WBI BLOG

February 22nd, 2012

Gone & Forgotten: Employees Who Commit Suicide Over Work

Institutions that created or allowed toxic work conditions to flourish out of sheer laziness (laissez-faire, indifferent, management) should be responsible for cleansing the destructive environment of perpetrators who are discovered to be responsible. In worst-case situations, conditions become intolerable for any human trying to hold onto a shred of personal dignity. Some workers take their lives, seeing no way out, typically after years of frustration by the disbelieving employer who accepts the perpetrators’ version of reality.

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February 21st, 2012

Bully Adults in the Workplace: What to Do

Barbara Mannino
Fox Business News
Feb 17, 2012

Adults who thought their days of dealing with bullies were left behind on the schoolyard better think again.

A 2011 CareerBuilder study shows that 27% of U.S. workers have felt bullied in the workplace with the majority not confronting or reporting the bully.

Workplace bullying is defined as repeated mistreatment of an individual employee by a person or group that takes the form of verbal abuse, behavior that is humiliating, threatening, intimidating or sabotages the targeted person’s work, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI).

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Posted in Bullying in the News | 1 Comment »



February 17th, 2012

Highly Recommended Book on Mobbing & Workplace Bullying

As a vocal proponent of the term “workplace bullying,” in my opinion only three individuals speak eloquently and authoritatively on “mobbing,” the original term adopted by Heinz Leymann at the movement’s birth. They are Ken Westhues, Len Sperry and Maureen Duffy.

Westhues wrote the Foreword to this new 2012 Oxford University Press book — Mobbing: Causes, Consequences and Solutions — by Duffy and Sperry. So, between the covers of a remarkable book, is found an incomparable compilation of research, clinical and practical information.

I stand by my comment for the book’s cover. “A fantastic, mesmerizing encyclopedic narrative jammed between two covers touching on every aspect of the phenomenon of mobbing like no other single volume in the literature. The authors clearly have been in the trenches helping abused workers. Their advice is spot on and keenly oriented toward improving the individual victim’s health and recovery from the mobbing assaults.”

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Posted in Announcements, Science | 1 Comment »



February 16th, 2012

Gov’t Worker Guilty of Felony Stalking Coworker

This just in from Seattle KIRO-TV. A woman harassed a woman coworker to the extent that she invaded every aspect of her life away from work and threatened her children. The nutjob, Christina Orozco, was convicted of felony stalking. Stalking is clearly on the rise. Bullied targets are rarely believed. Victims of stalking are never believed — the cruelty borders on the unbelievable — but is very real in this public case. (Tip to a WBI newsletter subscriber.)

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Posted in Bullying Tutorials | 4 Comments »



February 16th, 2012

Join us on Doctor Radio Feb. 21

Welcome listeners of Doctor Radio (SiriusXM Channel 81) on Tues. Feb. 21, 8 am ET. Host Dr. Carol Bernstein, NYU School of Medicine, and the past president of the American Psychiatric Association.

Thanks to callers, Brenda (call the office for a gift), Sandra brave advocate for those bullied by another manager, Linda whose personal life lessons inspired us, and Mary.

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Posted in Events | 2 Comments »



February 15th, 2012

Modern Work and Bullying Are Not “Human Nature”

WBI colleague, Peter Schnall (editor of the definitive book, Unhealthy Work and founder of the Center for Social Epidemiology) regularly points out that normal human blood pressure is 100/60. Unfortunately, only people living outside the industrialized world enjoy such a healthy BP. We are told our “normal BP” is 120/80, but that’s an average, according to Schnall. Working in our hurried world accounts for the difference.

The informative longitudinal Whitehall studies that track coronary health, including ambulatory BP of British government workers for 40 years, reliably find that workdays differ from weekends and vacation days. Metabolism differs. Just showing up for work carries a set of health risks.
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Posted in Bullying Tutorials, Employer Action/Inaction, Science | 2 Comments »



February 14th, 2012

WBI Podcast 24: Good People in Organizations Can Prevail

Optimism That Work Can Change

Lessons learned from a disaster that dramatically changed a baboon troop’s social culture from cutthroat to kinder comes from the work of Robert Sapolsky (author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers). From this there is reason for optimism that our social system of work can be re-engineeered to be kinder and less war-like. We just have to want to do it!

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Posted in Employer Action/Inaction, Podcasts, Science, Social Justice | 3 Comments »



February 13th, 2012

Murder by Proxy Review

JOE GANDELMAN
Feb 13th 2012
The Moderate Voice

The phrase “going postal” has become part of American culture since those awful days in the early to mid-80s when there were news accounts of mass murders at American post offices — murders usually committed by employees or former employees. Wikipedia even has an entry on the expression “going postal” — which explains:

“The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1983 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder. Between 1986 and 1997, more than forty people were gunned down by spree killers in at least twenty incidents of workplace rage.”

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Posted in Bullying Tutorials | 1 Comment »



February 3rd, 2012

BCGEU fights for bully-free workplaces

This week the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU/NUPGE) was in the print and broadcast news talking about workplace bullying.

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February 1st, 2012

2012 Workplace Bullying Online Survey

Please help us collect some useful and important data. We have created a short survey to answer two simple questions:

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

Take the 2012 Workplace Bullying Online Survey

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Posted in Social Justice | 7 Comments »



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