of the bill thanks to the grassroots network of HWB Coordinators in 27 states and 2  provinces. The new website becomes the single source of info about the legislation for lawmakers, potential sponsors, citizen lobbyist volunteers. and media. Visit

The Healthy Workplace Bill website.

The Drs. Namie, Workplace Bullying Institute

Listen to the show segment at the WBI website or the CBC website.

Alexis & Karmani Hutchinson, Credit: AP

She sent the son to her mother back home in Oakland, CA. However, the grandmother, could not provide the needed care and returned the child because she cares for her ailing mother and sister, as well as a daughter with special needs, and also runs a day-care center at her home, keeping about 14 children during the day. Hutchinson then scrambled to find another relative or acquaintance to care for the child. She skipped the Nov. 15 plane sending her unit to Afghanistan after that extension was rescinded.

Major  Gallagher of her unit (3rd Combat Aviation Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division) imprisoned Hutchinson instead. The unenlightened Gallagher and First Sergeant Gephart of her unit both believe that Hutchinson’s plight was not a real family crisis. They accuse her of using her son as an excuse to avoid deployment. Her son was taken from her by state child protective services. The mom faces a court martial in Afghanistan. There was also some coverage by the Associated Press.

10.7% of Army members are single parents.  Family Care Plans were formally required effective July 1992. Read the regulation.

The Army was an employer that reneged on the promise of a time extension. Next time you hear about the Army being family friendly, think again. And remember, these are the “Hooah” gang that deliberately blames PTSD victims for their psychological injury from waging war on behalf of the officers and desk jockeys in the Pentagon, Congress and White House.

But for individuals overwhelmed by the emotional morass of early-stage bullying or the effects of prolonged exposure to workplace stress, we offer telephone coaching/counseling by Jessi Brown, MS, LMHC, LPC. We plan to offer her telephone services one day per week starting in December. That day has not been determined yet. You can request a 55 min. session with Ms. Brown via e-mail (info at workplacebullying dot org)  and we will contact you to select a convenient time.

INTRODUCTORY RATE of $50 (US) per hour.

When I was offered a job as a junior network television executive at age 26, I was beyond excited. I’d get to be creative, meet talented sitcom writers, and best of all, work for a woman I idolized. Amanda,* a TV veteran who worked on some great shows, seemed intimidating from afar—drop-dead gorgeous and extremely successful—but in our interview, she was warm and funny, listened carefully to my ideas, and complimented me on everything from my intellect to my earrings. I showed up my first day thinking, “This will be the Best. Job. Ever.”

Instead, I drove home every night in tears. Amanda stole my ideas, sabotaged my relationships with writers, and “forgot” to tell me about meetings. It was like high school all over again. How could this be happening in a respected company run by professionals?  ….  Finish reading the original article at the magazine’s site

Read more about woman-on-woman bullying.

Freedom from Workplace Bullies Week was a chance to break though the shame and silence surrounding bullying. It was a national call to action. Anyone can participate in the way they seem fit. Here are some examples of ways people celebrated.

“I composed an unemotional, professional letter to our Board of Directors and sent it.”

“I put up a poster in my local career center. “

“I put a poster in the HR office, and published an article in our company’s newsletter.”

“I posted awareness messages on my facebook and myspace accounts about Freedom Week. I also posted it on my anti-bully blog.”

“I wrote a letter to our local chamber of commerce.”

One college professor led a discussion on the topic of workplace bullying.

Many people reported having conversations with loved ones or co-workers. Many others posted posters around their home town.

Thank you to all who participated.
If you are interested in doing more for Freedom From Bullies Week next year please let us know.

A Better Response to Mini-Holocausts
Bullying has been described as mini-holocausts because people are destroyed while others stand idly by. There is an alternative. A lesson from history where a nation responded to the actual Holocaust.

Download Podcast 12 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

WBI loves his popularization of the neuroscience of prolonged stress and its impact on health. Adult targets of bullying at work should appreciate his insights. His book  Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping a veritable textbook for those of us not in medical school to which we refer in speeches and WBI University. Purchase his book.

His bio
Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D is  Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University . Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist, has focused his research on issues of stress and neuron degeneration, as well as on the possibilities of gene therapy strategies for help in protecting susceptible neurons from disease. His lab was among the first to document that stress can damage the neurons of the hippocampus. He is currently working on gene transfer techniques to strengthen neurons against the disabling effects of glucocorticoids. Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. He received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Young Investigator of the Year Awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the Biological Psychiatry Society, and the International Society for Psychoneuro-Endocrinology. Author of numerous science articles, he is on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychoneuroendocrinology, and Stress and is a contributing editor for The Sciences.

Listen to two of his speeches at our Audio library.

- Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

- Stress and Coping: What Baboons Can Teach Us

Purchase his Zebras book.

Read one of his articles written for general audiences. [The influence of social hierarchy on primate health. Science, 2005, 308, 648-652.]

Elizabeth Blackburn

The 2009 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was won by Elizabeth Blackburn and two others for the discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.” Telomere shortening makes humans age faster than they otherwise would. Blackburn, the 60-year old biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco , oversees diverse applications of the science from her lab. Read reporter Katherine Seligman’s profile of the scientist.

The most relevant aspect of her original 1970’s discovery is the study of the impact of exposure to stress on telomeres which shortens the stressed person’s life.

Our personal genetic codes are carried in chomosomes made up of DNA molecules . Telomeres are the caps on the ends of the string-like chromosomes. According to Blackburn, telomeres are “like the plastic ends of a shoelace.” Blackburn discovered that those caps protect the chromosomes during replication.

As we normally age, telomeres shorten and start to lose their protective capacity and we lose protection from diseases. As the caps wear down and the cells shut down, we age. Unprotected chromosomes are prone to mutations and cancer.

Elizabeth Blackburn and felllow Nobel winner, Carol Greider who originally was one of Blackburn’s graduate students, identified telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the stability of the protective telomere caps. Because telomerase rebuilds the telomere caps, the enzyme actually delays aging (called senescence by scientists). This was true in simple organisms (the initial work was with yeast cells) and in humans.

Activity by telomerase — the enzyme not the chomosome telomere caps themselves — is associated with cancer cells. Normal cells divide and lose their telomere caps and require telomerase to rebuild. Cancer cells, however, divide constantly (moreso than normal cells) yet somehow maintain their telomeres caps. Why do cancer cells not age and die? Telomerase may hold the key. Research continues.

For bullied targets, the Nobel winning research is directly relevant. There is a connection between stress (the human response to external psychosocial stressors) and aging at the cellular level. Long-term exposure to stress decreases telomerase activity resulting in telomere cap shortening leading to accelerated aging through premature cell death. Highly stressed women experienced the equivalent of an additional 9 to 17 years of aging when compared to non-stressed women.

In an illustrative study led by another of Blackburn’s former graduate students, Elissa Eppel (article C3 from the WBI Research library), mothers were categorized as either “caregiving mothers” or “control mothers” based on whether or not they raised a chronically ill child or a healthy child and self-ratings of stress in their lives. Age affects telomere length. They are shorter as we age naturally.  Telomere length was the key measure of the impact of stress in this study. Sophisticated analyses of blood samples yielded telomere lengths and telomerase levels.

Self-ratings of stress were higher in caregiver moms. Within the caregiver group of 39 women, the more years of stressed caregiving, the shorter was the telomere length and the lower the telomerase activity level. And perceived stress was associated clearly with telomere length. The women with the highest stress had significantly lower telomerase activity level, exposing the ends of chromosomes to damage causing them to age faster.

In addition to shortened telomeres, highly stressed women in this study suffered more oxidative stress (cell damage from circulating free radicals that attack cellular DNA and RNA) which causes diseases like atherosclerosis, heart failure, heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, and chronic fatigue syndrome. The release of glucocorticoids, the primary stress hormones released by the adrenal gland during the body’s initial stress response is known to damage neurons. (Read Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for a clear, non-scientific description of this elaborate physiological process.) Low telomerase levels are associated with premature death in adults from bone marrow failure and vulnerability to infections.

The researchers in this caregiving mother study raised the fascinating possibility that people who are more psychologically resistant to stress have longer telomeres than highly stressed individuals. And telomerase contributes to maintaining telomere length. Longer telomeres can extend the life span (in simpler, non-human, organisms). A missing link in the science is the confirmed association between psychological stress resistance and physiological (at the cellular level) stress resistance. But it makes sense.

Read the Eppel, Blackburn et al. study with an attached announcement from the Nobel award committee.

You can also view Dr. Blackburn’s streaming and downloadable online video lectures about telomeres and telomerase.

Summary: chronic, unremitting stress causes problems at the cellular level that can prematurely age a person and render him or her vulnerable to diseases that kill. Moral of the story: stress is physiological and works at the cellular level. If your workplace has begun to cause you health problems, escape to live. Your body has already begun the process of decline and is aging you faster than necessary. Put your health first.

G. Namie

Guest Podcast: Teachers Bullied at School — Observations About Teachers as Targets a Teacher

Carrie Clark, podcaster

Carrie Clark, MA –  WBI-Legislative Campaign spokesperson, Co-Coordinator of the California Healthy Workplace Advocates, and CHWA Blogger, former English school teacher, veteran of 20+ years, and WBI Consultant for the Workplace Bullying in Schools Project

Part 1: When Teachers Are Bullied, 6′27″
The special case of teachers, who they are and why they get bullied
Download Podcast 11 – Part 1 (in .mp3 format)

Part 2: Solutions for Bullied Teachers, 2′14″
Download Podcast 11 – Part 2 (in .mp3 format)

Watch the video of Carrie narrating a 2008 BNET production on workplace bullying — Calling a Bully a Bully

Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Sponsored by the American Psychological Association/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health /Society for Occupational Health PsychologySan Juan, Puerto Rico | The Conference Program | The Conference Website

WBI participation

Symposium: Case Studies in Workplace Bullying – Just Scratching the Surface of Costs and Consequences.  Saturday Nov. 7:  11:30-12:45.  Presenters: Gary/Ruth Namie, Kathy Rospenda, Joel Neuman, Suzy Fox, David Yamada

Roundtable: Workplace Bullying: From Research to Activism. Sunday Nov. 8: 9:45-11.   Presenters: Suzy Fox, Lamont Stallworth, David Yamada, Gary/Ruth Namie, Joel Neuman

Paper: Bullied Workers Shunned in U.S. Workplaces.  Sunday Nov. 8: 2:45-3:45. Presenters: Gary/Ruth Namie

You can read the research works by these WBI-affiliated scholars in the WBI Research section for friends.

Researchers Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley, found in a series of studies that it is actually the combination of power and incompetence that can result in bad boss behavior. The paper will be published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science.

 [FYI, the paper is also described in our article and can be requested from the WBI Research list - A7. ]

“It’s not just power that corrupts people and it’s not just incompetence either,” said Fast, the lead author of the study. “It’s the pairing of the two that leads to aggression.”

Over a third of working Americans are estimated to have been bullied—that is, belittled, threatened, humiliated or sabotaged—according to a separate survey of 7,740 workers. And 72 percent of the perpetrators are bosses. The Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash., sponsored the national survey.

“

Abusive supervision is a major problem in U.S. companies.This is bad because it leads to high turnover and poorer performance,” Fast said. “We wanted to figure out what the mechanisms were that caused the power-holders to abuse their underlings.”

To do so, the researchers conducted four studies with 410 participants.

In one experiment, half of the participants were conditioned to feel powerful by recalling experiences of power over others. The other participants remained neutral as they were made to remember mundane events. Some members from each group were then conditioned to feel competent by recalling an achievement while the rest were conditioned to feel incompetent by recounting a failure.

Afterwards, the participants’ propensity for bullying was measured using a noise-blast horn, a tool used by psychologists to gauge aggression. The participants were instructed to select the decibel levels of the horn blasts to be used when strangers made mistakes. The volume of the noise blasts revealed how aggressive the participants were.

“The people in the high-power condition who also felt incompetent were the ones who exposed these strangers to high-noise blasts,” Fast said. “None of the other groups did.”

Ruth McKay, an organizational behavior specialist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, said the study has timely implications on workplace conduct.

“I find the results very interesting especially in today’s environment where baby boomers are exiting the workplace and there may be employees that are promoted too quickly without training to fill the gaps,” she said. “They may use aggression as a response if challenged.”

Adam Galinsky, a management and organization professor at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University, expressed concern about thrusting unprepared people into leadership positions as well.

“Organizations need to train people for leadership,” he said. “They need to not only give skills but to also provide a sense of ‘I know what I am doing.’”

Air Med flight nurse Laura Sorensen told her boss in 1993 that she had multiple sclerosis. In hindsight, she believes, she shouldn’t have.After learning of Sorensen’s diagnosis, University Hospital wouldn’t let her return to her job, she said, and instead moved her to its burn unit. Sorensen filed suit under the Americans with Disability Act — ADA — but a judge threw out the case because she was not physically impaired enough to be considered disabled.

And that, she said, was exactly her point: At that time, she wasn’t disabled and was capable of doing her job.

Now in a wheelchair, Sorensen told her story to legislators Wednesday in the hope they will consider passing a new law that protects health care employees from being bullied by their employers.
“I don’t want others in the future to fall through the legal cracks as I did,” she said.

The Health Care Provider Abusive Work Environment Prohibition Act (HB 224) would protect workers from a “work place where an employee is subjected to abusive conduct that is so severe that it causes physical or psychological harm to the employee,” the bill states.

Its sponsor, Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, said the law would stop “what is in some areas a culture of intimidation in the workplace” by protecting those employers that adopt policies against bullying from legal action.

Such a law is necessary, he said, because unless an employee falls into one of five protected classes — race, religion, disability, gender and age — they have little recourse under federal law.

Michelle Swift, a registered nurse and attorney who specializes in employment law, said Utahns can apply for Workers’ Compensation benefits if they have been “psychologically injured.” But those claims are seldom approved.

Sandstrom’s law, she said, “would allow employers to become involved and to have accountability and responsibility that would provide for that safe working environment for the employee — and ultimately good patient care.”

Opponents of such a law fear it will open a floodgate of lawsuits.
But Sandstrom said his bill sets the bar high for bringing legal action by precisely defining an abusive work environment. “It’s not going to be easy for someone to say just because they got yelled at once, they were abused in the workplace,” he said.

And proponents of the law say it would protect not only employees, but patients. Medical errors, such as giving out the wrong dose of a medication, are more likely to occur when a health care worker is upset, they assert.

Denise Halverson, the Workplace Bullying Institute’s (WBI) legislative coordinator in Utah, recounted the story of a toddler who was recovering from burns. She acted thirsty, sucking furiously on wet washcloths, and her mother called nurses twice one night.

The nurses repeated what their supervising doctor had said: She’s fine. Not long after, however, her heart stopped and she died of dehydration.

“It’s not because the nurses didn’t care. They did,” said Halverson, who contacted Sandstrom about carrying the bill after her own sister was the victim of workplace abuse. “They just weren’t willing to follow up” due to fear of retribution from the doctor.

Gary Namie, founder of the WBI and coauthor of “The Bully at Work,” met with Sandstrom and a small group of health care workers Tuesday night at the capitol. Bullying in a health care workplace, he said, can have disastrous results.

“You have an industry where if this happens, you have death as a potential consequence,” he said. Namie said Utah is one of 16 states that have introduced a bill protecting targets of workplace bullies. But not one has had a floor hearing in a state House or Senate.

The country has collectively said no to domestic violence, no to child abuse. But workplace abuse, Namie said, “is the last bastion of abuse where we tolerate it. It is not only not taboo, it’s rewarded and promoted.”

Legislators expressed concern that such abuses may be happening, but some were unsure whether Sandstrom’s bill solves the problem or shifts it to the courts.

“You’ve made some horrendous accusations I’m sure the other side will want to be heard on,” said Health and Human Services Committee Chair Chris Buttars, who plans to give employers an hour to be heard on the subject during a future meeting.

But, added the Republican senator: “What you’ve said, if only fractionally true, is ridiculous.”

lrosetta@sltrib.com

An epidemic of workplace bullying in hospitals and clinics has gotten so bad it will take legislation to put a stop to it, members of the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Interim committee were told Wednesday.
And, it’s having direct negative effects — sometimes fatal — on the care of patients, said Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, whose anti-bullying bill (HB 224) was referred by fellow lawmakers this past session to interim study. The committee took no action Wednesday but will continue studying the issue at monthly meetings between now and the Legislature’s general session beginning in January.

Witnesses told committee members that intimidation and other acts of emotional violence by superiors to front-line care providers foster medical errors, contribute to poor care outcomes, increase the cost of care and at minimum force people out jobs they neither want nor should have to leave.

The Workplace Bullying Institute’s director, Gary Namie, testified that half the workforce has either been bullied (37 percent) or have witnessed it (12 percent), and that 40 percent of administrators in effect ignore the problem or impose some kind of workforce sanction against the employee involved, not the intimidating superior.

The “proclivities of a tyrant boss” can also include simply shutting someone out of their work for fear of future reprisals and without basis, a retired certified emergency nurse from South Jordan told committee members.

Laura Sorensen said she was barred from being an AirMed nurse by University of Utah risk assessment attorneys because “I had the gall of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. They looked into their magic crystal ball and saw a potential lawsuit and that day, swept me under the rug.”
She said although she was forthright with her supervisors and told them of the diagnosis and that she would ground herself the minute she felt physically compromised by the disabling disease, she was immediately deemed too much of a public relations risk. Because AirMed helicopters provide emergency care in the most high-profile accidents that more often than not are covered by the news media, any sign of impairment such as a limp caught on tape and seen by a victim’s family would lay the university open to a malpractice lawsuit, she was told.

To add insult to injury, she said, her superiors regarded her as disabled without the slightest indication she was. Ironically, she wasn’t technically disabled enough under the Americans with Disabilities Act that would have protected her from the discrimination against her by the U., she said.

Sorensen said the fears were unfounded and she worked full time for 10 years at other emergency-care centers after her 1993 diagnosis.

Because there is no legal protection against workplace bullying, more than 80 percent of such accusations are dismissed by equal-opportunity and human-resource departments because they can find no “reasonable cause” for action.

Any bullying legislation is too late to protect her, Sorensen said. “In the future, my hope is that employees have adequate laws in place because I don’t want others in the future to fall through the legal cracks and experience the same indignity.”

Read the text of HB 224.

Take a stand. Do something different if only during this week. Eventually, we will gather and march on corporations and state legislatures demanding justice. For now, your victory may be completely personal and internal or within the work team or among loved ones. Just do something differently this week. For your health’s sake if you are the one targeted or for the others you care about.  See our suggestions.

TELL THE WORLD WHAT YOU HAVE PLANNED — POST IT IN A COMMENT HERE

Bullies present themselves as omnipotent and powerful to dissuade confrontation and to keep from being revealed as something different. Targets intuitively sense that bullying is compensatory behavior, attempts to cover wrongdoing with bluster and bravado. It’s like the Wizard of Oz in the palace who is exposed by Toto, the dog, when he pulled back the curtain showing the small man pretending to be bigger than he was.

It’s nearly impossible to call a bully insecure or cursed with a sense of self-inadequcy because of the power they often enjoy in the workplace. However, the intuition of bullied targets and witnessing co-workers is spot on. Bullies are small people.

In a 4-study research paper to be published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science, by Nathaniel Fast (University of Southern California) and Serena Chen (University of California, Berkeley) linked aggression at work to perceived inadequacy of people in power (bosses). [Fast, N.J. & Chen, S. (2009) When the boss feels inadequate: Power, incompetence and aggression. Psychological Science, Nov. 2009]

Three of the studies tested working adults and are most relevant to the workplace.

In the first study, 90 working people completed assessments of their formal authority and power at work, the degree to which they feared being negatively evaluated by others (the inadequacy measure), and their level of aggressiveness as traditionally measured (willingness to hit others, ease with which arguments are entered). The aggression survey is a reliable predictor of physical violence, verbal abuse and the tendency to get into fights. For people with organizational power, believing themselves to be incompetent led them to be more aggressive than competent people. This was not true for people without power.

In the second study with working adults, some people were guided to think about their power or competence beforehand. Aggression translated into how loud (decibel levels from 0 to 130) they would be willing to blast a horn at another person who made mistakes over 10 trials. For people who already had organizational power, being primed to think even more about that power made them more aggressive if they also felt incompetent.

The third study of adults asked participants to rate their organizational power and their aggressiveness as in the first study. People were then sorted into low- and high-power groups based the demand their jobs required. Low power tasks typically involved doing simple work, completing tasks, High power tasks involved influencing others — supervising, closing sales. Then, the experimenters manipulated the perceived level of competence for people within each power group. Those subjected to their own incompetence were instructed to write about an experience where they failed to meet a task demand. Competence was primed by having those people recall a time when they successfully completed work projects.

This study also added another manipulated factor. Half of the people in each group were asked to select the value most important to them from a list (social life, relationships, business, etc.). They then wrote a paragraph justifying the value’s personal importance. This was done to bolster a sense of self-worth, a self-affirmation. People in the no affirmation group selected their least favorite value and wrote about how the value could be important to others.

In all three studies, incompetence increased aggression for high-power, but not for powerless, working adults. Aggression decreased when powerful people were reminded of their competence. When incompetence was primed (the person was reminded of failures) for low-power people, aggression decreased. The affirmation factor created some ego defensiveness and it seems to be the explanatory factor for why power and incompetence mix the way they do to lead to more aggression.

Thus, the results point to the dangerous combination of incompetence in the hands of people with power. The authors, Fast and Chen, claim that their work demonstrates that power holders have an increased vulnerability to perceiving potential psychological threats. Rather than feeling safe in their positions of power with the ability to disproportionately affect the outcomes of other people on a routine basis, the feelings of incompetence escalate the perception of threat in the eyes of people with actual power and authority. In turn, this leads to ego defensiveness (a self-protective mental device) that leads to aggression.

There was some limited exposure of participants to flattery, but the manipulations were weak and artificial compared to real-world kissing-up, ingratiation, that bullies receive at work. So, research on flattery’s effect on aggression by a boss is yet to be advanced.

Unfortunately, aggression equals bullying in this study. Regular working people rated their own tendencies to be aggressive. This was not a study of bullies. Of course, bullies do not offer themselves up for research purposes.

It would be an innovative to extrapolate link between perceived threat and aggression to the organizational level. Executive sponsors feel threatened when their bullying toadies are accused of wrongdoing. They react defensively. With guidance from legal counsel and HR, the entire organization responds defensively attacking the bullied accuser who dared to reveal internal weaknesses. But that is a study for another day. As they say, in the academe, further study is warranted.

Gary Namie

You can request this study (A7) at the WBI Research section.

Gillman had closed the plant in Dec. 2008 without notice or the severance pay due to 240 union workers (represented by the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America – UE). The Dec 5-11 sit-in by the union inspired the nation partly because Bank of America (on the heels of the initial bank bailout) was tarnished as the greedy bank that kept a good-guy CEO from meeting payroll.

Diligent union sit-in members found Gillman to much less than honest. He was a crook who knew his factory would have to shut down but did not tell creditors or employees. He ordered the trucking of equipment from his Illinois union shop to his non-union Iowa factory. Union members trailed the trailers. (Saving the equipment enabled Serious Materials, a California firm, to buy the factory.)

That sit-in is memorialized in Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story.  During the sit-in, Gillman could not access his office for documents. It was those documents that led to his being charged with defrauding creditors of over $10 million and using the money for paying off two luxury cars and not paying employees their $2 million. Gillman is charged with 8 counts of felony theft, fraud and money laundering through two shell corporations. His bail was set at $10 million.

Telling remarks from the union about the arrest, “Corruption and abuse of workers rights is rampant in corporate America.  Very often where you see violations of workers rights there are other corporate crimes and poor conditions as well … we all hope that this is the beginning of more bosses being held accountable for their crimes against workers.”

Let us hope that accountability can be restored for many more executives.

According to the LA Times, Crystal was born into a family of textile workers. By age 17 she was in the mill. In 1973 at age 33 she was working for $2.65 an hour at the J. P. Stevens factory in Roanoke Rapids, NC sporting a union pin. A coal miner-turned-organizer, Eli Zivkovich, was attempting to unionize the workers.

She angered management and was fired for supporting the union. Immediately afterwards, she wrote “UNION” on piece of cardboard, climbed onto a table with the sign raised. The workers switched off their machines. Crystal was arrested. The next year the plant voted in the union. She won back wages (only $13,000) and moved on.

Her subsequent union advocacy cost her a second marriage. The story of her heroism was written in a 1975 book and inspired the movie “Norma Rae,” which led to Sally Field’s Oscar winning performance depicting Crystal. The producers fought Crystal over details of the movie; she forbade them from using her name.

Crystal Lee Sutton worked as a maid and security guard until her health deteriorated.

Her legacy : “It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world.”

Stop the fear — of being the only one who comes to your bullied colleague’s assistance, of daring to provoke the bully with an indignant stand, of being the next target, of being called insubordinate if you talk or work with the target person, of losing your job. Go ahead and feel guilty for not helping someone who clearly needs your help and may have asked for it. Why do you worry about the bully’s impression of you? Think more about your personal integrity. Your bullied friend may be too ashamed to ask for help. So, offer it without having to be asked.

If all co-workers stood together and immediately confronted the bully AS A GROUP about interfering with work of the target, he or she would most likely back down, if only temporarily. Bullies are liars and cowards. It gives the target much-deserved safety. Unfortunately, the reputation of co-workers is well known. They cower in fear, doing nothing, or worse, siding with the bully. That’s why some people call bullying mobbing. It becomes many against one. Co-workers do the bullies’ dirty work for them.

By working together and showing the bully a united front, chances of being divided as a group are less likely. And if you stick together, you can’t all be fired (thus overcoming the greatest fear of all). The very least you can do as a group is to comfort the target by sharing your experiences as a former (and probably future) target of the same bully.

At least provide emotional support if tactical support sounds too scary. In the beginning of the bullying, targets believe they are alone and this never happened to anyone before (because co-workers are silent and do not share experiences). Reinforce the target’s humanity. While being bullied, targets come to believe the bully’s lies. The group can counter the lies. Be there for your friend. It’s the social compact among human beings. Honor humanity; dare the bully to act humanely toward all of you. Read more about why groups do what they do in The Bully At Work.

Make the Oct. 18-24, the week of Freedom from Workplace Bullies, the excuse to try something different. The results will please you.  It will be something you can be proud of. And your targeted colleague will thank you.

The gist is that during times of economic expansion, workers are stressed by overtime and sleep less, hence they drink and smoke and commute to jobs which causes pollution which in turn leads to a spike in heart disease which all negatively influence health.

However, deaths remained stable during the Depression (except for suicides) and life expectancy increased from 57 to 63 years. You can read the research abstract below.  In 2005 Granados published a similar study in the Journal of Epidemiology and was countered by a researcher who disputed the conclusions (the same ones Granados drew in 2009).

Granados told a Reuters interviewer that during recessions there was less work to do, so employees can work at a slower pace. “There is more time to sleep, and because people have less money, they are less likely to spend as much on alcohol and tobacco,” he said.

José A. Tapia Granados and Ana V. Diez Roux

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), September 2009

Abstract

Recent events highlight the importance of examining the impact of economic downturns on population health. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the most important economic downturn in the U.S. in the twentieth century. We used historical life expectancy and mortality data to examine associations of economic growth with population health for the period 1920–1940. We conducted descriptive analyses of trends and examined associations between annual changes in health indicators and annual changes in economic activity using correlations and regression models. Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. The only exception was suicide mortality which increased during the Great Depression, but accounted for less than 2% of deaths. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.
E-mail: jatapia@umich.edu  Social Environment and Health (SEH/SRC) Program, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248;

Download and print the Poster for your office or home(in .pdf)

Recently, a former student athlete at Central Connecticut State University, where I teach, has alleged that his coach, George Kewacki, made him drink blood in front of teammates.

While there are racial overtones to this incident, it is also an instance of bullying. Like Annie Le, the student athlete hovers between “school” (bullying is banned by law in CT schools from K through 12) and work (there are no workplace bullying laws).

In that space, college/work, the opportunities for bullying are rife. So much depends on one’s performance and compliance, from scholarships to housing to careers, that targets are naturally reluctant to speak out.

If you have experience as a graduate student worker, or as a student athlete, and you have been bullied, please write to your state legislators. Ask them to include in the WBI Healthy Workplace Bill provisions for protecting those who are also the employees of their colleges or are holding some sort of contract for services rendered.

I saw on the news an “expert” who claimed that workplace violence was rare. Perhaps murder is rare. But bullying, which is violence, is not rare. We know that 37% of the American workforce has experienced bullying at some time, based on research done by the Workplace
Bullying Institute.

Although the time has passed for legislation for this year, let’s gear up for next session. Let’s remember Annie Le and all those whose very lives have been at stake because of workplace bullying.

Dr. Katherine Hermes, WBI-LC Connecticut State Coordinator

Online at CT Bullybusters

Calling Out Bullies – Only for the Brave – 5′ 34″

Download Podcast 10 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Kudos to newbie Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-8th Dist) who bluntly called out colleagues who are stalling on health insurance reform. Grayson was outraged by the Cambridge Health Alliance study revealing that people without private insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of dying than insured people, an unconsionable outcome in the “richest country in the world” accounting for 44,579 adult deaths in 2005 from uninsurance. We should all be outraged. However, truth telling, calling out bullies, can be hazardous.

Dr. Gary Namie and Carrie Clark (WBI-LC State Coordinator) Thank you, NAACP!

Panel: Bill sponsor Stephen Sandstrom;  Utah Nurses Assoc president Nancy Watts;  Lauren Scholnick, attorney;  G. Namie & D. Halverson, WBI;  Sharlene Watson and Laura Sorenson, nurses. From this meeting will come a Utah Healthy Workplace Advocates group. Contact the WBI-LC State Coordinator ut@healthyworkplacebill.org  to be connected.

The event was held Sunday Oct. 25, 2009 at Village Books, Bellingham, WA. Village Books, 1200 11th Street, Bellingham, WA‎, (360) 671-2626‎

Lawyers say Yale murder highlights need for training, policies (about physical workplace violence) with a nod to understanding possible underlying work environment issues. Read the original article.

Includes our list of indicators that you might be being bullied without knowing it.

Read the original article on Oprah.com

SIOUX CITY — The Sioux City Community School District wants to practice what it teaches by developing an anti-bullying program for adults.
The district already has a program in place for students, but this week, about 20 district employees, including teachers, janitors, administrators and counselors, gathered at the Northwest Area Education Agency to brainstorm and create a bullying-prevention program for themselves and their co-workers.

The district is the first in the nation to launch an anti-bullying program with advocates trained to hear complaints from employees, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., which is partnering with the Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention in North Sioux City to provide training.

A trained advocate can resolve disputes in an effort to resolve them without a reprimand or forward them to district officials for further action.

Sioux City Education Association president Bruce Lear said workplace bullying is a problem in every work environment and trying to stop it before it happens is the best approach.

“This provides a vehicle to address something that’s long been unaddressed,” Lear said. “We’re unique in the idea that we’re willing to try to do something before it happens.”

Cindy Waitt of the Waitt Institute said open discussion about workplace bullying is a recent phenomenon.

“It’s so new and cutting edge,” Waitt said. “Fifty years ago there wasn’t a conversation about family violence. … This is all a part of people becoming open to all forms of bullying in life. This one could take a generation to reach a saturation point.”

Debi VanMeter, a safety technician for the district, said people have confided in her about uncomfortable situations at work and that compelled her to get involved with the program and become an advocate.

“I think it will further promote a healthy work environment for the employees of the district, and I also think it will trickle down to the children in the district,” VanMeter said. “Overall, it enhances a healthier atmosphere.”

Steve Crary, human resources director for the district, said the school board passed a workplace bullying policy in January and the workshop is the next step.

“This creates a synergy within our district where employees can stand up if they see this occurring and say,’ Knock it off, stop,’” he said.

But there’s a whole range of actions that can be taken, including termination, if bullying occurs, Crary said.

“The reality is, if we can get our employees to buy in and be part of the process it will have a much larger impact than just human resources,” he said.

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, said he hopes other districts across the country will follow in Sioux City’s footsteps.

“Our desire is to see this become a national movement that school districts will want to embrace,” Namie said. “As schools cut back and lay off, I think it’s wonderful to have employee protection for surviving employees.”

Namie said people shouldn’t shy away from reporting bullying just because they’re grateful to still have a job and that employers should be obligated to offer a safe, healthy workplace free of humiliation and intimidation.

Alison Benson, spokeswoman for the district, said she hopes the program will begin some time this year.

The District has teamed up with the Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention to create a bullying prevention plan unlike any other. The three day program will help staff to recognize and resolve bullying amongst their peers. In doing so, they hope the program’s outcome will have a trickle down effect.

“Coaches and adults that work with youth, empowering student leaders to help facilitate conversations amongst their peers in high school in particular, talk about some of the strategies to change social norms that basically says this stuff, violence and bullying, is not ok.” says Alan Heisterkamp of the Waitt Institute.

Because the program is so unique, the bully program is being filmed this week for a documentary called “The Bully Project”. It’s spearheaded by Emmy Award winning film makers, Lee Hirsch and Cindy Lowen.

KCAU-TV 9. Sioux City, IA

West High’s anti-bullying program is making history, by expanding prevention to staff and faculty. The training program creates advocates to give both students and teachers a place to report bullying. From the lunch room to the teacher’s lounge, the district hopes to stop the problem before it starts.

Steve Crary, Director of Human Resources for the Sioux City Community Schools told KMEG 14, “As a school district, we’re constantly working with our kids to stop bullying, and the best way to do that is to make sure our adults are modeling the way and leading the way.”

The training sessions also create coaches to continue spreading the message that bullying is not acceptable.

More Information available here

Schools and student bullying are a September tradition. However, this year, there is a new twist. The Sioux City (Iowa) Community School District (SCCSD) is boldly taking steps to prevent bullying among teachers, staff and administrators. They are first district in the nation to launch an anti-bullying program for adult employees.

[Interested school district administrators are invited to call 360-656-6603]

The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) is consultant to the District with its nearly 2,000 employees and 28 schools. Through its consulting firm, Work Doctor, Inc., the WBI founders adapted their Blueprint for Workplace Bullying Prevention designed for corporate use to fit the public school district as employer. Work Doctor was the first consulting firm in the U.S. to directly design organizational solutions for workplace bullying.

Last October, with WBI’s help, a group of employees wrote the first-in-the-U.S. district bullying policy for adults. Bullying is defined in the policy as conduct that a reasonable person would find hostile, intimidating, offensive, humiliating or an abuse of authority. Accordingly, the alleged bullying must lead to negative consequences that affect an employee’s ability to perform his/her job.

SCCSD Human Resources Director Steve Crary said that the vision he and Superintendent Dr. Paul Gausman share is “to ensure our district is free of all forms of bullying and to create a respectful climate in our workplace.”

The policy writing group also created a team of current and former district employees, the Bullying Prevention Advocates (BPA), to serve as peer experts on workplace bullying. They will also educate staff and sustain the program in a variety of ways. The BPA group is likely more important than the policy alone because the group is central to creating a school culture intolerant of bullying among adults.

School board member John Meyers told the Sioux City Journal that “the initiative will generate positive role models for our students … if we’re asking students to do something we wouldn’t do ourselves, we’re not being honorable.”

WBI founders and consultants, assisted by WBI University graduate and teacher expert Carrie Clark, lead 3 days of intensive training for the BPA team in Sioux City on Sept. 15-17.

New York-based documentary filmmakers Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen are featuring the WBI project in their forthcoming film, “The Bullying Project” that explores bullying’s impact across the lifespan from childhood through adulthood. Hirsch’s previous film, “Amandla!,” won awards at Sundance and an Emmy Award.

Dr. Alan Heisterkamp of the Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention is the liaison for this and other violence reduction-prevention programs at SCCSD. WIVP also partnered in 2007 with WBI to conduct the first scientific survey of all adult Americans regarding workplace bullying. WIVP and its president, Cindy Waitt, were responsible for this national project to serve as the prototype of how school districts can foster a bullying-free environment for adults as well as students.

“Schools are workplaces, too,” said Dr, Ruth Namie, WBI co-founder and project consultant. “Success here in Sioux City could launch a national movement to rid schools of bullying for adults as well as children.”

School districts interested in following the Sioux City model are invited to visit the Work Doctor website (the Drs. Namie consulting firm) or call 360-656-6603.

The list of known health impacts of bullying is long. Affected systems include cardiovascular (high blood pressure, cardiac ischemia, heart attacks, stroke — a great deal has been discovered by Peter Schnall, MD and researchers associated with the Center for Social Epidemiology), gastrointestinal (colitis, ulcers), auto-immune (fibromyalgia, cancer propensity), and the psychological/emotional (anxiety, panic attacks, clinical depression, acute stress disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder – PTSD).

One characteristic of the onset of depression is sleep disruption — either trouble falling asleep or trouble returning to sleep after premature awakening. A recent study of French workers (E8  by Niedhammer et al. in our Research section) illustrates the association between being bullied and sleep disturbances.

Of those currently experiencing bullying both men and women were twice as likely to have sleep trouble than those not bullied. Problems with sleep were most pronounced when the bullying was daily or almost daily, and for women, if the exposure to bullying lasted more than five years.

Even witnesses to bullying were affected. For men, 60% increase in sleep disturbances; for women, a 20% increase occurs. People who both witnessed and personally were bullied had twice the sleep problems as people not bullied, with men having a slightly worse time than women.

In an American study (E9 in our Research section ), the association between being bothered or upset at work and the quality of sleep was examined. How does work “follow workers home”? Being bothered by work is a direct measure of stress because it captures a person’s emotional reactions to conditions at work. Other negative workplace measures included reports of low control (no autonomy) over work conditions and perceived job insecurity (fearing layoffs). The Univ of Michigan researchers (Burgard and Ailshire) used a longitudinal sample of 1,330 representative adult Americans across the occupational spectrum and across three measurement periods.

The results showed that being bothered or upset at work does consistently account for poor sleep quality. Even stressful negative conditions at home (financial hardship, spouse concerns, children) were not as disruptive as being bothered.

The relevance of the two studies is that sleepy, fatigued workers make performance errors. In manufacturing sites, they risk injury. In white collar workplaces, they make more mental errors. Though bullied workers are subjected to false claims by their bullies that they are poor performers, eventually the stress from bullying makes the person perform poorly. Sleep disruption may be one reason. Thus, the bully’s lies become their own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The studies (both available through our Research section):
Workplace bullying and sleep disturbances: Findings from a large scale cross-sectional survey in the French working population. I. Niedhammer, S. David,  S. Degioanni, A. Drummond, & P. Philip  (2009) Sleep, 32 (9), 1211-1219.

Putting work to bed: Stressful experiences on the job and sleep quality. By S. Burgard, & J. Ailshire. Population Studies Center Research Report 08-652, University of Michigan, 2008.

Stephen Colbert's history of his "anti-union" stance

PLAY THE VIDEO CLIP — Pay special attention to the nitrogen cycle explanation of work!

Read the complete results.

Labor Day 2009 Remembering the place of working people – 13′ min.

Dr. Gary Namie

Restoring dignity for the underclasses with help from Franklin Roosevelt, Mark Twain (Hal Holbrook), Andrew Cuomo, Harry Chapin.

Read the Aug. 2009 report cited in the podcast: No Rhyme or Reason: The ‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’ Bank Bonus Culture by Andrew Cuomo, NY State Attorney General

Download Podcast 9 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Guest Podcast: Unions and Bullying  – 5 min.

Carol Fehner, union activist, former union rep, lifelong bullybuster (and WBI affiliate), retired federal worker

Learn what bullied targets should do to get the union to pay attention.

Download Podcast 8 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Tutorial:Recasting health insurance reform from a bullying perspective – 7 min.

Download Podcast 7 (in .mp3 format) or Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers in Portugal and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. [The abstract and citation appear below.] Though rats were the subjects, both rats and humans are easily stressed. Stress was induced over four weeks by sharing a cage with a dominant rats and receiving moderate electric shocks and prolonged dunks in water. The chronically stressed rats easily learned a simple task (pressing a bar to get a food pellet or sip of sugar water) but with greater frequency than unstressed rats kept pressing the bar when snacks were available in the cage and when the bar only randomly dispensed goodies. In other words, the stressed rats acted out of habit and did not respond to changes around them. Dr. Sousa, one of the principal researchers, said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

When the brains were examined, in stressed rats, neurons in the dorsomedial striatum, an area associated with goal-directed behavior (for example, pressing a lever to get a specific treat), had shrunk, making fewer connections to other cells. Meanwhile neurons in the dorsolateral striatum, an area that controls habits (such as pressing the same lever regardless of outcome), had grown and formed more branches.

Robert Sapolsky, preeminent American stress researcher and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (a book we highly recommend) told New York Times reporter Natalie Angier, “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut … we’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new… If I were to try to break into the world of modern dance, after the first few rejections the logical response might be, practice even more, but after the 12,000th rejection, maybe I should realize this isn’t a viable career option.”

Sometimes our brains under stress are our own worst enemies.

The structural brain and behavioral changes, fortunately, are reversible. After four weeks of vacation without bullies and shocks, formerly stressed rats were able to innovate and lay off the bar as well as the unstressed rats.  Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.

Ouch!

Because this study is significant to Sapolsky and other neuroscientists, we can extrapolate to human behavior. Bullied targets during the acute phase of being attacked have a very narrow perspective. Just like battered spouses, they cannot see that there are options, ways to get to safety, job and career alternatives that could save their lives. The deer-in-the-headlights paralysis that is so much a part of bullying and abusive mistreatment may be partly explained by this study.

Simultaneously, while the target is frozen and indecisive, witnesses and colleagues get increasingly madder at targets for not helping themselves. In fact, targets might be not be able to act differently given the underlying biological changes in their brains. We need to stop blaming the victims and understand the burgeoning neuroscience around stress, memory, decision making, and brain structure.

Another popular description of the study is found at ScienceNOW Daily News.

The research article:

Chronic Stress Causes Frontostriatal Reorganization and Affects Decision-Making
by Eduardo Dias-Ferreira, João C. Sousa, Irene Melo, Pedro Morgado, Ana R. Mesquita,  João J. Cerqueira, Rui M. Costa, Nuno Sousa. Science 31 July 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5940, pp. 621 – 625. DOI: 10.1126/science.1171203
Abstract
The ability to shift between different behavioral strategies is necessary for appropriate decision-making. Here, we show that chronic stress biases decision-making strategies, affecting the ability of stressed animals to perform actions on the basis of their consequences. Using two different operant tasks, we revealed that, in making choices, rats subjected to chronic stress became insensitive to changes in outcome value and resistant to changes in action-outcome contingency. Furthermore, chronic stress caused opposing structural changes in the associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits underlying these different behavioral strategies, with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex and the associative striatum and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum. These data suggest that the relative advantage of circuits coursing through sensorimotor striatum observed after chronic stress leads to a bias in behavioral strategies toward habit.

Nuna Sousa, MD, PhD:  Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Health Sciences, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.  njcsousa@ecsaude.uminho.pt

Rui Costa, DVM, PhD:  Section on In Vivo Neural Function, Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20852–9411, USA. costarui@mail.nih.gov

Read the actual Science article found in our Research section, C8.

Gary Namie, author of The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job, calls bullying one the business world’s dirtiest secrets.

Explain how workplace bullying is a silent epidemic.

About 37 percent of the U.S. work force — or 54 million workers — report they have been bullied at work, and 12 percent see it and are vicariously made miserable. Forty-five percent report they haven’t experienced or witnessed bullying, so on the one hand you’ve got an epidemic, while on the other the problem is an “undiscussable” epidemic. Research by the Workplace Bullying Institute also shows that most bullies are bosses (72 percent), more perpetrators are men (60 percent) and most targets are women (57 percent). Bullying is a worldwide phenomenon but it’s extremely common in the U.S. because aggression in the workplace is promoted and rewarded.

Describe differences between male bullies and female tormentors.

They are the same, with minor exceptions. All seek to control other people to drive their personal agendas and to make themselves more important. Where they differ slightly is that women bullies target women (71 percent), whereas men target men (54 percent.) Women also tend to pit women against each other, or they’ll bully to disrupt social relationships in the team. Males tend to use their higher-ranking buddies to crush you.

What are some tips to deal with bullying?

You can check for legal violations, such as civil rights or sexual harassment violations, which would compel employers to rectify the problem. Bullying, however, isn’t illegal, and it’s four times more common than illegal discrimination. The employer is safe to tell you to work it out between yourselves or to grow a thicker skin. You can take time off to check your mental health with a counselor or visit your physician for indicators of stress-related complications — such as high blood pressure, panic attacks or depression — to build a business case that bullying is too expensive to condone. Losses can also come from turnover costs, absenteeism, litigation and worker compensation claims. But confronting the bully may not get you anywhere. You’re targeted for your excellence, not for a deficiency. Workplace bullying is a form of psychological warfare between adults — inflicted by one adult that’s akin to domestic violence — only in this case the abuser is on the payroll.

Do workers’ fears in an economic downturn complicate the problem?

There are reports there has been an escalation in bullying since September, when the economic crisis hit. People are more trapped and there are fewer job alternatives. I wish I could be optimistic, but our research shows that 45 percent of the targets of bullying have stress-related health problems — and once targeted, a person has a 64 percent chance of losing his or her job for no reason.

Historically, committee chairs of the majority party can pass legislation out of committee whenever they want with strict majority votes (13 Democrats, 10 Republicans). However, Baucus chose a select group, which he dubbed the “coalition of the willing,” to craft new legislation. It included only 3 Democrats, including himself, and 3 Republicans and met in his office without public scrutiny. The result is a draft without a public insurance option designed to compete with the private plans. The House versions (e.g., HR 3200) contain this provision. This was President Obama’s original goal.

The Center for Responsive Politics compiled health industry lobbying and campaign contribution expenditures through June, 2009. The figures are staggering and help explain Congressional reluctance to adopt either single payer or public insurance options as part of any final “reform” package. Industry giving has been split nearly evenly between parties.

Pharmaceutical firms have spent $370.4 million on lobbying and $33.6 million on campaign contributions, with 51% going to Democrats, 49% to Republicans. Health insurers’ lobbying costs — $144.7 million — $22.8 million in contributions. Health professionals (physicians, dentists, nurses) spent $117.2 million lobbying and $105 million in contributions. Hospitals and nursing homes spent $151 million lobbying and gave $26.6 million to campaigns with 63% going to Democrats. Business PACs (tilting toward Republicans) spent $2.8 billion on lobbying and $433 million in contributions to oppose employer mandates.

Who supports the public insurance option? Unions (with Democrats as 92% of recipients) with $53.6 million spent on lobbying and $92.8 million in contributions. Nurses were the only health professionals to support a single payer plan ($1.9 million in lobbying, $866,891 in contributions with 79% going to Democrats). The AARP with its $37 million in lobbying is ambivalent about supporting the public option.

Industry opponents have outspent reform proponents approximately 43 to 1. Advocates for a public health insurance plan option spent $96.7 million, normally a large sum, but pale in comparison to the industry’s $4.2 billion. But does all that giving produce desired results?

Mike Dennison, writing for the Montana Standard discovered that one-fourth of Baucus’ campaign funds from 2003 through 2008, totaling $3.4 million (the most of any Congressman), came from drug companies, health insurers, hospitals, medical supply firms, and other health professionals. Sen. Grassley (R-IA) who stated publicly that people had reason to fear the so-called death panels, received a higher percentage 23.5% from the industry but a lower amount.

Tutorial: Fun with explanations for bullying that don’t lead to solutions, but provide personal satisfaction gloating that it is they who are defective! This is a long one – 11 min.

Download Podcast 6 (in .mp3 format) or   Subscribe to the Podcasts.

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Forget baseball, bullying, it seems, is fast becoming the national pasttime.

Bullying involves intimidation by one side over another acting with unshakeable confidence — whether real or faked. It’s about the unilateral exercise of power — real or imagined. Republican party power comes from its minority role and ability to block bills in the Senate. Republican unity often convinces Democratic leaders to not bother to move bills not certain to garner 60 or more votes. Minorities can bully despite their numerical disadvantage.

Bullies love to claim they are victims. They are whiners, projecting their weaknesses onto others. For example, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform famous for calling bipartisanship "date rape" claims that (1) there is a left wing political handbook, and (2) it dictates the use of lies, harassment and violence at Town Hall meetings to silence meeting disrupters. 

However, it’s the vociferous minority at Town Halls who are the harassers. Their startling misconduct paralyzes attendees who are there to get genuine questions answered or to have a reasonable dialogue as a voting constituent. Just like in bullying situations in families, classrooms and workplaces, witnesses tend to stand idly by with a deer-in-the-headlights powerlessness.

Civility and respectful disagreements are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Watch how Rep. Kathy Castor of Tampa tries valiantly to talk through the noise.

Town Hall bullies are the ones with simple-to-follow guidelines for those unwilling to think for themselves. Nothing could be farther from courteous civility in public settings necessary to discuss something as important as whether or not the health insurance industry will change. Changes proposed, but far from finalized, may create new opportunities for coverage for people previously blocked by the industry’s historical habits — rescissions (policy cancellations for dubious reasons), exclusion of pre-existing conditions (rendering the personal insurance game a "Catch 22" in which the only ones eligible for coverage are the ones who least need it), and unconscionably high COBRA rates after separation from employer-purchased group coverage.

Tea-bagger and relative unknown Bob Macguffie of the Rights Principles.com  wrote the recipe for incitement and chaos at Town Hall meetings. He directed attendees to be disruptive early and often, shout out a particular vote by the Rep then "freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it." Disrupters are to use intermittent shout outs by different people spread out across the room to make the Rep "uneasy early on .. goal is to rattle" the member of Congress. Macguffie tells people to be angry about "the socialist agenda, infringement of our liberties, and profligate spending."

 Bullies are bullies because they target others with hateful attacks. The real targets of bullying in all settings, for a variety of reasons, cannot or will not defend themselves. The presumed bully in Congress could be the Dems, based on their numerical superiority, but they behave more like targets, victims, and let the minority determine the legislative agenda.

Said one Washington State Democratic representative, "we dare not push the other party around or we will be mistreated when they next come to power and can control us." Make no mistake, this sheepish view is not shared by Republicans who historically intimidate their colleagues when in power. (Can you say Clinton impeachment?)

The rowdy folks in Castor’s Tampa meeting identified themselves afterwards as Glenn Beck fans. If they had studied the language crafted by the House Ways and Means Committee (HR 3200), the first of three House bills which will require melding in September, they could have rationally discussed provisions of the current drafts with which they disagree.

It’s a world turned upside down when the mock-"grassroots" message from the shouters is actually pro-corporate. They want to derail any changes to the current patchwork system that leaves millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured so as to risk dying in the world’s richest country for no other reason than they could not afford access to doctors and hospitals. 

And based on the film footage of some Town Halls, the screamers are unsure of what angers them — "socialism," having a Black President, government in their lives. The Town Hall I attended personally introduced me to a group of about 10 rabblerousers in a group of about 60 people who naively followed Macguffie’s script. 

The Town Hall was held in an American Legion hall with the stated purpose to discuss veterans’ matters. So many of the screamers seemed to be vets — of Medicare-eligibility age and many with VA benefits. Despite the involvement of government in their lives, they stood on cue, clapping, exhorting others in the room to stop the slippery slide into government involvement in healthcare!

To his credit, Congressman Rick Larsen (WA-2)  scheduled subsequent Town Halls to focus on health reform right after the events for veterans.  He also firmly countered the misconceptions and lies about the reform legislation at the meeting I attended. The faux-angry grumblers did not stay around to have an intelligent discussion with the Congressman afterwards.

So not only do bullies lie, they are whining cowards who have no intention of being reasonable. Stay tuned to see how aggression and conduct at Town Halls further impacts progress toward solving the myriad of societal problems.

Gary Namie

1-800-273-TALK  / 1-800-273-8255

We’re doomed it seems to never learn, or worse, never be able to teach ourselves to learn. This happens for several reasons.

Teachable moments for society require (1) facts and access to people whose life mission is to discover the facts, (2) an ability to absorb facts at levels deeper than superficial summary or Twitter-length statements, (3) an ability to separate politically-driven opinions from facts, (4) a “let’s fix it if it’s broken” orientation, a willingness to reverse long-standing problems with long-range solutions and to stop denying that societal problems exist, (5) sufficient public patience to allow the success to happen over time without insisting on immediate or short-term gains, and (6) abandonment of the cult of American individualism and exceptionalism.

At his press conference, Obama said “what I think we know separate and apart from this incident—is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”
Here’s how the Moment could have been materialized to get closer to a more equitable and decent society.

1. Facts about racial profiling (which Crowley was accused of) confirming Obama’s statement reveal themselves with a simple Google search. Further, the studies that pop up identify individuals and organizations who can teach us about it.

A 2008 Illinois state study found that when a vehicle of a white driver was “consent-searched,” officers statewide found contraband 24.7 percent of the time. When a vehicle driven by a minority was searched, officers found contraband 15.4 percent of the time. In Chicago, minority drivers were four times more likely to get searched.

The principal American researcher is Dr. Karl Lamberth who conducts studies and emphasizes applications for practitioners.  In a study for Washington DC law enforcement, Lamberth recommended that formal “how to” training done at police academy be accompanied by discussions about the informal transmission of biased conduct through the sharing of “war stories” among police.

It might surprise you to learn that Crowley the cop teaches the course Racial Profiling at the Lowell MA police academy. The course covers different cultures that officers could encounter in their community and not to single people out because of their ethnic background or culture. He has done so for the last five years at the invitation of the former police commissioner Ronny Watson (who incidentally is black). Certainly, police training prepares cops to endure predictable verbal abuse from the public when police exercise their unique authority to take away a person’s freedom. In other words, Crowley chose to have a short fuse and to react to the emotional Gates (who was in his own home and proved it to Crowley).

Another source is the Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center at Northeastern University, Boston. Reporters could have read the 2005 report “New Challenges in Confronting Racial Profiling in the 21st Century: Learning from Reserach and Practice” by Amy Farrell, Jana Rumminger, Jack McDevitt. Read the report yourself to learn that individual bias plays a role but also that policies can unintentionally result in disparate treatment of minorities. For those minorities, the burdens are not only ostracism but financial.

Amnesty International also has called for an end to racial profiling and created a fact sheet about it.

Finally,there is the ACLU Campaign Against Racial Profiling. ACLU experts were the only ones to have given media interviews about the problem.

2. As consumers of facts, we have to be able to absorb them. Turn away from purveyors of information that force feed sound bites and push twitter-length crawls across the bottom of the TV screen (or brightly colored sidebar boxes in newspapers). Some topics cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker. Newspaper Op-Ed opinion columns are limited to 600-750 words. And that now seems long.

Sometimes you have to read longer articles and follow all the links provided. Exercise your brain by reading more to keep the high level of functioning you inherited as a newborn. Condescending coverage of important topics breeds a stupid public. A stupid public is sheepish and will never confront the well-funded corporate forces willing to do the homework to figure out how to deceive and con you. Be skeptical. Read more. Dig for more facts. Don’t be influenced by partisan advertising making an emotional appeal because the creators know that if you thought about the facts you would never agree with their nitwit premises.

Teachable Moments require teachable, not passive, learners.

3. Americans have to be able to recognize the difference between facts and opinion. The media distort this difference all the time. They create a false sense of balance and equality when a representative of one side of an issue (climate change, for example) is paired with a rep from the other side. The scientists are 99% in agreement about impending catastrophic changes to the earth. 99% should not be counterbalanced with a 1%-er; it’s not equal. However, when one person, like idiot Sen. Inahofe, says that the science is a hoax, relying on the non-factual, anti-science nut makes the “debate” seem legitimate. In the screwy world of modern media, one man’s opinion is juxtaposed so as to look as important as the aggregate knowledge of thousands of scientists and millions of reality-based people.

Obstructionists love to say that opponents’ reality-based evidence cannot sway them because they themselves have not seen the evidence. In fact, they refuse to seek information that disconfirms their stereotypes about other people. When facts are presented, e.g., a copy of Obama’s birth certification, the disbelieving “birthers” have their totally false side of the story carried on TV as if there is a legitimate debate.

When have the media ever slowed down to gather and report “all the facts” in any story? In Gatesgate, polarized TV pundits separated into two camps — Police Are Heroes (who never do wrong — too much Law & Order not enough The Wire) and Racial Profiling Exists (unfortunately the principal proponents on TV were conveniently black). One side had the facts, the other side wanted to obfuscate and say that America has resolved its race problem. Unfortunately, the networks did not invite the scientists who conduct the racial profiling studies to present their work.

4. To solve a problem, you gotta admit that one exists. Staying in denial, avoiding conflict, resenting dissent, insisting on jingoistic nationalistic slogans (post-racial America) — all of these tactics block problem solving. As part of the current fight over health insurance reform, the insurers work tirelessly at great expense to convince Americans that government is to be feared more than the actual demonstrable record by health insurers of recission (dropping coverage when a new disease warrants treatment), exclusion for pre-existing conditions, increasing required deductibles and co-payments, and pricing individual and COBRA insurance so high that too many Americans cannot afford to have health or dental insurance.

In other words, they are telling Americans not to trust their real experiences and fear the imagined world conjured up from whole cloth. And polls show that this strategy works! How dumb are Americans?

Getting and paying for health care is a problem, so let’s fix it. The economy is a mess, so let’s fix it. But don’t turn to the industry and individuals responsible for the mess (Wall Street, insurers, hedge fund managers) expecting them to change and find a solution that works for the general public good.

Solutions necessarily change the operating rules that allowed the problem to develop in the first place. When corporations say to trust them to voluntarily do the right thing for patients or workers or voters, say no. Responsible insurers, investment firms, employers have nothing to fear from regulation. For that small group only, the marketplace restrains anti-social behavior. The rest of them cannot be trusted curb their profit-driven tendencies without the imposition of external regulations.

The mantra for corporate America is that an unfettered marketplace is better than one regulated by government on behalf of the people. This perspective has dominated American culture for nearly 30 years. Solutions to the problems generated by the marketplace will not be devised by corporations. It’s not their job; it is ours.

5. The fourth stumbling point that keeps Americans from learning from Teachable Moments is our insatiable need for immediate gratification. 24/7 cable news coverage shortens our ability to wait. A news story that spans two days is considered old news, so they move on (except in the case of celebrity coverage saturation — OJ trial, Michael Jackson death, athletes misbehaving).

Societal race problems were born in the time of slavery long ago and maintained overtly in the deep South until very recently. Racism did go mostly underground. Covert racism can preserve the inequalities for centuries into the future. The point is that if the problem is long standing, the fix can never be immediate. If the fix seems to good to be true, you know that it’s b.s. Quit expecting something for nothing. Real solutions require sacrifice and commitment from large groups of people.

6. America’s arrogant pride in its destructive, divisive individualism that harms millions of fellow Americans interferes with societal improvement. We are immersed in the big societal problems (racism, violence toward women, bullying, climate change, pollution, dwindling water supplies) together. It takes many working together to fix society. Social solutions for social problems are not necessarily “socialistic.” However, to brand such solutions with a perjorative connotation (as if democratic socialism = stalinistic communism) stalls progress while we dicker over semantics.

We can learn much from our fellow human beings. Yes, Virginia, people on the earth outside America are humans! They have struggled with the same issues. Many countries have dealt with problems we now face successfully. Why not apply the good ole biz practice of “benchmarking” and copy from the nations who got it right?

For instance, Scandinavian countries offer the best chances of realizing “the American Dream” of upward social and financial mobility. Great Britain and the USA are last on the international list. The Dream for Americans is a myth, but we refuse to accept that Europeans have much to teach us.

All western industrialized nations have national health plans so that residents don’t risk financial ruination (bankruptcy) from medical costs to stay alive. Only Americans make the choice between economic security and life itself.

Who are the stupid ones? We are the last among nations in many indexes of the quality of well being and longevity. With respect to workplace bullying, the movement started in Scandinavia. Those nations are the most advance with respect to identifying and correcting it.

America is not as exceptional as we like to think it is (view historian Howard Zinn’s video about the myth of American exceptionalism). Our “special place among nations” noted by de Tocqueville about 1831 America seems an antiquated phrase.

Phew! If you read this far, you deserve a medal! Hope I jarred your sensibilities a bit. Tell me what you think it will take to capitalize on Teachable Moments.

Gary Namie

Workplace Bullying needs its Teachable Moments. Only you bullied targets can provide them. Post summaries of your stories below to help convince corporations and lawmakers that bullying must be addressed, not ignored.

Lyn Witheridge

We at US-based WBI salute and thank the British pioneers for their contributions, including the six years of Ban Bullying Days and crisis line support for targeted individuals. Lyn Witheridge, founder and chief executive of the trust said: “It is time for the Andrea Adams Trust to pass on the baton, and I urge other organisations who share our passion in the fight against workplace bullying to continue with our work. ”Recognition of the effects of bullying in the workplace is essential if it is to be legitimately challenged, which can only be achieved through persistent effort to raise awareness of this insidious practice.”

The Trust will be missed.
Gary and Ruth Namie, Founders, WBI

Article features the brave and bullied target Julie Soderstrom. As well as ridiculous notions from employer attorney Karen Buesing that corporations facing cutbacks are less likely to tolerate the antics of an employee who is perceived to be a bully and “There are too many great people out there who are not abusive.”

And the comment “Could you be a whinier baby? Blame a bully for everything. Perhaps you are just mentally weak…” from Keith. Yeh, right! The pro-corporate mindset has blinded workers to their ability to feel compassion for other workers.

Read the article

For severed union workers, paychecks alone were incentive enough. Union members  are now asked to absorb cuts in medical and life insurance benefits.

Though Visteon has no money to pay long-term and annual bonuses, the company had the nerve to ask the bankruptcy trustee for permission to pay $30 million of the total $80 now. For its part, the firm is willing to delay paying executive bonuses. Isn’t that gracious? But Ford, GM, the UAW,  and the case’s committee of unsecured creditors all filed objections to at least parts of the bonus plans.

For now the judge has denied superior treatment for Visteon execs. However, the corporation files one request after another keeping its hands in the cookie jar, begging for goodies, despite running the company into the ground.

250,000 autoworker jobs have been lost and these clowns insist on paying executive bonuses! A little job insecurity without severance or health insurance is what the executives deserve. They ran the company into the ground, causing pain for workers who did not make the stupid decisions that led to failure.

Even in failure, executives feel they deserve a softer landing. Have they no shame?

Bullying Tutorials

Advice from traditional, HR-promoting, sources such as media types and motivational speakers who make bullied targets responsible for their fate can be harmful. Here are some warning signs.

Download Podcast 5 (in .mp3 format)

or

Subscribe to the Podcasts.

or

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Thurman Higginbotham started at the cemetery in 1965 as security guard and rose to his Deputy Superintendent in 1990. Technically, he’s the second ranking executive, but he claims to be the operational chief.

Women in the position of public affairs directors, held by a succession of four women in only two years, seemed especially vulnerable to attacks by Higgenbotham. One woman, Kara McCarthy, was driven out because of a discriminatory hostile work environment (potentially illegal). She claimed that Higgenbotham and other senior managers “did whatever the hell they wanted.”

McCarthy’s successor was Gina Gray hired in April 2008. In her new role after only 10 days on the job, at the funeral of Lt. Col. Billy Hall, Gray clashed with Higgenbotham over a regulation. She knew the press could be present as the had family wished. Higgenbotham instructed her to violate the regs and keep the press far away. He had a history of calling families coercing them to deny press coverage to which they were entitled. The unethical boss won but the press noted the defiant Gray.

Gray was well qualified for her job. She worked 8 years for the Army in public affairs in Germany, Italy and Iraq. She suffered some hearing loss from a 2003 ambush in Iraq. Then, she went back to Iraq as a contractor doing media relations.

Higgenbotham’s campaign of interpersonal destruction began after the publicized incident. Gray complained to Higgenbotham’s “boss” John Metzler. Metzler withdrew support from her on May 27, leaving Gray’s immediate supervisor, Phyllis White, free to hassle her — restricting permission to leave the building, overtime, posters in her workplace and disconnecting her BlackBerry. June 9, she was demoted from director to public affairs officer.

Gina Gray

She filed a discrimination complaint (the pair had both gender and race differences).

Higgenbotham retaliated with trumped-up charges of “poor performance.” On June 27, 2008, Gray was fired. White said Gray had “been disrespectful to me as your supervisor and failed to act in an inappropriate manner.”

On that same June day, Higgenbotham had an IT contractor friend block Gray from access to her e-mail account and transfer access to Higgenbotham who replied to subsequent e-mails as if he were Gray. Gray found out.
The Army investigated and found that the unauthorized access and misuse were criminal offenses. However, the Dept of Justice assistant US attorney declined to prosecute the crime.

Not only did Higgenbotham illegally harass Gray, but he committed a crime and still nothing was done! Of course because of Phyllis White, a woman supervisor, harassing Gray, a woman, the case becomes more a bullying problem than one characterized by illegal discrimination.

Mark Benjamin, the journalist telling this story, discovered that Higgenbotham has falsely claimed he is “Dr. Higgenbotham” despite not having earned a PhD or MD degree. Higgenbotham’s tactic of stealing access to public affairs officers’ computers was confirmed by at least one other woman who held the position.

The kicker, which is no surprise to bullied targets, is that Higgenbotham is also technically inept. Arlington National Cemetery seems to have a gravestone burial records matching problem that was supposed to have been modernized by technology since 2000. Benjamin is filing additional reports that memorabilia left at gravesites are tossed into the trash unlike at the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

Higgenbotham and White are a disgrace to the families whose loved ones gave their lives for their country. They should both be banned for life from federal employment.

UPDATE

You can read Mark Benjamin’s second part of the story about Arlington Cemetery’s policy of keeping the grounds pristine and trashing family momentos and gifts left at gravesites, especially Section 60 where Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are buried.

Read the article

View the segment:

Warning: advice from the in-studio Career Expert does not reflect the reality of bullied targets, the voluminous research, or advice that we at WBI give.

Listen to Podcast 5: Beware Bad Advice for a different perspective.

Romanow writes eloquently

GDP (gross domestic product) makes no distinction between economic activities that are good for our wellbeing and those that are harmful. Spending on tobacco, natural and human-made disasters, crime and accidents, all make GDP go up. Conversely, the value of unpaid housework, child care, volunteer work and leisure time are not included in GDP because they take place outside of the formal marketplace.

Even the “father of the GDP,” Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets, recognized that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined by the GDP.”

(the late) Senator Robert Kennedy noted that GDP “measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

The Institute of Wellbeing has created the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW). The CIW is rooted in Canadian values.

 It begins with the belief that our cornerstone value as Canadians is the principle of “shared destiny”: that our society is often best shaped through collective action; that there is a limit to how much can be achieved by individuals acting alone; that the sum of a good society and what it can achieve is greater than the remarkably diverse parts which constitute it …

our standard of living, our health, the quality of our environment, our education and skill levels, the way we use our time, the vitality of our communities, our participation in the democratic process, and the state of our arts, culture and recreation.

Good public policies can improve wellbeing, bad ones can harm it. Three examples. Reductions in Employment Insurance (unemployment benefits in the U.S. which several governors have proudly refused to extend despite additional federal funding) increase financial risks and hamper economic wellbeing for people — a negative. Denial of medical services (even in Canada) causes a rise in a family’s health care expenses leading to poorer health for low-income citizens — a negative from the Canadian CIW perspective (as U.S. lawmakers consider taxing workers’ health care benefits and fight over people’s right to care). Significant cuts in welfare benefits increase income inequality (the rich getting richer) — something that impairs Canadians’ wellbeing.

Wellbeing in the U.S. Starting to Get Noticed

The only diectly comparable US counterpart to the Canadian CIW is the Foundation for Child Development (FCD).

The Child Well-Being Index (CWI) is a national, research-based composite measure  updated annually that describes how young people in the United States have fared since 1975.  It combines national data from 28 indicators across seven domains into a single number that reflects overall child well-being.  The seven quality-of-life domains are family economic well-being, health, safety/behavioral concerns, educational attainment, community connectedness, social relationships, and emotional and spiritual well being.

The FCD 2009 Report warned that the recession adversely impacts child wellbeing.

The percentage of children in poverty will rise to 21 percent in 2010, up from about 17 percent in 2006 primarily because of drops in family income from two incomes to one or none. Estimates of the recession’s effects reduce median family incomes to $55,700 by 2010, down from $59,200 in 2007. Single women household incomes fall to $23,000 in 2010, down from $24,950 in 2007. Single households headed by men income is expected to drop to $33,300 in 2010, from $38,100 in 2007.

As a social scientist-turned-advocate, I’ve seen firsthand how science is ignored by public policy decision makers (legislators) and by courts (and lawyers). Mostly it’s science’s fault by being too obscure, incremental, coupled with the common problem that scientists vary greatly in their ability to translate basic science into information relevant to societal problems. A recent (July 9 released) Pew Research Center survey of scientists found that only 3% of scientists are contacted by the media to describe their work; only 8% of scientists believe that public media exposure is important.

However, the library of relevant articles is growing with respect to workplace bullying. (For a sample, consult the WBI Research section.) And the media have been quite kind to WBI.

Lawmakers nearly always respond predictably to the demands of business lobbyists (no regulation, no enforcement, no accountablity, no new worker protections that interfere with absolute control over employees’ lives). Left out of the process is how laws affect real people living real lives, regardless of what’s good for business. Science about the impact of inhumane business practices should inform compassionate policy developers.

That same Pew survey also asked Americans how much various groups contributed to the “well-being of society.” The group credited as the most contributory: members of the military (84%), teachers (77%), scientists (70%), while lawyers (23%) and business executives (21%) contributed the least. In addition, 53% of the public (and only 33% of scientists) agreed that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength. Militarism is a key cultural ingredient in America. Militarism, all about the business of death, certainly undermines attention to wellbeing.

Rugged individualism, another American trait, sabotages the collective nature of society. It coarsens the regard we Americans have for one another. “To hell with him, let him fend for himself” is often the operating creed.

Both militarism and individualism run counter to genuine human altruistic impulses. Elsewhere, we cited the neuroscience of compassion. In America, showing concern for a fellow human’s wellbeing is frequently mocked as being “wimpy” or a “bleeding heart.” It is a challenge to American exceptionalism (the belief that the nation is the best and most advanced in all endeavors) to compare ourselves to European or Canadian progress on a topic like wellbeing. We clearly lag behind.

However, there is a bold new movement called Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ). WBI colleague and law professor David Yamada introduced TJ in his July 2 blog. He reports that a recent conference of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health included panels on mental health law and family law.

Mental health and law professionals are beginning to see the utility of “connecting the dots” (the CIW description of the process) to make the causal connection between social policy and impact on individual lives (as the CIW and FCD already know). These connections come naturally to social scientists, but the barons of the marketplace, businesses, lawmakers, and obviously do not share the same perspective. The TJ movement is bridging that gap in knowledge.

Finally, theologians can soften American attitudes toward defining success. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in his book The Politics of Meaning (1997), wrote:

The goal of the economy should be to help produce and sustain humans who are capable of realizing their highest capacities for love; creativity; intelligence; mutual recognition; solidarity; productive work; freedom; caring and nurturing; intimacy; commitment; trust; vitality; and aesthetic, ethical, spiritual, and ecological sensitivity. The materialist conception that promoting these capacities is difficult when people face material deprivation is correct, but needs to be qualified. There are, and have been throughout human history, societies that more successfully actualize these capacities than some of our contemporary advanced industrial societies, even though these others produce less, materially speaking. In my view, these societies have had a stronger economy-one that we ought to deem more productive and generating a higher standard of living.

Here’s hoping that the public dialogue started in Canada and the rest of the world enthuses America. Taking into account citizens’ wellbeing is one sign of an enlightened society. America needs to catch up. We need only to look north for a model.

UPDATE: 7/15 Public Policy and Health Impact
Los Angeles has an estimated 40,000 homeless people. The city’s policy (called Safer City which spends $6 million to pay for extra 50 police to patrol the downtown 50-block skid row) is to criminalize the destitute (for example, giving harassing tickets for not obeying crossing signals). The city spends only $5.7 million for homeless services at a time when more people, including working people, are living in their cars stripped of their foreclosed homes. Contrasted with LA is New York City with half the homeless population in large part due to a “right to shelter” policy and an investment of $200 million for housing and services for the needy. Read the Reuters report. Policies affect human wellbeing.

Gary Namie

News reports about torture by the CIA revealed a reliance on Chinese torture techniques used in the Korean War against American Air Force prisoners of war. Those methods were described first at a Nov. 1956 scientific panel presentation at the NY Academy of Medicine meeting by Albert Biderman (who died in 2003). Biderman worked then in the Office of Social Science Programs at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. (Read the actual Biderman study which was published in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1957, September; 33(9): 616–625.)

Amnesty International’s 1973 Report on Torture (written in response to Pinochet’s brutality in Chile and updated regularly as international atrocities surface) incorporated Biderman’s study. That oft-cited Report made infamous his list of coercive methods. Technically, he called the 8 methods “Communist Coercive Methods to Elicit Individual Compliance” (p. 619, Biderman). Post 9/11, it seems the CIA re-discovered Biderman’s categories.

Torture Principles Present in Other Types of Abuse

Remarkably, “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion” as it has become known, is used by domestic violence opponents to counsel battered spouses. It seems abuse by the batterer is very similar to torture techniques. In fact, we at WBI always consider domestic violence to be the traumatizing form of interpersonal abuse most similar to psyche-damaging workplace bullying.

For individuals subjected to brainwashing by a cult, religious or not, abducted or volunteered, the Chart of Coercion has been modified to explain how the same 8 principles explain the transformation to a compliant, obedient member.

The workplace bullying analogy to torture was first made by Robyn Mann, then of Queensland University, who presented a paper titled “Psychological Abuse in the Workplace” at an August 1994 Australian conference. She adapted the Biderman Chart of Coercion for her paper. [The event was organized by the Australian Beyond Bullying Association with presentations compiled into a book: Bullying from Backyard to Boardroom (now out of print). BBA co-founder Michael Sheehan is a WBI colleague.]

Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance
Albert Biderman (1957)

Side Note: Given the importance of the Coercive Methods to the CIA, it is remarkable that they simply lifted the Biderman Chart without reading the title of the article: “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Throughout the manuscript, Biderman refers to “confessions” and “confessions”-elicitations engineered by the torturers. He wrote “For many prisoners, finally being able to learn what their captor wanted them to do was an achievement which afforded them considerable gratification – one of their rare gratifications in an exceedingly frustrating environment” (p. 622). Hence torture victims were willing to “confess” on film to germ warfare and other atrocities they did not actually commit. In other words, to escape the pain of Coercive Methods (torture), individuals, who varied from complete resisters to complete compliers, were willing to say anything to their captors. The lesson was learned in 1956!

Gary Namie, WBI

Do these principles apply to any of your work circumstances?

You can learn about the Illinois Task Force on Workplace Bullying and the bill that was proposed in IL House this year. Go here.

This website is where you find personal help.

Complaints by managers, that all bullied targets will recognize immediately, included: fear of not being taken seriously, worry that managers may lose confidence in their abilities, and damage to mental health and wellbeing. Poor babies. On the other hand, when managers are bullied companies may be more willing to effect policies and procedures to protect management, their most precious resource.

(The WBI-Zogby US national survey found that 35% of all workers bullied were managers of some level.)

Visit the revised Work Doctor website.

Recall the fact reported in a story at this website that 62% of all individual bankruptcies by Americans were due to medical costs that overwhelmed families. In other words, while Congress plays political games with health care reform, and the president refuses to design a new system “from scratch,” people are DYING. Underinsurance or the lack of insurance compounds the problems of bullied individuals driven from their jobs. Just when they are the sickest, they cannot get much-needed care. This is an unconscionable uniquely American disgrace.

Compounding the problem is that the poor are sliding into even greater depths of poverty. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her blog (and published in the NY Times on 6/14/09) the rate of blue collar unemployment is 3 times higher than the white collar variety.

People are doubling and tripling up and couch-renting after losing their houses. The overcrowding may be causing a spike in domestic violence. Women are turning to stripping. People are urban hunting — squirrels, rabbits, raccoons — and eating food past their sell-by dates acquired at “food auctions.”

All of this at the same time that Goldman Sachs in 2009 is paying the largest bonuses to its richest employees in its history thanks to largesse from the US Treasury engineered by Paulson and now Geithner. (Originally reported by the way in a British newspaper, not a US one.)

Why does this country not understand an obligation to take care of its own people? As Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote, can we please stop the illusion of bipartisanship that prevents the federal government from being a problem solver?

By Tali Arbel
Associated Press Business Writer
Newsday
June 30, 2009

BULLY WATCH: The recession is creating a “blank check” for office bullies, said one employee advocate.

The downturn’s layoffs – job rolls have shrunk by 6 million since the recession’s start – may make a bad situation worse for victims, said Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group.

Namie is the author of the “The Bully at Work.” It was originally published in 2000, with an updated version released this June.

The “absolute control of an employer is more apparent in a recession,” he said. That means workers are feeling the heat, as the bulk of workplace harassment cases involve superiors taunting their employees, he said.

“People are more stressed because there’s no escape,” he said. While previously employees could jump to another job when the verbal abuse, humiliation, career sabotage or intimidation he defines as bullying got to be too much, a new job is harder to find during a recession.

Namie’s Institute is pushing states to adopt legislation defining abusive conduct in the workplace and setting guidelines for employee behavior and possible litigation. The federal government currently prohibits harassment based on race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability and age.

His advice for those who feel harassed:

- Understand that abusive behavior – invading someone’s space with intent to intimidate or calling the person names – isn’t just rude. “It’s not inadvertent, it’s not accidental,” Namie said. Recognize someone else’s actions as a problem that’s hurting you.

- Try to get sick leave time, he said. Often workplace bullying goes on for a long time, and can even cause stress disorders for targets.

- Build an economic case against the bully. Has there been high turnover or absenteeism? Is there low morale? Has productivity sagged due to a tense, inefficient atmosphere?

“You have to make the argument that the bully’s too expensive to keep,” Namie said. Take this case to the highest-level person in your company that doesn’t have a personal connection to the source of harassment.

- If you can, look for another job. Getting away from the bully might be the easiest way to resolve the problem.

The basis for claiming that the recession is exacerbating workplace bullying can be found in the WBI June 2009 study results.

The complete description of our advice for bullied targets can be found here.

This article also appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Contra Costa (CA) Times, Cincinnati Enquirer, Birmingham (AL) News, Mississippi Sun-Herald, Lakeland (FL) Ledger, St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Evansville (IN) Courier & Press, Seattle HeraldNet

Bullying Tutorials

A double standard regarding Freedom — Freedom To … exploit, harm, abuse (for employers, the wealthy, the financial sector) and the less frequently realized Freedom From … bullying, exploitation, harm (for the working poor, the displaced layoff victims, the rest of us)

Download Podcast 4 (in .mp3 format)

or

Subscribe to the Podcasts.

or

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

27.5% did say that the bullying worsened (it was more abusive, severe or frequent) after Sept. and 37% of respondents said that employers blamed financial troubles on the economic downturn. You can read the results of the brief survey here.

However, 75% of the bullying predated the crisis. In 22% of cases, bullying started on or after Sept. Since October to December is one quarter of the year, one would expect that about a quarter of the cases to begin during that calendar period.

The link between tough times and bullying hinges solely on the 28% worsening. Though we could not have definitively said tough times CAUSE more bullying if the 22% had been much higher, we would have been more confident about the potential link.

Explanations: Perhaps 9 months is not a sufficient time for the effect to be felt by more than 28% of targets OR there is no effect, no link there to discover OR it is sufficiently outrageous that a quarter of bullied targets experienced an increase in abuse at work.

If we combine this comparatively small study with the findings from our large national scientific survey (an academic no-no, but I’m a recovering academic now), we could say that bullying got worse for 4% of working Americans [from .275 x .126 (the currently bullied rate) = .0364]. That doesn’t sound like much but based on labor force statistics — that’s 5.3 million workers! [from .0364 x 147,000,000] 18.5 million workers are currently (or within 12 months) being bullied.

For over 5 million workers to experience even more misery for no reason other than the bad luck to have run into a conniving, intimidating, control freak is unconscionable.

That’s the outcome that makes the most sense from our WBI June 2009 Survey.

You can read the results of the brief survey here. To compare some of the findings to the true national picture, read the WBI-Zogby U.S. Survey.

Gary Namie

So much for statistics. Tell us your story about the increase in psychological violence in your workplace here. Add a comment.

The Impact of Bullying

Carson Cooper, Host
Show: Florida Matters
WUSF-FM, Tampa, FL
June 26, 2009

The majority of the broadcast focused on school-age bullying. However, at the end Carson interviewed Dr. Gary Namie, WBI.

You can listen to only the Workplace Bullying segment here.

Or listen to the entire June 26 broadcast at the station’s website.

Bullying Tutorials

To bullied targets: you are not only innocent of not causing the harm the bully elected to inflict, you are among the best and brightest. Adult targets are the smartest and best workers. Your reward — abuse!

Download Podcast 3 (in .mp3 format)

or

Subscribe to the Podcasts.

or

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro

Debra Ness, President PWF

Worker champion Rep. Rose DeLauro proved how necessary it is for America to stop being last in all things that help working people. “it is hard to stay ahead when 19 of the 20 most competitive countries in the world guarantee paid sick days – and the United States in the odd one out … What does it say when Lesotho and Papua New Guinea are implementing paid sick days to give their businesses and their entire nation a competitive edge, yet America still does not get it?” Read DeLauro’s testimony.

Debra Ness highlighted the fact that “the problem (of little to no paid sick leave) is particularly acute for working women ,,, because they are more likely to work part-time (or cobble together full-time hours by working more than one part-time position) than men. Only 16 percent of part-time workers have paid sick days, compared to 60 percent of full-time workers.”

Ness continued, “one in six workers report that they or a family member have been fired, suspended, punished or threatened with being fired for taking time off due to personal illness or to care for a sick relative, according to a 2008 University of Chicago survey commissioned by Read Ness’ committee testimony.

Also supporting the Healthy Families Act was Read Frett’s testimony.

Business Lobby Opposition

But HR industry representative, China Miner Gorman, opposed the modest change in the way American employers do business. She testified “according to the SHRM 2009 Examining Paid Leave in the Workplace Survey, 81 percent of responding SHRM members reported that their organization offered some form of paid sick leave … particularly during a time of economic crisis … Congress should refrain from pursuing additional employer mandates – rather, employers need to be unencumbered from proscriptive government rules, so that they can create innovative and more flexible ways to meet the needs of their employees.” Read Gorman’s testimony.

HR offers more more reflexive, simplistic allusions to “free enterprise” and efficacy of voluntary employer controls in the absence of regulations. Can you say global economic meltdown because business has been unfettered?

China Gorman, SHRM

Gorman told Congress to leave employers unecumbered so they can do things for employees. Really? Is HR in the business of meeting employees’ needs? Not according to SHRM’s stated mission which is to advance: “the human resource profession and the capabilities of all human resource professionals to ensure that HR is an essential and effective partner in developing and executing organizational strategy.” Notice that it is about attempts to credential (SPHR, CPHR, etc.) hr types so that they can sit at the right hand of the CEO. HR is eager to serve its organizational masters in the executive suite. Unfortunately for SHRM, executives mock HR and their dubious contributions.

The funniest part about SHRM’s involvement with the HFA was their complaining that subcommittee chair Rep. Lynn Woolsey pronounced SHRM as “shoorum” instead of their preferred “sherm” as if the world should know about an HR trade group.

To solidify HR as anti-employee/worker: “The only thing that gets [SHRM members] more riled up than HFA is EFCA,” Mike Aitken, SHRM director of government affairs (lobbying) said. EFCA is the bill to make workplace unionization easier, to level the playing field with employers.

The heaviest hitting corporate lobby to oppose the HFA is the US Chamber of Commerce. Attorney Victoria Lipnic spoke for that group. She is the former in-house counsel at the U.S. Postal Service, a former staffer to the Committee when Republicans were the majority party, and Asst Secy of Labor for Employment Standards under George W Bush and anti-employee Secretary Cho’s Department of Labor.

Victoria Lipnic, US Chamber

The Chamber’s mission: “to advance human progress through an economic, political and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity and responsibility.”

About paid sick leave for American workers, Lipnic said “employers provide leave benefits as a recruiting and retention tool, as a market differentiator, as part of a total compensation/total rewards package, but have the ability to take into account how the benefits are structured. Under the HFA, employers who are already providing these benefits would be subject to a new regulatory regime (sic), additional compliance and recordkeeping costs and litigation for alleged violations of the law.” Read Lipnic’s testimony.

See, employers are already benevolently providing all the paid sick leave workers require. Ignore or discount the CEPR report that puts us last among 22 nations.

The tug of war has begun between advocates who can readily demonstrate the positive impact paid sick leave has on the workplace and the business lobby that utters its drivel about “free” enterprise so they can run the American workplace like a master drives the slaves. Will Congress help the American worker or roll over to appease the big contributor biz lobby?

Stay tuned.

Read the background article about HR 2640, the HFA.

Gary Namie

Power harassment, in which someone in a superior position takes advantage of their power to cause distress to others, is now rampant in the workplace in the form of bullying, pestering and persistent reprimands, amongst other behavior. It has even become a way for failing companies to drive employees to quit.

One out of every three people who consulted the Labor Standards Bureau in fiscal 2008 about being pressed to resign complained of emotional problems, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has found. Those citing harassment in the workplace as the cause of their emotional problems exceeded 30 percent, which was significantly higher than those who were affected emotionally by bankruptcy and other challenges. The statistics confirm that the large numbers of lay-offs that have resulted from the current economic slump have had major emotional impact on workers.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, of the consultations made by workers with prefectural labor bureaus in fiscal 2008, 22,433 cases were regarding “encouragement to resign,” while 32,242 cases were concerning “bullying and harassment.” Both figures were the highest they have ever been.

The Tokyo Labor Consultation Center investigated the causal relationship between such factors and “emotional problems,” self-reported as insomnia, depression, and other symptoms. The study found that of 2,207 consultation cases regarding “forced resignation,” 738 (33.4 percent) complained of emotional difficulties. Of 1,260 consultation cases regarding harassment from co-workers, 391 (31 percent) complained of deterioration of emotional health.

In cases concerning lay-offs, 5.9 percent complained of negative emotional impact, while the figure was 2.8 percent for cases concerning company bankruptcies. The highest rate at which emotional trauma was reported was for cases of sexual harassment in which employees are either transferred to a different position or fired depending on how they respond to a sexual proposition, at 40.2 percent.

“Lay-offs and bankruptcies resulting from the tight financial circumstances of one’s employer is devastating enough, but being told by a company to which you believe you’ve contributed ‘to resign voluntarily’ when you’re not in a good position of finding new employment is probably even more emotionally taxing,” say officials at the center.

Take a look at the case of 52 year-old Yoshiaki Otani. He was chided by his boss, nearly 10 years his junior, that “this was why he was no good” when he found the way Otani had compiled some data on the computer unsatisfactory. Similar incidents took place all over last spring and summer. Every time, the office was cloaked in palpable tension.

As a section chief, Otani had had subordinates. Once, when he’d given an assignment to one of his assistants, the assistant consulted another superior about the task. Otani was then criticized for not having won over the trust of his own subordinates and forcing them to ask others for advice. It was suffocating. Otani wanted to ask why he had to be subjected to such treatment, but chose to swallow his words instead.

He had been hired by the company, a subsidiary of a major real estate firm with approximately 20 employees, as a temporary worker in 2006 with the promise of being accepted as a full-time employee in three years. Previously, he had worked at various places, including a Japanese trading company that primarily did business in Southeast Asia. He decided to change jobs when he was 49 years old so that he could secure a better pension for his retirement, and planned to work until the compulsory retirement age.

Not even a year into the job, however, relations between Otani and his superiors began to turn sour. He was reprimanded for tying back his hair, and once for dressing in a formal Filipino shirt. But he immediately changed his ways, and has no recollection of ever making any significant mistakes in his work.

Faced with suspicions that his company was waiting for him to resign, Otani began to lose sleep. Having lost his wife to illness eight years previously and alone in his house in Chiba, he was scared of the night. Flashbacks of his boss rebuking him woke him up at two or four every morning. Soon, he began to suffer from headaches everyday before work.

Otani applied for leave at the end of August and began a process of recuperation at home. The pin code for the company entrance was changed soon afterwards, and he was no longer able to come and go freely. He was diagnosed with reactive depression. Talking to a co-worker could agitate him and aggravate his condition, so he couldn’t go without his mood stabilizing medication. He humbly asked himself if he could be at fault without realizing it. But he just couldn’t come up with anything.

He received notification from the company that his contract would be terminated at the end of March. Through an outside labor union, he is currently seeking that the company acknowledge that harassment took place. He plans to live on disability and unemployment benefits for the next two years, and has given up on gaining reemployment. Meanwhile, the company refuses to comment, citing privacy reasons.

View original article:

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20090622p2a00m0na021000c.html

The article cites Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s answer to a staffer’s question: “You know, I have zero tolerance for any kind of bullying. I find it intolerable. I hate people who use a position of either superior rank or physical dominance or any other aspect to lord it over or mistreat other people, especially those in the workplace.”

You can read the context of Secretary Clinton’s March 12, 2009 comment here. Scroll to page 9 to read the question from staffer Shirley Miles and Clinton’s response.

In the State magazine article, Director and Chief Diversity Officer Office of Civil Rights Robinson (202-647-9294) astutely writes: “Managers, be aware: If someone in your office has the characteristics of a bully, it is your duty to counsel that person before his or her behavior creates an uncomfortable situation for your other employees, harms others, leads to workplace violence or subjects the Department to legal vulnerability because timely action was not taken. Finally, ask yourself (or, better, ask others who will be honest with you) if you yourself rely on intimidation or scare tactics in your leadership style as a form of workforce control. Everyone deserves to work in an environment that is safe and bully-free.”

Read Robinson’s one-page essay.

Kudos for taking the first step toward raising awareness. How long before State Dept. employees enjoy protection that only an explicit policy and credible enforcement procedures can make likely?

Sid Citrus: Asshole Boss can be viewed at: www.youtube.com/sidcitrus
and at www.SidCitrus.Com.

Orange Rebel Productions announces the launch of a new comedy web series, Sid Citrus: Asshole Boss, in partnership with inaugural corporate sponsor, The People Group.

“Sid’s goal in life is to be universally acclaimed by his peers as the King of all corporate assholes. Sid Citrus already stands head and shoulders above every other jerk boss out there,” laughs writer-director Fred Emmer. “Or rather I should say, he floats.”

Sid Citrus is an orange. A floating, philandering orange to be exact, who wears a tie, including Saturdays. And he’s not very nice.

“I laughed my head off when Fred gave me the script. I immediately knew we had to get this made,” recalls workplace consultant Kevin Kennemer, principal of The People Group. “That Sid Citrus, what an absolutely amazing jerk!”

The first three webisodes tell story of how rookie cube dweller Brett comes to realize that his floating orange boss is a bully and an asshole and that standing up to him can lead to lethal consequences, literally. “Of course Sid as a character and the story events are beyond farcical.” says Emmer. “But we actually are trying to say something.”

“The issues are real and I deal with them every day,” adds Kennemer, whose consulting practice specializes in helping corporations put people friendly practices in place. “Incivility in the workplace creates huge costs no company can afford to ignore. The effects of psychological mistreatment on the workforce is brutal and allowing it to go on is immoral. I think Sid Citrus makes the point with humor.”

Fred explains Sid Citrus’s origin. “A friend of mine had recommended Kevin’s blog to me and after reading a few posts I couldn’t believe how candid he was in condemning asshole behavior in the workplace,” said Emmer. “It hit me viscerally and I was thinking about his post as I strolled to the fruit bowl in the break room. Someone had left a sharpe marker by the bowl. Two minutes later, Sid Citrus was born,” stated the writer-director from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

One school of thought is that every organization should have one asshole. That might be okay if the asshole is kept around so their behavior can be used as a bad example, and if they are not too high in the organization. Kind of like an object lesson in assholeology. But most organizations aren’t that sophisticated. Inevitably corporate assholes wind up breeding like rabbits, eventually poisoning the entire organization.

“I’ve already heard it from my wife, don’t be a Sid,” says Emmer. “He’s not even real and he’s already helping me put a check on my own behavior. I hope we can spread this around,” states Emmer. “Don’t be a Sid.”

Sid Citrus: Asshole Boss can be viewed at: www.youtube.com/sidcitrus
and at www.SidCitrus.Com.

Orange Rebel Productions is a Tulsa based media production company specializing in viral video production for the web. Fred Emmer, Writer-Producer, Orange Rebel Productions, 918.519.6206, sidcitrus@gmail.com

Inaugural Corporate Sponsor
The People Group is a Tulsa based consulting firm committed to improving employee lives, business performance and society through positive people practices consulting. The company was founded on the premise that positive people practices result in better organizations. The People Group proved that a leadership team that adopts, models and promotes positive people practices benefits business, for people, for customers and society. Kevin Kennemer, President, The People Group, Office 888.797.9992, kevin@thepeoplegroupllc.com

###

I had the privilege of speaking to the Oklahoma Business Ethics Consortium at Kevin Kennemer’s invitation.

These are good people. And many bullies ARE fruitheads!

Gary Namie
Support Sid Citrus!

The folks at MomsRising.org want you to sign their petition alerting your U.S. Rep and Senators to support the respective bills. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will certainly fight this pro-employee health bill. They will claim it interferes with employers’ ability to “compete.”

Read the related report exposing America’s dismal denial of paid sick leave.

Stay tuned.

On the morning of June 2, 2009, a city letter carrier went to work and reportedly fatally shot himself in the head in the locker room at a postal facility in Gastonia, North Carolina. The Gaston Gazette online news report stated that the “Gastonia Police are investigating an apparent suicide this morning at the post office. . . . One of the employees is inside dead from a gunshot wound.”

Prior to my retirement from the USPS, at a former district I worked for, there were three suicides within a two year period that I concluded were contributed to in significant part by how these employees were treated in the workplace. The third employee, a city letter carrier, fatally shot himself in a postal jeep and left a letter stating that he could no longer take the job. The suicide at the Gastonia postal facility was the second since December 2005.

Many people have asked: Why is there so much stress and workplace tragedies in the U.S. Postal Service? The answer to these questions is because the postal culture embraces and reflects core values that center on achieving bottom-line results with little or no regard for employee participation, respect, dignity, or fairness. Additionally, there is little or no accountability for the actions of top management in the Postal Service. Many postal facilities consequently have toxic work environments, and they can be a catalyst or trigger for serious acts of workplace violence, including homicide and suicide. The associated rewards system for behavior consistent with the postal culture core values, moreover, enables systemic organizational and individual bullying of employees at all levels of the organization.

I define a toxic workplace environment as a workplace where there is a high incidence of stress-related illnesses. These stress-related illnesses are manifested by psychological and physical deterioration. In other words, these types of environments seriously erode employees’ health and well-being. The primary factors contributing to a toxic workplace environment are high job demands, low job control, and low social support. Low social support generally entails a lack of respect and validation of employees’ dignity by their “superiors”. It also oftentimes includes organizational practices and methods that encourage the bullying of employees to meet corporate goals.

The name of the city letter carrier who committed suicide in Gastonia, NC on June 2, 2009 is Steven Spencer age 60. According to his obituary, Steven was married and leaves two daughters and three grandchildren. He was a member of the National Association of Letter Carriers/ and state representative for Muscular Dystrophy Association. He was the founder of the National Association of Letter Carriers Food Drive for Gaston County. He was very active in Scouting, attaining the highest rank of Eagle Scout. He also was a member of the Order of the Arrow. Steven was a veteran of the Vietnam War serving his country proudly in the US Navy.

I find it highly improbable that an employee will kill himself or herself in a postal facility or while on a postal route unless it is to send a clear message that a toxic workplace exists and the person can’t handle it anymore. Sadly, it also may be a tragic attempt to better the lot of one’s fellow coworkers by drawing attention to the tragic event itself.

Prior to Steven’s suicide, I was contacted by a relative of an employee at the Gastonia post office in April of this year. She was concerned because of what she reported as a toxic workplace environment at the Gastonia post office, lack of accountability to address employees’ concerns, and that the situation may lead to another workplace tragedy. Unfortunately, her worst concern became a reality on June 2, 2009. She further indicated several employees have resigned their positions at the office because of the toxic workplace environment and others were suffering from negative psychological and physical effects because of this environment. I was told employees’ attempts, mostly city letter carriers, to have their concerns addressed over a two-year period included: filing of discrimination complaints and grievances, unprofessional workplace assessments, town hall meetings, contacts to congressional representatives both locally and nationally, contacts to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and petitions to Charlotte postal District officials and representatives of their national postal union. She further indicated that none of these measures contributed to fully addressing the workplace environment or alleviating its negative impact for the employees at the Gastonia Post Office.

In order for the U.S Postal Service to become a safe and healthy organization and thereby prevent future workplace tragedies, which have been at an endemic level over the past three decades, there is an urgent need for congressional intervention and legislation to address its toxic postal culture. Dr. Gary and his wife, Dr. Ruth Namie, along with their colleague Professor David Yamada, have for years pushed for such legislation at the state level. In order for national legislation for the prevention of workplace bullying to have the intended impact, it would require sanctions to employers or their representatives who are in violation of a new workplace statute that defines workplace bullying as a harmful and illegal activity.

Stephen D. Musacco, Ph.D.

http://goingpostal-beyond.com/

WBI Note: Readers of the comments below will see the pattern of abuse described above repeated at the same postal center with other employees. Sadly, other comments reveal a national pattern within the Postal Service. So, readers may also be interested in:

Details of a bullying-related NALC Arbitration and management’s use of “routine” bullying on the shop floor as a defense! and   The 1992 USPS Joint Statement on Violence (policy that supposedly applies to ALL employees, except when a grievance is filed)

First, screen the next potential employer during the interview process.

• Ask why the job is open and how long the predecessor was there. If asked why you ask, answer “just curious.” (Turnover is the key indicator that bullying happens there.)
• Ask what is the hiring manager’s attitude toward “workaholics.” (If they say it is expected, lots of unpaid overtime, abandonment of family, etc. know what you are getting into.)
• Ask what policies or codes exist to ensure a “Respectful Workplace.” If they answer with that naturally they have and enforce anti-harassment rules. Push farther for the presence of a code that makes unacceptable abusive, cruel, destructive conduct regardless of illegality. If they answer that they rely on “common sense,” that “no one like that” works here, state that the best places to work recognize that out-of-control people are destructive and have clear guidelines and punish offenders. More important to you than the absence of a policy is the response they give to the question. You decide how risky it is to work in a place that denies it happens. During the interview, you may actually have to say that you left an employer because they refused to protect workers from unsafe people. It is imperative that you take the next job with your eyes wide open. No more surprises. No deer-in-the-headlights paralysis for you.

Second, restore your health before looking for a job. Try to establish new personal boundaries that strangers will not cross, making slight changes as described in the book The Bully At Work. Limit your openness and desire to disclose so much of yourself when others reveal nothing personal about themselves. Make them give first, then reciprocate slightly.

Depending on the severity of the harm suffered and the nature of your departure (in your control or involuntarily disgraced), rebound time can be long.

This British article criticizes their government agency HSE. Know that the U.S. OSHA is even less protective of workers.

How realistic are limits when employers want to offer 24/7 operating hours? Nurses are especially vulnerable because patient care requires 24/7 coverage.

No summary can do justice to this detailed article. Read it in its entirety @ Hazards Magazine..

Here are 3 examples from May-June, 2009 seminar marketing to HR.

“When Employees Strike Back”
“Banish Bullies and their Lawsuits”
“Make Unions Irrelevant”

1) Hyped sales-oriented headline for a seminar “When Employees Strike Back”

Rationale given: “The number of retaliation claims against employers skyrocketed to record 32,690 in fiscal year 2008, resulting in more than $111 million in monetary awards.”

HR skills to acquire: “Learn how to avoid damaging retaliation jury awards”

This is mythical because retaliation claims by employees can be filed only after original claims of discrimination were answered by employer retaliation. You complain that you were discriminated against — sexual harassment or racial discrimination or age discrimination or your disability caused them to mistreat you — and the sham HR “investigation” concludes no wrongs were done. The employer enabled the harassment to happen in the first place! On top of that insult, the employer demotes you, punishes you in some way or fires you for daring to insist on your dignity. So, you can file a retaliation claim.
Retaliation is the employer, often with HR’s guidance, striking down the employee a second time. How can it be characterized as employees striking back? Funny, if it was not a seminar taught by an attorney helping HR keep complaining employees in their place.

2) Hyped sales-oriented headline for a seminar “Banish Bullies and their Lawsuits”
[This is our favorite.]

Actual title of the attorney-led seminar: “Workplace Shootings, Domestic Violence, and Bullying: New Challenges and Legal Threats for Employers”

Rationale given: “More than 71 million American workers are victims of bullying at work, according to a recent study by the Workplace Bullying Institute.” (Wrong! It’s 54 million who have directed experienced bullying. The 71 million includes witnesses. They found the WBI-Zogby survey statistics but can’t cite them correctly.)

“New pending legislation in 16 states that prohibit bullying in the workplace and what these laws could mean for employers” (Wrong again! Here, they cite the history of the WBI-Legislative Campaign which has had 16 states since 2003 with some version of our anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill. In 2009, 12 states had active legislation. And they did not bother to mention that the “toughest” versions of the bill do not carry a mandate requiring employers to do anything. They only get the chance to avoid being sued if they create policies and faithfully enforce them — something they should be doing as good business practice voluntarily. Again, too tough for corporate attorneys to read accurately.)

The seminar contents focuses on workplace violence and domestic violence intruding into the workplace and the security risks they pose. The reference to bullying was limited to coverage of “bully bosses” and the legal liabilities they bring to any organization.” Note that they used bullying as a hot topic sales gimmick.

The presenter is an attorney, author of Workplace Catastrophes: An Employer’s Guide to Workplace Violence, Terrorism and Natural Disasters.

If WBI dared to associate bullying with terrorism, we’d be banished. It would imply that employers hire terrorists to do their bidding as bullies. But evidently it’s OK for employers to brand employees they don’t like terrorists.

3) Hyped sales-oriented headline for a seminar “Make Unions Irrelevant”

Actual seminar title: “Minimize the Impact of EFCA and Unions with Powerful HR Communications”

(EFCA, Employee Free Choice Act, is the proposed federal legislation making union organizing easier, the first new labor law in over 30 years in the U.S.)

For this training, the outline of its content is especially revealing (and funny):

- “Communication techniques to win the hearts and minds of your employees by championing your organization’s sound policies and benefits” (Yea, right. Loyalty in exchange for policies that are not enforced and benefits that are disappearing.)

- “Specific internal communications to demonstrate why unions are irrelevant” (This is the union-busting industry’s best seller. It’s the mandated meetings when union organizers announce they want the employees to vote on having a union.

- “How to establish a first line of defense by monitoring the Internet for signs of organizing activity and chatter about your organization — because it all starts online” (The same people who want to win hearts and minds will conduct surveillance, just in case.)

- “How to overhaul supervisory communications immediately, so your supervisors can become advocates for management, listening posts, and experts in interpersonal relations” (This is a very narrow definition of communications skills. Listening is for surveillance purposes only and then only to report to higher ups what is heard and who is affiliating with whom. Are we clear here? It’s snitching.)

- “The grassroots nature of union communications, which focus on emotive language and an emphasis on people over profits” (Yes, that dastardly emphasis by people on people is grassroots by nature, union-driven, and employee advocacy must be struck down.

Readers will find WalMart’s categorization of which employees are “union-prone” equally illuminating.)

Also relevant to union prevention is the report by Kate Bronfenbrenner at Center for Economic Policy and Research. Employers more than doubled their use of anti-union tactics against employees attempting to form unions between 1999 and 2003. Sixty-three percent of employers use mandatory one-on-one, anti-union meetings with employees. Further, 57 percent of employers threatened to close the workplace, 47 percent of employers issued threats to slash benefits and wages, while 34 percent of employers fired workers during union organizing drives. Read the full May 20, 2009 report – No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing

So you see from these three examples, HR is about helping management communication focusing on profits and snitching. Nothing about HR need focus on employee rights, dignity at work, employee safety and health. HR works for the employer and must keep the corporate mission in mind – profits at the expense of people. No bleeding hearts need apply for HR.

G. Namie

So tell your HR story here. Please comment.

How A Woman Becomes a Bully
More employees are suffering at their colleagues’ hands
By Carly Chynoweth and Tariq Tahi
The Sunday Times (London)
June 7, 2009

It would be nice to think that in hard times colleagues pull together to support each other but in some organisations the opposite is true.

The Andrea Adams Trust, a charity that fights against bullying at work, says the recession has led to a sharp rise in the number of people seeking help. At the same time, many employees say they are too scared of losing their jobs to risk doing anything about it, according to Lyn Witheridge, the trust’s chief executive.

She estimates that there has been a 50% rise in the number of calls coming in to the charity’s help line since the recession hit. “That’s a big increase,” she said. “And many of the callers are really worried about their jobs and say that they don’t want to raise grievances – they just want support.”

Even in good times, victims of bullying can find it hard to complain, but now they are so worried about being branded as troublemakers that they simply put up with it. “People are more afraid about speaking up because they are worried about what it might mean for their job and their mortgage,” she said. This in turn means that bullies have a much freer rein. “The recession means that workplaces have become almost a playground for bullies,” said Witheridge.

And, just as teachers discuss whether boys or girls make the worst playground bullies, questions are being raised about whether male and female bullies act differently at work. Much of this has been sparked by a recent New York Times article which reported that, while men make up the majority of bullies, women bullies pick on other women 71% of the time.

Julie Morris at Russell, Jones & Walker, the law firm, said that men and women exhibit different bullying styles. “Female bullying can be a bit more subtle, whereas male bullies throw their weight around without really being aware of their actions,” she said.

She believes that bullying of women by their female bosses can often arise from friction about issues such as childcare.

“I have seen circumstances when there is a woman who has sorted out her own childcare arrangements in a way that suits her [without] necessarily being understanding about another woman,” she said. “For instance ‘I have a nanny, why can’t you do the same?’ or ‘I took six months’ maternity leave, why do you think you need a year?’.”

Lisa Clark, 33, a PR consultant, experienced difficulties with a woman manager in a previous job. “It is a tenet of PR that each agency should have at least one woman with a gigantic ego who is unbearable to work with and a complete bullying maniac,” she said. “I’ve never worked with a bullying bloke in PR – only other women.

“I once worked with a woman who would do everything, from taking credit for your work and blaming you for everything that went wrong to being rude to your face in front of clients. I was driven into a position where I wasn’t able to have my own ideas because she said it was undermining her and her authority.

“When it came to things like the hours we worked, there was one rule for her and one for everyone else.”

Sharon Mavin, associate dean at Newcastle Business School, turns the issue round. “Is it bullying or is it just a woman not meeting another woman’s expectations?” she said.

Mavin argues that we associate many of the characteristics of leadership – assertiveness, ambition and so forth – with masculinity, while women are expected to be helpful, friendly and compassionate. When people do not conform to these stereotypes, it jolts our expectations.

“If you look at the research, it’s not a surprise to me that women would perceive other women to be picking on them, because women have very different expectations of other women at work than they do of men,” said Mavin. “Women react to men bosses as bosses but react to women bosses as women.

“Great strides have been made since the 1970s but there are still gender stereotypes that we all use and they drive our expectations of how people behave.” In other words, what might be seen as acceptable behaviour in a man might not be acceptable in women.

Some women believe that being bullied by another woman has a different psychological effect too. One woman who left her job as an office administrator at an engineering con-sultancy after being bullied, said: “I feel that if it was a man I could almost turn round and tell him to get lost, but I felt I couldn’t do that to another woman,” she said. “It was difficult to deal with because it was so unexpected. You don’t expect it from a female who has a family. That’s what was strange.”

Ultimately, however, bullying is about power. The idea that women in authority are supposed to see other women as their sisters but actually treat them with disdain makes a good story – it was the basis of The Devil Wears Prada, the best-selling book and hit film. However, this ignores other statistics from the same research, which show that 32% of all bullying is man-on-man, 29% is woman-on-woman, 28% is man-on-woman, and 11% woman-on-man – 60% of all bullies are men.

Indeed, Witheridge believes that the figures can largely be explained by the fact that most bullies tend to be managers and that most managers tend to be men. When women are in positions of authority it is often in female-dominated professions, which could mean that women bullies target women simply because that’s who is at hand.

“It reflects the make-up of the workforce, not a deliberate choice by women to pick on other women.” What’s important is not worrying about the sex of the people doing the bullying but how it can be stopped, said Witheridge.

Read the original article at the Sunday Times site.

The statistics quoted in this UK article are not from the NY Times, but from the WBI-Zogby survey of adult Americans.

Regardless of personal political leanings, it’s time to form an alliance between the US Workplace Bullying movement which represents 24% of the US workforce who lose jobs due to bullying (64% of the 37%, see the WBI-Zogby statistics) and the Single Payer Health Insurance movement.

The triple whammy: Employer exposes worker to abuse/Worker with declining health loses job for daring to complain/Unemployed, uninsured worker’s health declines further

Good people lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Many suffer stress-related health complications as a result. And in America just when you require urgent medical treatment for those problems, taken away is health insurance tied to the job.

A study of medical bankruptcy published in the American Journal of Medicine (May, 2009) summarized at Single Payer Action is shocking.

The inability of Americans to pay their medical bills led to 62% of all bankruptcies in the US. 78% of those who went bankrupt because of medical problems had “health insurance.” Later we will explore the disconnect between having “health insurance” and getting treatment by a medical provider. And these statistics were gathered prior to the economic downturn. It can only be worse in 2009.

We cannot afford to get sick and not be able to afford care. It is the height of American heartlessness.

We first became aware of single payer advocacy with the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

Single Payer Action has a list of groups working for single payer plan.

Dear reader: Help us combine forces and make the obvious connection. Comment below with advice and direction. If you are working with any of the groups listed at Single Payer Action, let them know about WBI and our new outreach effort.

MADRID, June 5 (UPI) –
Fourteen percent of the respondents to a survey in Spain say they have suffered psychological abuse or bullying at the workplace, researchers said.
David Gonzalez of the High Court of Justice of Madrid and Jose Luis Grana of the Complutense University defined workplace bullying as a “process of systematic and repeated aggression by a person or group towards a workmate, subordinate or superior.”

Gonzalez and Grana used data from nearly 3,000 valid responses received from the Negative Acts Questionnaire — a specific tool used to measure workplace abuse.

The study, published in the journal Psicothema, also found that results also provide evidence that women are most frequently on the receiving end of workplace harassment, which coincides with the results of other studies carried out on the issue.

However, the findings contradict previous results that indicated that workers under the age of 30 were the most vulnerable to harassment. Gonzalez and Grana found those age 45 and older are more likely to be the victims of abuse.

The study also found that 9 percent of workplace bullying was carried out by subordinates, but 47 percent were bullied by bosses.

The survey used, the Negative Acts Questionnaire (NAQ), is the favorite tool for academic bullying researchers to use. It was developed by Helge Hoel and Stale Einarsen. Their research and many other studies using the NAQ can be found in the WBI Research section.

The flu scare revealed yet another gap between the myth of American exceptionalism and reality. American employers would have you believe they take seriously the health of their employees. But a study of sick leave policies (called Contagion Nation) from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that at least 40% of the private-sector US workforce does not have paid sick days or leave.

The rest of the world’s 22 richest economies have taken a legislative approach to ensuring paid sick days or paid sick leave. Only the US does not guarantees some form of paid time off tied specifically to illness (for example, the 5-day flu or a 50-day cancer treatment) and it does not mandate any form of paid sick days or leave on a national level.

However New Jersey, California, Hawaii, New York, Rhode Island, San Francisco, and Milwaukee do mandate sick leave.

Read the report here.

Are you afraid to lose your job if you take time off when sick? And even if you have sick leave, dare you use it? Has your job been threatened if you take paid time off?

Mass worker displacement is a boom for career counselors and job trainers. In a May 3 LA Times op-ed, worker advocate-activist-author Barbara Ehrenreich blasted the prevalent notion that the imperative full-time task for unemployed folks is finding a job without other life distractions. She challenges the American workaholic ethic that taking time off to breathe and detox after the last corporate round of bullying or jobs devoid of meaning and purpose is taboo.

Her essay is titled: Trying to find a job is not a job. Subtitle: Keeping the unemployed busy is an exercise in denial — and social control.

Barbara Ehrenreich encourages the dispossessed to reframe their dilemma as an opportunity.

“Job searching is not a job; retraining is not a panacea. You may be poorer than you’ve ever been, but you are also freer – to express anger and urgency, to dream and create, to get together with others and conspire to build a better world.”

This is no simplistic pablum for fools to swallow. In fact, to rush into mimicking the corporate rat race while free from rules imposed by others (unemployed), is a self-defeating madness.

She means that many good causes require and deserve the talent and energy of the displaced masses. She suggests doing some good for the world.

Ehrenreich founded United Professionals for displaced white-collar workers.

We second the idea. A very talented group of volunteers in 26 states have taken up the banner of the WBI Legislative Campaign as State Coordinators. For some, it has transformed their lives. For nearly everyone, it has added meaning and purpose not found in typical jobs. Evolving from rookie citizen lobbyist to articulate spokesperson on par with professional lobbyists for business groups is heady stuff. It’s about changing the world.

No state has yet passed the complete version of our Healthy Workplace Bill. So, the world has not changed. But it is changing. The process feeds one’s soul, if not the pocketbook.

So, we, at the center of the Workplace Bullying movement, are one “cause” that can use your help. Do you have what it takes to be a State Coordinator?

The need is greatest in states without current Coordinators. However, you also can be teamed with existing Coordinators. Check the list.

Additionally, WBI needs help aligning our efforts with groups advancing a single payer healthcare approach to coverage for all Americans. People with existing connections or willing to make new alliances, please contact us.

info @ workplacebullying .org

Thank you and thanks to Barbara E. for her brilliant notion.

Gary Namie

What do you have to say?

Tutorials for Targets.

Dr. Namie warns of the harm inherent in Not Being Believed as a bullied person. How can they trust the liars?

Listen and then tell about your experience in a comment.

Download Podcast 2 (in .mp3 format)

or

Subscribe to the Podcasts.

or

WBI Podcasts are also in iTunes. Please rate the podcast there. Thanks.

to ha•rass

Etymology: French harasser, from Middle French, from harer to set a dog on, from Old French hare, interjection used to incite dogs, of Germanic origin

No wonder bullying and harassment are so dehumanizing, it is as if someone called on the attack dogs. Our South African friend Susan Steinman always invoked in her books the metaphor of bullies as hyenas, flesh-eating, pack-traveling attackers.

Illinois State professor Curtis White ponders in a new essay how humans can destroy the natural world. According to him, the source precedes contemporary culprits, and goes much deeper. Unfettered capitalism and the emphasis on “winning” are certainly to blame. But the human “barbaric heart” underlies our warlike approach to others. Violence and plunder are virtuous in a winner-take-all society. Citing the experience of the Romans, for whom prosperity depended on violence, White makes the point that the strategy is ultimately suicidal. But barbarians lack insight, never pausing to reflect on actions taken.

I know many of you are convinced most bullies are evil, barely human! Others believe all bullies are psychopaths. I thought you’d appreciate yet another way to characterize their quest for interpersonal violence at work — they are barbarians. In reality, we believe most bullies are banal soccer moms and fathers of the month. At work, they are transformed into barbarians.

Love to have your thoughts on the matter.

Dr. Denise Lopez Haugen, Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Square Peg Psychological

503-723-5053

17998 S Anderson Rd, Oregon City, OR 97045-9001

drhaugen@squarepegpsychological.com

Dr. Denise is a graduate of WBI University and an Oregon licensed clinical psychologist (PsyD) who can help you. Tell her WBI sent you.

If you do not live in the area but want telephone counseling, call her and request an appointment.

Read our advice about Selecting Therapists and what different kinds there are.

If your therapist is interested in learning more about Workplace Bullying dynamics in order to specialize, have him or her attend WBI University.

How have counselors treated you? Have they understood? Have they hurt? Please tell us here so others know who to trust and who to avoid. Make sure you name the city along with the person’s name.

BY DAVID P. WILLIS
Asbury Park (NJ) Press
May 26, 2009

You should know it when you see it. Verbal harassment at work, practical jokes, threats, intimidation, and even sabotage, are all the hallmarks of a workplace bully.
As opposed to tough management, “bullying is a level of misery that falls disproportionally on the few,” said Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash.

A 2007 survey by the Institute and Zogby International found that 37 percent of American workers have been bullied at work. Nearly three-quarters, 72 percent, of the bullies are bosses, the survey said.

And as companies struggle, experts say workplace bullying has grown as people fear job loss.

“It is just really out of fear. Where there is fear there is a need to control,” said Terri Dawe, employee assistance coordinator at CPC Behavioral Healthcare, which has centers around Monmouth County. “It is escalating in these economic times and jobs being tenuous.”

The tight job market has compounded the problem, Namie said. “It’s a buyer’s market. Now the attitude is, ‘I can treat you however I want and you can leave and I can find more like you.’”

Like the school yard, bullies cause problems at work.

“In terms of overall morale, it is horrible,” said Alan Cavaiola, an associate professor at Monmouth University and co-author of “Toxic Co-Workers: How to Deal With Dysfunctional People on the Job.” “Everyone kind of tiptoes around this person. It is very much like walking on egg shells.”

In one case, Cavaiola said a female worker was harassed by two male supervisors, who made sexually demeaning remarks. Her boss didn’t take her complaints seriously, she quit her job and sued.

“They are very narcissistic. They are very self-centered,” Cavaiola said of workplace bullies. “They lack empathy. They lack compassion.”

But unlike schoolyard bullies, bullies at work tend to target people who are a threat to them, said Namie. Their victims may be stronger performers or better liked. “The bully is a political animal and knows how organizations run and knows that aggression pays off and is rewarded,” Namie said. “You have a player against a person who is basically a do-gooder, someone with a social orientation who (keeps) their nose to the grindstone.”

A bully is different from a hard-charging boss, said Red Bank workplace coach Donna Coulson, owner of Donna Coulson & Associates. A hard boss may not smile and give a lot of work to people, but they tend to challenge employees, she said. “A bully will bully you whether things are good or bad or indifferent,” she said.

So what’s a worker to do?

If possible, talk to the person later in private, Coulson said. “If you stand up to the bully, they will eventually stop,” she said.

Oops, Coulson. If targets could have confronted their bullies, they would have – WBI

Dawe said a worker has to recognize bullying which can be hard to define. But once they do, they should make a diary of what they experience, including dates and times, so they can bring it to human resources, she said.

Hey, Coulson. Wrong again. HR won’t do anything – WBI

Namie recommends that workers take a three-prong approach. “You have to recognize that it’s happening to you,” Namie said. “In a way, that takes a long time. They can’t believe it is happening to them, so they are in denial themselves.”

They should take time off from work to check their physical and mental health, and look for violations of company policy, he said. Consult a lawyer, he said. “You need to start to build a business case, the unemotional case, that the bully is too expensive to keep,” Namie said. Take the case to the highest level position who is not pledged or not related to the bully, he added.

Namie said he supports a bill in the state Assembly, called the “Healthy Workplace Act.” It would make abusive conduct in a workplace — repeated use of derogatory remarks, insults and epithets that are intimidating and humiliating — illegal. The bill is currently before the Assembly Labor Committee.

“Workplace bullying is an underappreciated problem,” said Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, D-Middlesex. “Studies have shown that workplace bullying occurs much more frequently than sexual harassment, yet has not received nearly as much attention.”

Kathleen M. Connelly, a lawyer at Lindabury, McCormick, Estabrook & Cooper in Rumson, said employers have to recognize the need to address the problem.”Employers have dropped the ball in not recognizing that an essential element of being a supervisor is managing people, and that means being able to do that in a respectful manner.”

But legislation is not the answer, she said.

“This statute would basically give every employee in the workplace a vehicle to commence litigation,” she said. “Do we want to be in a situation where our court systems become overwhelmed with burdens with every employee grievance?”

David P. Willis: 732-643-4039; dwillis@app.com

THAT’S MEN: Male bullies tend to target men and women equally

WHO ARE the biggest workplace bullies, men or women? Some new research in the US, which has been creating a bit of a stir over there, suggests that the answer depends on whether the target of bullying is a man or a woman.

The American research suggests that about 60 per cent of workplace bullying is done by men. But when you look at who the genders bully, the findings become interesting. Male bullies seem to bully men and women equally. As one commentator said, the male bully is “an equal opportunity jerk”. But about 70 per cent of the targets of female bullies are other women.

Much of the comment that this has generated in America has been to do with the absence of sisterhood among women. The fact remains, though, that for whatever reason, women mainly tend to target other women.

It seems to me, from talking to many people about this, that the figures would be much the same for Ireland.

Workplace bullying is a curious issue in the degree of damage it can do to people who are targeted. Sometimes bullies latch on to some vulnerability in the person they target. For instance, people who are unsure of their own worth are very vulnerable to the bullying message that they are worthless.

At other times, it is the bullies who are insecure and who target very good workers. Such workers, too, can suffer serious distress at the hands of a bully.

Why do women target other women? Are other women more vulnerable as targets than men? Are men more likely to be in positions of authority in the workplace and less susceptible to bullying?

We simply don’t know the answers. Little research has been done with bullies – perhaps few bullies see themselves as such.

When bullying is under way, the person who is targeted then experiences a series of symptoms which destroy his or her peace of mind: loss of sleep, obsessing about the bullying, loss of appetite, not being able to work to a high standard because of their fears of the bully’s next move.

This effect isn’t just found in women. I have met as many men as women whose peace of mind was destroyed by bullies. Both genders display the symptoms I have mentioned above.

My experience is that companies all too often show a real reluctance to tackle the bully, especially if the bully is a manager and even if this person has been identified as a bully many times. Again, this reluctance to tackle the bully seems to be the same regardless of whether the bully is a man or a woman.

I recall one workplace in which a female bully was allowed to wreck the jobs and wellbeing of a series of female secretaries. Somehow the men who mostly ran the place saw her treatment of her secretaries as a sort of female domain into which they were not going to dare to intrude into.

In this way the men facilitated the female bully.

Some bullying is overt and some is sneaky. Publicly reprimanding or shouting at the target is a feature of both male and female bullies, according to a small-scale research study in the UK.

Consistently insulting the target is another. In other words, public humiliation is a favourite weapon of many bullies.

More sneaky and less noticeable methods include changing rosters frequently and unreasonably, spreading rumours, and excluding the target from meetings. Both men and women are well able to engage in both.

Last week’s report from the Commission on Child Abuse showed just how vicious both genders can be – and that viciousness can be translated to the workplace.
The common factor in all these forms of bullying is the undermining of the person’s dignity and stability as a human being.

Sadly, the bully – male or female – often gets away with it. Perhaps it’s hard for other managers on a personal level to challenge macho bullies. After all, they may come across as tough, no-nonsense managers. In some workplaces, aggression is encouraged.

A sad commentary on human behaviour – but what else is new?

Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Is There No Room for Sisterhood in Today’s Workplaces?

by James Turnbull, Korea Times, May 22, 2009

In U.S. workplaces, women are primarily bullied by other women rather than by men, the New York Times reported last week, and the news quickly went viral as it busted some long and deeply-held stereotypes about the women’s movement.

In total, 60 percent of bullies in U.S. workplaces are men, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI), a national advocacy group. But whereas they tend to target both sexes equally, their female counterparts choose other women as their targets over 70 percent of the time.

These figures were surprising because they arrived in an environment where the glass ceiling remains quite strong

A 2008 census by the nonprofit research group Catalyst, for instance, found that only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women.

On that basis, it had been natural to assume that many women workers identify themselves as members of a repressed group, and consequently are more supportive and nurturing of each other in their working lives than men are.

Yet in reality, as numerous examples provided by the WBI attest to, there is little sense of feminist solidarity in the workplace. Why?

Workplace bullies can stunt productivity and kill employee morale.

By Alexandra Johnson, Inc. Magazine, May 22, 2009

Hair-pulling and tattling may seem like child’s play, but bullying is alive and well in the workplace. According to a study by the Bellingham, Washington-based Workplace Bullying Institute, 49 percent of U.S. workers report being affected by bullying at work—totaling 71 million Americans.

Read the short article at Inc. Magazine

Solidarity of the sisterhood is a myth and stereotype. It doesn’t mean it does not exist, it’s just that not all women are nurturant and supportive to one another. Neither is every man macho and hyper-aggressive. Stereotypes are generalizations about sex-role-typed behavior, common acts associated with only one gender and not the other. Many behaviors are gender-typed. 

Workplace Bullying is not gender-typed. Workplace environment factors are better predictors than gender. For example, a culture that carries no accountability or negative consequences, regardless of how harmful the behavior exhibited paves the way for bullies. A place where kissing-up (ingratiation) is the norm is fertile territory, where bullying and favoritism (and its converse, ostracism) thrive.

When we discuss the WBI Healthy Workplace Bill, we speak of “status-blind” harassment. Bullying crosses the boundaries drawn by gender, race, ethnicity, age, and disability. Thus bullying is truly “gender-free.”

What attracts the media to woman-on-woman (WOW) bullying is the fact that women are targeted at a higher rate by female bullies (71%) than by male bullies (46%). Yes, women are crueler to women than they are to men, and that must be explained. But don’t forget that 60% of all bullies are men. 31% of all bullying is men-on-men, 29% is WOW. Why is there so little interest in the more frequent variety of same-gender bullying? Because it’s discounted as routine, expected, predictable. WOW sounds mysterious, counterintuitive, and, I think, somewhat prurient.

So here are some explanations for WOW bullying that rarely make it into TV segments on bullying, print stories and the gabfest which is the blogosphere. We offer this because some readers might get the impression that we are misogynists. We are not! 57% of all bullied targets are women, and the majority of callers seeking help from us are women. We are women’s advocates in the fight against workplace bullying.

The WBI  starter list of explanations

A. It’s the workplace, not the people in it. Employers create work environments where aggression is rewarded. women see this (as well if not better than men) and learn to abuse others to get ahead. It’s the way things are done around here.

In male-dominated organizations, where men hold all the executive positions, women tend to adopt male-sex-typed behavior to survive and succeed. Only in female-run organizations (or those run by males who adopt a female-sex-typed style that values quality of interpersonal relationships as much as power and status differences) can there be hope for a less aggressive, more dignified and respectful way to operate.

See the Women and Bullying articles in our Research section for relevant studies about this particular angle.

B. A double standard about women is alive and well and practiced by both men and women. If women are “nice” they are too soft. If they are tough, they are “bitchy.” There are two social psychological explanations for this. 

First, it is gender bias in the causal attribution process. Causal attribution is simply showing a preference for explaining things that happen. Old research found that if a person is described succeeding at a task, the explanation depends on whether the person described is male or female. Success for men is typically explained by a trait, inherent skill, intelligence, ability. With exactly the same information, when it’s a woman, success is the result of the task being so easy anyone could have done it or luck. And both men and women elect those different explanations. 

Second, the first person to break any barrier and be the lone representative of a group (and therefore, be in the statistical minority) is called a “token.” Tokens are subjected to disproportionate pressure. Errors, however tiny, are magnified. Successes can also be blown out of proportion. In practice, token individuals often break from the pressure. Look at what Jackie Robinson had to endure when he broke the race barrier in the white baseball league. Same for the first woman CEO or the first woman to attain a high rank in any organization. Women are natural tokens in male-dominated domains, like business. Men are rarely the only male in any role, but when they are, they, too are tokens and heavily scrutinized.

C. Women targets are less likely to confront in response to being bullied. But targets, of both genders, rarely react with aggression. That’s what makes them targets. Bullies sense who will be an easier mark. Targets are sorted into those who take no action because of a higher moral calling. It could be their religion that tells them to turn the other cheek or to never lower oneself to the level of a tyrant. Other targets walk away in fear, stunned at the surprise attack. Getting away is the only reaction they have. Once away, they hope time will heal the wound or prevent it from happening again. Regardless of motive, targets do not defend themselves because either they are unable (it’s not their worldview and never acquired the skill of self-defense because it’s a fair world, no one will hurt you) or unwilling to do so. Targets are all “easy marks.” It’s not just women.

D. Most bullies are bosses (in the US, 72% of bullies are bosses). All bullies prefer to bully subordinates. It’s a permitted prerogative that makes being a boss attractive to many people. So, bullying flows downhill.

Women are bosses, too. But they are lower-ranking than men bosses (only 15% of executives are women, only 3% of CEOs). So they are more likely managing other women and not other men executives. They bully whoever they can. So, WOW may be nothing more than proximity at work. You bully those within reach.

E. Though I’m not a woman, I’ve had a great deal to do with them during my lifetime (and Ruth educates me constantly). (She says that) women are socialized to judge other girls while growing up. They pay attention to how others look and dress all the time. Self-identity can be almost entirely dependent on how others appear and how they are judged by others. Without comparisons to others, some would not know how to make decisions.

Two factors emerge. First, modeling one’s personal behavior on the actions of others gives a great deal of power to the other person. Clearly in WOW relationships where apparent friendship preceded bullying, the bully may have been respected by the future target. When she is betrayed, the target ruminates (for way too long) about the inexplicable turnaround, searching for a rational explanation. It doesn’t matter, it just happened because the bully wanted it to. Wanting to be like someone else gives away too much personal control over one’s own life and choices made.

Second, the skill of paying attention since childhood determines the adult woman’s perceptual field. Other women are salient in the social world. More information is gleaned from cultivating relationships with women. Abusive, exploitative relationships with one person dominating the other is simply a twisted, sick reliance upon getting information from another woman (to then be used against her). Targets fall into the trap easily.

F. Feminist writers claim that women grow up accustomed to having their personal boundaries invaded and thus learn to treat other women that same way. A girl’s opinions are treated as irrelevant by the father compared to her brother’s. A girl’s ambitions are tamped down, expectations made more “realistic,” dreams treated as impossible. This is denial of her very psychological integrity, a discounting of her humanity. If this is how she is raised, she grows accustomed to being treated rudely or denigrated as not deserving equal status with others. So, when bullied at work, the immediate reaction is rarely outrage and righteous indignation that a fool would dare lie so readily or be so unapologetically cruel. It is more likely a timid turing away, starting immediately to blame herself, buying into the lies (as if some “kernel of truth” is buried in all the manure), and spiraling into a psychologically compromised state.

Read Phyllis Chesler’s Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman in the Recommended Books section.

So, there’s my preliminary thinking about the topic. Do you see why reporters can’t handle all this information?

Women:  share your favorite explanation for WOW bullying by adding a comment. We want to see lots of input from you, the experts.

Work, Stress and Health 2009
Global Concerns and Approaches
The 8th International Conference
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Sponsored by the American Psychological Association / National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety / Society for Occupational Health Psychology

The Conference Website

2010 Cardiff Conference

June 2-4, 2010

Cardiff, Wales, UK

The conference website

WHAT’S IN A DAME : Meanies who wear high heels

JENNIFER CHRISTMAN  Arkansas Democrat Gazette   May 19, 2009

Read this.

Because I said so, that’s why!

Bullying is apparently a big issue not just in America’s schools, but in our offices too.

So much that there is a Workplace Bullying Institute that released a study saying so (of course, if the group said all was peaceful, wouldn’t their workers all be out of a job? And have to seek employment out there in the big, unfriendly world?).

The New York Times recently devoted a large business story to the subject, the advocacy group and its research, explaining, “During this downturn, as stress levels rise, workplace researchers say, bullies are likely to sharpen their elbows and ratchet up their attacks.”

Not to mention sharpen their long, painted claws.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a significant number of people who responded to the organization’s survey (37 percent) said they had been the target of bullying, which the group defines as the “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons by one or more perpetrators” including verbal and nonverbal abuse and “offensive conduct/behaviors which are threatening, humiliating or intimidating” and “work interference – sabotage – which prevents work from getting done.”

And perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s usually women (57 percent) who are targeted.

What might be shocking: who is doing the harassing. According to the survey, 40 percent of workplace brutes are women who are making life miserable mainly for other women. (At least New York Times writer Mickey Meece, a woman, sounded startled in the May 12 story, asking “In the name of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, what is going on here?”)

Women can be rotten to other women. This is news? Not to most of us who have known this since the days when our pigtails were pulled and we read – or maybe we lived – Judy Blume’s Blubber. We know that Mean Girls extends way past high school years. (Luckily nothing like that takes place in my present office. Although if it did, I’d surely be way too scared of women-inprison-movie-esque ladies room drama to say so here.)

And the “speak out or suck it up?” dilemma only gets trickier with age and repercussions.

Like the bullying institute’s Web site says: “Good employers purge bullies, most promote them.” Those who expose bullies open themselves to ridicule, retaliation and termination. While those who tolerate bullies open themselves to emotional harm and physical stress.

Employees who feel they are being subjected to occupational intimidation might check out articles about everything from warning signs to mental health concerns and success stories at the organization’s Web site, www. workplacebullying.org/targets.html. It’s just a suggestion. Not an order.

I kindly ask that you e-mail: jchristman@arkansasonline.com What’s in a Dame is a weekly report from the woman ‘hood.

Link to original (not confirmed as permalink)

The fact is that we ran a large national study looking at lots of aspects of bullying at work. The trouble is that the media love the catfight (woman-on-woman) angle. Or shall I say, the editors, love it. Most reporters get the big picture. Fact: most of the bullying is done by men.

One blogger sorted through the B.S. and got it right — Abby L. Ferber — at the Huffington Post.  She sees that most bullying is about abuse of authority and power. Bullying is certainly complex and comes in a variety of forms, but common to all types is the perpetrator’s CONTROL over another human being. The perp’s insatiable need, made possible by either unknowing or corrupt employers, and the harm it causes the targeted person’s health, sense of identity, livelihood, family and career.

So in the noisy, error-prone, cranky and eccentric world of bloggers, Ferber got it right! WBI commends and thanks you.

GN

What do you readers think? Feel free to comment below.

When Does a Robust Leader Become a Bully?

Policy changes could leave firms with a hefty bill

Howard Levitt, Financial Post Published: Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Defining a “bully” is easy for dictionaries. Otherwise, it is a matter of perspective. What is the difference between being a bully and having an assertive management style? Are the courts and tribunals the best situated to decide?

Whatever the definition, how many people consider having a tough boss to me more worrisome than being sexually harassed? A 2008 joint Queens University and University of Manitoba study found, surprisingly, that sexual harasment was less injurious to the victim than workplace bullying. A culture of success begets competitive, even aggressive, behaviour. At what point is robust leadership properly characterized as bullying?

Read more at the original article from the Financial Post

Readers may be interested in a Stanford Biz School professor’s characterization of CEO bullies as misunderstood “great intimidators.” See article G3.

Completely rewritten

Order from this page for discount

Enjoy

If the prior edition of this book helped you when you were bullied at work, please write a comment below. Thanks,

GN & RN

She threw scissors across the room and barked at Cheryl to pick them up. She framed the young nurse for an egregious medical error involving a patient in their maternity ward. For an entire year – Cheryl’s first out of school – she verbally abused her in front of patients, who themselves feared this woman’s wrath.

“I actually had no confidence left, I thought I would have to try another job. On my last day of work, I didn’t even think I could take a blood pressure. [She] questioned everything I did.”

This senior nurse was Cheryl’s workplace bully and a recurring nightmare for the Calgarian, who did not want her last name used for fear of reprisal. While that was 36 years ago, the experience is seared in her mind as a reminder to refuse to be pushed around. But even recently, a colleague yelled at Cheryl in the hallway after she disagreed with how she was handling an issue.

“I said, ‘I don’t receive this. We have to agree to disagree. This is how I see it, this is how you see it.’ She ended the conversation, but she’s left me alone.”

Workplaces fraught with uncertainty are giving rise to office bullying. The antagonistic behaviour is becoming more commonplace, experts say, as the recession puts employees in survival mode – and contrary to macho stereotypes, some of the biggest workplace bullies are women.

A 2007 survey conducted by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an U.S. advocacy group, and polling company Zogby, found that female bullies target other women 71 per cent of the time.

Women make up 40 per cent of workplace bullies and 57 per cent of targets.

Just like Meryl Streep’s horrendous character in The Devil Wears Prada, the bullying woman often holds the power or at least some of it.

“Women are targeted because they’re easier targets [for female bullies],” says Erica Pinsky, a Vancouver consultant who works with organizations to form anti-bullying and harassment policies. “And they’re easier targets because they won’t stand up for themselves. You know ‘pick on someone your own size?’ It’s pick on someone your own sex.”

It’s mostly mid-level female managers or employees baring their fangs, says Nan Mooney, journalist and author of I Can’t Believe She Did That: Why Women Betray Other Women at Work.

“We can feel there’s a possibility we could lose our jobs if we cut another woman slack. We can also feel threatened by an ambitious, intelligent woman coming up from beneath us and want to knock her down and keep her in her place.”

That threat is fuelled by insecurity, which women tend to feel more than men do, Ms. Mooney adds. And with good reason – their jobs are often less secure.

“Women tend to be paid less, there are glass ceilings that are slightly porous, but still exist. … Women are dealing with issues of taking care of families, maternity leaves. Trying to balance all these things creates a great deal of tension,” she says.

But if gals are all facing the same career challenges, why lash out at another woman?

“I wish we could think more of that sensibility that we are in this together and it doesn’t necessarily help you to hurt other women,” Ms. Mooney says. “But a lot of times we’re in a position where we can take it out on other women, and we can’t take it out on our male boss or even a male underling who may become our boss.”

Women are more trusting and likely to share personal information at work, offering ammunition for a potential bully, she says.

Women have been socialized to play nice and many dodge conflict, Ms. Pinsky says.

“I hear from women, ‘I hate confrontation, I hate confrontation.’ The idea is any time you give people feedback, it’s confrontation and we need to change that,” she says. The change can come by developing a culture where the bullied victim can go multiple places for help – not just to the boss, who may be the bully.

But female bullies can be subtle and craftier than their male counterparts, says Marilyn Noble, who researches workplace bullying at the University of New Brunswick.

“Women tend to use relational aggression. It’s verbal, psychological, emotional bullying. People don’t recognize it – it’s covert, it’s harder to pin down and to prove,” she says.

There’s also a lot of reputation smearing, and female bullies often manipulate others into joining them, says Diane Rodgers, co-ordinator for the Bully Within, a B.C. group of professionals who have organized to fight workplace bullying. The consequences can be dire.

One woman Ms. Rodgers knows was hounded by a female colleague who would phone her up and berate her for not tying up loose ends before taking a sick leave for cancer treatments. Some female bullies pretend to be a woman’s friend only to spread lies that turn others against her. Some are driven out of their jobs and battle post-traumatic stress disorder.

To Cheryl, there’s just one catalyst for workplace shove-arounds.

“Stress. I think people are stressed. I think involved in it is all of our personality traits. Sometimes it’s an ego thing, like ‘I think I’m right,’ ” she says. But she also sees it getting better. Nurses like herself are vowing to guard young colleagues from the abuse with which she was initiated into the profession.

“I determined it would never happen. Nursing used to have a saying, ‘They eat their young,’ ” she says. “I say help them be the best they can be.”

View the original article

by Dee McAree
The National Law Journal
11-11-2002

A case in which an employee charged that he was retaliated against for taking time off under the Family Medical Leave Act to care for his aging parents has triggered an $11.65 million award.

The recent Chicago verdict — one of the largest won under FMLA — is just one of many that employment lawyers say they expect to see as baby boomers are faced with the predicament of caring for aging parents. In 1998, Chris Schultz, a 25-year veteran employee of Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill., was the esteemed “MVP Employee” with his picture hanging in the hospital lobby.

But two years later, he was out of a job. Lawyers for the 45-year-old Schultz sued the hospital in Schultz v. Advocate Health, No. 01C-0702 (N.D. Ill. June 5, 2002), claiming that he was unfairly penalized for taking time off to care for his aging parents.

Schultz, who worked in maintenance, was entitled to take 12 weeks intermittently over the course of a year after his request for family medical leave was granted in 2000.

At the time, he was caring for his father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and his ailing mother, who eventually died later that year. During the course of his leave, hospital supervisors instituted a monthly performance policy that graded maintenance employees by the amount of work they had completed within a set period of time. It was this system that led to trouble.

Schultz’s lawyer, Charles Siedlecki, a Chicago-area solo practitioner, argued that the hospital’s grading policy punished employees who had been granted legitimate time off, including those on sick or disability leave. “You can’t hold people accountable for work when they are not there to do it,” said Siedlecki. He argued the case with co-counsel John P. DeRose, a solo based in Hinsdale, Ill.

Joan E. Gale, a member of Chicago’s Seyfarth Shaw, led the defense for the hospital. Gale did not return calls for comment.

After a seven-day trial and eight hours of deliberations, a jury of four men and four women awarded $10.75 million against Advocate Health and Hospitals Corp, which owns Christ Hospital.

Additional awards of $450,000 each were levied against two supervisors. The issue of equitable damages remains before U.S. District Senior Judge Milton Shadur of the Northern District of Illinois, who could opt to award “liquid damages,” or twice the total amount of front and backpay.

Steve Platt, president of the Illinois chapter of the National Employment Lawyers Association and a partner at Chicago’s Arnold & Kadjan, expects to see more FMLA claims against employers as baby boomers face the predicament of caring for aging parents.

Platt said he would be hard-pressed to point to another FMLA verdict as high as this one, and speculates that the jury’s reaction was an emotional one.

“There’s a certain amount of equity in the drama of a courtroom and juries don’t always decide things based on jury instructions or the law,” Platt said. “If they see [an employer doing] something that isn’t fair, they’re going to hit you for it.”

An FMLA claim on its own would not have produced such a high verdict, said Siedlecki. “Under FMLA, the most you can get is liquid damages,” he said. “To get that kind of verdict, you’ve got to find some state claim not subject to the caps,” he said.

To seek higher damages, in addition to FMLA, Schultz sued his employer under an Illinois statute for intent to inflict emotional distress. State claims of emotional distress in employment matters are very hard to pursue, admits Siedlecki. “They almost never survive summary judgment.” [Note: Read law professor Yamada's essay in .pdf format on the limitations of current U.S. law in bullying-related cases and the stiff requirements to prevail in emotional distress cases like this one.]

Siedlecki said he won’t be surprised if the verdict is reduced. “The 7th Circuit is pretty conservative,” he said.

2006 Note: The verdict was appealed and a settlement of an undisclosed amount was paid.

Jury found Dr. Raess guilty of battery, awarded plaintiff Doescher $325,000

Expert witness:  Dr. Gary Namie, WBI

Appellate Court reversal

2008 Indiana Supreme Court restoral of trial verdict and award for plaintiff

Read the entire story and view the Supreme Court hearing

Remarkable in this survey is the fact that so many employees can see and feel bullying’s impact on their daily lives while employers feign blindness and deafness. This survey was conducted in BRITAIN where the term Workplace Bullying is in common usage ever since Andrea Adams launched the UK movement and coined the term there. Of course, U.S. employers are motivated to stay in denial, but even British employers still tempt danger by ignoring bullying.

That’s why there must be specific anti-bullying laws! When laws are in place, employer denials will evaporate.

U.K. Survey: Workplace Bullying Ignored

The Times (London) Online
August 2, 2006

Workplace bullying is a growing problem but bosses are failing to take the problem seriously, according to a report out today. Four out of five people have been bullied at work but most are wary of complaining because they do not believe they will be taken seriously, according to a survey by Peninsula, an employment law firm. (in Britain).

Just 11 per cent of 1,300 workers questioned said they would report workplace bullying to a superior, with only 9 per cent saying they thought their boss would take the complaint seriously.

This is despite 81 per cent of employees saying they had been bullied and 71 per cent saying they thought workplace bullying was on the increase.

The survey reveals a sharp distinction between how employers and employees view the problem, with just 13 per cent of more than 2,000 employers surveyed acknowledging that bullying was an issue in their workplace.

Peter Done, managing director of Peninsula, said: “One of the most serious concerns to come out of this research is that few employers believe their companies are suffering at the hands of bullying, yet a high percentage of employees have been victims. This suggests that workers do not feel confident enough to tell their bosses they are being bullied.”

Mr Done said that in adopting such a stance employers were “attempting to brush the problem under the carpet, which can have serious consequences.”

Yesterday Helen Green, a company secretary at Deutsche Bank, was awarded £828,000 (U.S. $1.5 million) in damages after being driven to a mental breakdown by office bullies.

The judge criticised Ms Green’s managers for being “weak and ineffectual” in the face of a longstanding bullying problem in their department.

Richard Martin, a partner at Speechly Bircham, said: “The Helen Green case serves as a salutary lesson to employers to stamp out behaviour of this kind at a very early stage, particularly when the liability of employers for the bullying and harassment carried out by their employees is increasing all the time.”

Employment experts pointed out that cases like Ms Green’s are rare and that employers are able to protect themselves.

Andrew Chamberlain, an employment lawyer at Addleshaw Goddard, said: “When any employee reports bullying or is known to have suffered ill health, it is crucial that firms closely monitor the situation and maintain accurate records to prove they have done so. If it goes to court then it is all too easy for evidence to become a case of one person’s word against another’s but, by maintaining accurate records and taking proactive action to manage the situation, firms will be better protected against such claims.”

Michael Farrier, an employment expert at Boyes Turner, added: “This survey is a reminder to employers, particularly those with considerable resources, to be vigilant and introduce an effective equality and diversity policy as well as anti-bullying and harassment policies. It is vital that employers undertake annual equality and diversity training and monitoring, if they are to be able to demonstrate they take their obligations seriously.”

A City (London) worker has won £800,000 in damages from Deutsche Bank in a landmark workplace bullying case. The award is said by legal experts to be particularly high and likely to be appealed.

High Court judge Justice Owen said that the campaign at the secretariat division of the international banking firm Deutsche Bank Group Services (UK) Ltd. against Helen Green involved a “relentless campaign of mean and spiteful behaviour designed to cause her distress” that left Green on some occasions crying silently at her desk. She worked there from 1997 to 2001.

Owen awarded her a total of $1.5 million for pain and suffering and loss of past and future earnings. He also ordered the bank to pay her legal costs, beginning with an interim payment of $650,000.

The largest part of the award is the £640,000 awarded for future loss of earnings and a pension, and it is this portion which marks the case out as unusual.

“We have seen cases like this before a number of times but the court has awarded such a large amount because it took the view that this person would not be able to work at this salary level for a long time in the future,” said Tom Potbury, a lawyer specialising in employment law at Pinsent Masons.

Green, 36, had said she was subjected to “offensive, abusive, intimidating, denigrating, bullying, humiliating, patronizing, infantile and insulting words and behavior” and subjected to crude and lewd comments from her former colleagues. Her colleagues would move her papers, hide her post and remove her from document circulation lists. She alleged that some of the colleagues had ignored and excluded her, that her personal and professional authority was undermined, and her workload increased to unreasonable and arbitrary levels.

Her lawyer said medical experts on both sides of the case agreed that Green developed a major depressive disorder, but there was disagreement about its cause.

Deutsche Bank said it had not breached its duties to Green and denied that she was bullied, saying she had had a predisposition to mental illness. Deutsche Bank paid for stress counselling and assertiveness training for Green but she had a nervous breakdown before returning to work and suffering a relapse.

“The best way for companies to deal with workplace bullying is to have a clear policy in place and to make sure that employees know about it,” said Potbury. “The policy then has to be enforced. If someone complains it is important that the employer does not sweep it under the carpet,” he said. “That is the best way of protecting yourself against claims. You can better defend yourself if you can show that you have done everything you can.”

Green said she was delighted by the ruling, adding that she had learned bullying was a problem throughout London’s financial world. “My case was not an isolated one,” she said. “At the trial the court heard evidence about other victims. Not only does Deutsche Bank have to put its house in order, but all City (finance) businesses will have to do more than pay lip-service to this hidden menace.”

A Deutsche Bank statement said that “No decision about whether to appeal has been made at this stage”.

Part of Green’s case was argued under the Protection from Harassment Act, a 1997 anti-stalker law that is beginning to be used in employment cases. A House of Lords ruling last month permitted its use in employment cases, and the law differs substantially from existing employment legislation.

“I don’t think anyone imagined when the law was made that it would be used against employers,” said Potbury. “Employers have no real defence against this law. If an employee is harassed at work on more than one occasion they can be liable and there is nothing they can do about it.”

In the case on which the Lords ruled, the NHS (National Health Service) was vicariously liable for the harassment of employee William Majrowski, even though it was not guilty of causing the behaviour or of failing to prevent it. Previously, employees had to prove that the employer had been negligent in preventing bullying, but that is no longer the case.

Though the award will concern other City financial institutions, Potbury said that the problem of bullying at work was very real but very widespread. “It is a problem, but it is not confined to City firms. People get bullied at work everywhere, though the City is a higher stress culture than other workplaces,” he said. “This will make other City firms make sure they are doing everything they can to avoid this.”

May 19, 2009

Are women natural bullies? According to the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI), 60 percent of bullies at work are men, but they don’t tend to discriminate which gender they bully. On the other hand, 70 percent of the victims of women bullies are women, reported the New York Times on Sunday. Most people are aware of it, but prefer to ignore it.

Read more from the original Chosun Ilbo article

1. Targets under report it (40% of targets never tell). Employers simply may not know about it.
2. Most (80%) bullying is legal, rendering laws and law-compliant policies inapplicable
3. Thus, 62% of employers either do nothing or worsen the situation (retaliation) because they can do so with legal impunity.
4. The majority of bullies (73%) are managers; senior managers and HR reflexively side with management when disputes arise.
5. Bullies derive 73% of their support from executives, peer managers and HR
6. Bullies (an unknown percentage) are following orders from above
7. Executives have been bullied by the bullies. They are afraid to act. They have a disproportionate fear of lawsuits brought by the bully if they dare investigate or sanction the bully.
8. Bullies invented their reputation as indispensable high-performers in case they were ever exposed. Target complainants are then not believed.
9. Employers don’t actually know how to stop it. They forgot the lessons learned from having to correct and prevent illegal discrimination.
10. Employers don’t recognize bullying as violence in the workplace. The problem is erroneously defined as “conflict,” and the wrong solutions are applied.
11. Our society is highly aggressive and competitive. Bullies embody these two popular tactics. Hostility is more normative than the exception. So, bullying/abuse/psychological violence at work is positively embraced more often than despised.

WBI

For a similarly successful legal outcome to happen in the U.S., the WBI anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill will have to be enacted and used by the courts.

The Sunday Times (London)
August 6, 2006

Bullying Court Case Led Victim to Lost Family

Jasper Gerard

THE City executive awarded 800,000 pounds compensation after years of bullying at a merchant bank has described how the traumatic court case has led to one of the most uplifting experiences of her life: the tracing of her lost family.

Helen Green, who won her case again Deutsche Bank last week, tells the story in today’s Sunday Times News Review of how she was given up for adoption aged two. Her birth to an unmarried orthodox Jew and an Italian man had caused a scandal in conservative Jewish circles in the early 1970s.

Green, 36, underwent a campaign of harassment at the hands of her co-workers at Deutsche Bank, particularly a gang of four women who continually made offensive and mocking remarks. The judge agreed that her nervous breakdown should be attributed to this “wholly abnormal stress” rather than to her troubled early years.

Green describes how, after her mother lost a custody battle, she suffered sexual abuse from her adoptive father.

Green said that in preparation for the court case Deutsche Bank had investigated her family to see if her mother was a schizophrenic and whether this could have been passed on to her.

Initially Green was horrified by the intrusion but it set off a train of events which, she says, have been more significant to her than her award.

“I was so hurt and horrified [by Deutsche's investigation],” said Green. “I didn’t even know the full circumstances of my adoption. But last year I contacted social services and discovered my natural mother had passed away two years ago; I just missed her.”

Amid this bleakness, Green finally found joy when she was united with the blood brother she had never met. “He is lovely,” Green said. “He was able to tell me so much. I feel I could write a book about my family.”

Before landing her job with Deutsche Bank, where she was appointed assistant company secretary, Green had suffered a breakdown caused by the trauma of reporting her adoptive father to the police for child abuse. Eventually she balked at testifying against him, but he was cautioned and put on the sex offenders’ register. He has since died. The bank contended that Green should have made greater disclosure about her psychiatric history prior to her appointment, but Green claimed: “Deutsche’s message is: if you have been abused you cannot work for us.”

Green said that she was not psychologically damaged by her childhood; rather it was the bullying endemic at the bank that drove her to two further breakdowns and a stint in hospital on “suicide watch”.

“I’m not some little wallflower,” she said. “I played hockey to county level, I won a golf competition. I skydived with people from the army. I am used to the odd lewd comment. I didn’t crumble at the first push.”

Green describes herself as “very proud” of winning a position at Deutsche, but her dream job degenerated into a nightmare of bullying, which the judge, Mr Justice Owen, described as a “Darwinian, survival of the fittest campaign” to undermine her. At one point a member of the “gang of four” was heard boasting to colleagues that she had nearly made Green cry.

Another colleague, Stuart Preston, was described at the trial as having behaved like a “football hooligan’”.

Green was not the first victim of the Deutsche bullies. Seven other women, the court heard, suffered “subtle” victimisation in an environment of “extreme bitchiness”.

Further evidence of the nature of bullying in the workplace has come with a poll of 3,500 victims by the Andrea Adams Trust. The poll found that humiliation and ridicule had affected 65% of respondents. Other methods of bullying included excessive monitoring, exclusion from meetings, exclusion from social events and physical abuse. Half the respondents said that the bullying had lasted more than a year, while 80% said it affected their sleep and 30% said it made them drink or smoke more.

Green’s case illustrates how bullying can destroy careers. “This case has broken my heart,” she said. “All I wanted to be was a company secretary”.

Read the related contemporaneous U.K. survey documenting employer denial of bullying’s presence

Dr. Emelise Aleandri was one of two victorious plaintiffs in a lawsuit against City University of New York. Her bully, Joseph Scelsa, degraded this professional woman, stole her creative works and subjected her to humiliation at an institution of higher education in such a way that Dr. Gary Namie, expert witness in the case, described his outrageous conduct as the worst he had read about nationally. Scelsa treated Aleandri as a worthless person. Obviously, there is a different, objective realistic way to characterize the accomplished woman.

Read about Dr. Aleandri’s lawsuit against the City University of New York (CUNY) that settled for $1.4 million.

Emelise Aleandri, Ph.D.
2005 Woman of Distinction Award
Queens, New York

Dr. Emelise Aleandri has been selected as a Queens Woman of Distinction for 2005. The New York State Senate’s “Woman of Distinction” program was created in 1998 as part of the State’s celebration of Women’s History Month. Past honorees included 19th Century suffragists and women accomplished in sciences, academics, business and the arts. In addition to historic figures, the Women of Distinction program also honors exemplary present day women throughout New York State whose singular professional or personal achievements, whose commitment to excellence, accomplishments and dedicated service on behalf of their communities merit them special recognition by the State Senate.

Dr. Emelise Aleandri is the Artistic Director of Frizzi & Lazzi The Olde Time Italian-American Music & Theatre Company which recreates 19th century immigrant entertainments. She has a Ph.D in Theatre and is President of the Metro NY Chapter of the American Italian Historical Association. Arcadia published her photographic histories, The Italian-American Immigrant Theatre of New York City and Little Italy, about which she regularly lectures for many community organizations. She also lectures through the New York Council for the Humanities. She is currently at work on a multi-volume history of the Italian immigrant theatre for Edwin Mellen Press. She was the 2001 recipient of the Elena Lucrezia Cornaro award from the Order Sons of Italy in America, the 2002 recipient of the Leone di San Marco Award from the Italian Heritage & Culture Committee, and the ETTA Theatre Awardee in 2000.

Dr. Aleandri has produced three documentaries: Teatro, Festa and Circo Rois. For ten years she was the Producer/Host of Italics: The Italian-American Magazine, a nationally-aired cable TV show and is now an independent producer at the Manhattan Neighborhood network. A singer, folk dancer, TV and film actress, Emelise created the role of the 19th century Italian actress, Eleonora Duse, opposite Lilianne Montevecchi’s Sarah Bernhardt in Penguins and Peacocks. She was also featured in Spike Lee’s films Crooklyn and Summer of Sam, the Walnut Street Theatre production of Italian Funerals and Other Festive Occasions, Festa Primavera at La Mama ETC and the Off-Broadway production of Lou La Russo’s Sweatshop. Next, she will sing and play the tricchabalaccha and sing in the chorus of prostitutes in a recording of Jane House Productions’ musical Via Toledo by Night. On May 28 Emelise and Arnie “Mig” Migliaccio presented a program on Farfariello for Bella Italia Mia at the Paolucci Conference Center, 68-02 Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens.

MERRITT – A former Merritt RCMP officer has been awarded almost $1 million in damages after harassment by her commanding officer caused her to become clinically depressed and led to her quitting the force.

It is believed to be the highest harassment award made against the RCMP by a Canadian court, said Kamloops lawyer Barry Carter, who argued the case for ex-Mountie Nancy Sulz.

Sulz said Monday she’s still in shock from the award, but “no amount of money could replace the career that was taken away from me.”

“I had always wanted to be a police officer since I was a child. But I can’t do that work anymore. This whole thing has taken 10 years of my life. It’s been tough on my family and my friends,” she said.

Kamloops B.C. Supreme Court Justice George Lamperson awarded Sulz a total of $950,000 in damages, lost wages and loss of future earnings after finding Staff Sgt. Donald Smith and two subordinate officers caused Sulz “serious psychological harm.”

The RCMP has 30 days in which to appeal.

Lamperson ruled that Smith breached his duty by failing to ensure Sulz could work in a harassment-free environment as set out in RCMP regulations.

However, while the officer’s conduct was unreasonable and insensitive, there was no evidence he “deliberately set out to harass the plaintiff and drive her from the RCMP”, said the judge, who found Smith’s old school management style no longer acceptable.

“Although his manner was abrupt, demanding and unfeeling, his actions were consistent with his experience of the paramilitary command structure of the RCMP. It is clear, especially in light of the establishment and dissemination of a specific harassment policy that this command style was no longer appropriate in the modern RCMP,” Lamperson said.

Sulz said the ruling should be a wake-up call to the RCMP.

“I lost my job because I had a baby. I’m sure I’m not the only female member that’s had this happen to them. I complained twice [to superiors] because I wanted to keep working, but nothing happened,” she said.

Sulz joined the RCMP in 1988 and was in the Merritt detachment when Smith took command in 1994. At the time, she was contemplating a full career in the force, she testified.

Sulz testified her troubles began in 1994 when she was on medical leave due to complications from her second pregnancy. While off work she went on a shopping trip to Bellingham (home of the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute) without obtaining Smith’s permission.

She said she didn’t realize she had violated policy but was told by Sgt. Ron Angel that he and Smith were annoyed at what she had done and she would have to pay the price.(An RCMP inspector testified that this policy was not well known and has since been discontinued.)

When she returned to work she found that auxiliary constables were instructed not to ride with her because she was said to be manipulative and afraid of the dark. Because of the way she was being treated, her physical and mental health deteriorated, she lost nine kilograms (20 pounds), was constantly on the verge of tears and was unable to sleep.

In 1995, an RCMP psychologist recommended she work only part time. She was diagnosed as having major depressive disorder in February 1996 and told to take sick leave.

The psychologist then received an angry phone call from Smith suggesting that Sulz might have a drug-dependency problem, something he reported to RCMP headquarters, she said.

In 1997, “E” Division headquarters began a formal investigation into Sulz’s 48 complaints against Smith and found five allegations were founded, two could not be determined and the rest unfounded — based on the fact that it was her word against his and there was no corroborating evidence.

The findings came out in 1998 after Smith had left the force. Asked what she would do if any of her children wanted to join the RCMP she said: “I’d have my son pursue it, but I’d be very iffy about the girls.”

DAMAGE AWARD:
Here is how the almost $1 million in damages, lost wages and loss of future earnings was awarded:
$125,000, General damages
$600,000, Future wage loss
$225,000, Past wage loss
Total: $950,000

This type of conduct is what I read as an expert witness in court cases involving bullying physicians. Similar things happened in the trial dubbed the “first bullying trial” in Indianapolis, IN in March, 2005 in which I testified.

How rare were angry, hostile, bullying rants by Castro-Moure? Was this the first and only time that an otherwise respectful, gentle man exploded? Not likely. The statement by the chief medical officer about Castro-Moure’s normalcy means little. He probably never works directly with him in the OR, the workplace that bully surgeons terrorize. He only sees him through an administrative lens and as a fellow physician, a club member deserving protection.

The aftermath will be worth tracking. Will the Medical Board do anything since they rarely strip licenses? Will the chief of staff, Altman, have the guts to sanction Castro-Moure or will that be seen as capitulation to nurses? Will Highland Hospital, the county government employer, implement a policy to prevent this from happening again? [We do work with motivated hospitals but eventually they balk at applying anti-bullying policies to the docs.] Will the nurses union demand action to make them safe? Will the patient’s family sue for the involuntary delay?

Bullying in hospitals jeopardizes patient care and staff safety. But most administrators are too timid to confront and constrain thugs like Castro-Moure. This unfortunate incident gives the public and bully sympathizers a rare peek behind the hospital door to show what nonsense is tolerated on a daily basis by nurses.

Highland (Hospital, Oakland, CA) Surgeon Suspended
Drunken Altercation Reported in Hospital’s Operating Room

By Jim Herron Zamora
San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, March 9, 2006

OAKLAND — The top neurosurgeon at Highland Hospital has been suspended and may be charged with a misdemeanor after what authorities called a drunken altercation with sheriff’s deputies in an operating room, officials said today.

Deputies believe Dr. Federico Castro-Moure, 45, was intoxicated during the scuffle and prosecutors may charge him with public drunkenness and interfering with a peace officer.

“The deputies felt that he was behaving in an aggressive manner,” Alameda County Sheriff’s Capt. William Eskridge said. “He was yelling and put a fist in the face of a deputy in a threatening manner.”

Neither Castro-Moure nor his attorney could be reached for comment.

The incident began about 8:30 p.m. Monday when Castro-Moure argued with nurses recommending that he wait several hours for sterile equipment to arrive before operating on a spinal patient.

Although Castro-Moure wanted to operate immediately, other hospital personnel believed the surgery could be delayed because the patient was stable enough to wait, said Dr. David Altma