Read the original article. Tip o’ the hat to Victoria Pynchon.

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.

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..

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.

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.”