Workplace bullies leave a trail of destruction – and the impact of their behaviour can have consequences for their victims far into the future. At one of the first Christmas parties that Peta went to after joining the real estate industry, she was beckoned over to be shown a video on someone’s phone.
It depicted a bestiality scene involving a woman and a horse. “It was shocking. Everybody was laughing and it was clear to me that this was something that I also needed to find funny too if I wanted to fit in with this group,” she says. “Due to the long working hours, people didn’t have much of a social life outside of work and spent lots of time with each other. I was grateful for the social life and wanted to fit in. “The industry was very male dominated and many of our interactions were based around alcohol. There was a fair bit of hazing.” After Peta was promoted, the bullying got worse. “That’s when the ‘gaslighting’ really started. Despite being a high performer, I was publicly criticised every Friday at the leadership meeting. It was a kind of ritual shaming and humiliation,” she says. “I learned to constantly blame myself and agree with the perpetrators. ‘I will try harder’, I told them. “When staff left the organisation, I was told it was my fault. When new staff joined the office, they were forewarned that I was ‘difficult to work with’.” As time went on, Peta was told not to attend team meetings. She wasn’t invited to Christmas parties or whole team parties, either. She was deliberately ostracised. “By the end of 2010, depression overwhelmed me. I had a perpetual, anxious fear of everything and couldn’t get out of bed. My doctor put me on medication. Even today, I still suffer PTSD from everything that happened,” she says. “The company fired me and I took it to the Fair Work Commission, but it didn't turn out in my favour.” Employment lawyer Josh Bornstein has heard many such stories. Over more than a decade, he has handled hundreds of workplace bullying cases. “People are capable of great good and people are capable of great evil,” says Bornstein, the national head of Employment Law for legal firm Maurice Blackburn. “You can try to find very sophisticated reasons for workplace bullying, but sometimes it's about just something as banal as personal dislike or jealousy, and then a desire to bring someone down.” Under our legal system, Bornstein explains, workplace bullying is constituted by repeated unreasonable behaviour directed at an employee or employees that poses a risk to their health or safety. Bornstein notes he’s turned away more clients than those he’s acted for. “Not everybody can afford to see a lawyer in the private sector. There's a huge unmet demand for legal assistance for people who suffer workplace bullying,” he says. Precisely how common is a matter of some dispute. A 2012 federal government report into workplace bullying suggests its prevalence in Australia cannot be determined because of a lack of data. A more recent study conducted by mental-health advocacy organisation beyondblue and the University of Wollongong found almost half of Australian workers will experience some form of workplace bullying during their careers. Psychologist Evelyn Field has been working on the issue of workplace bullying for 20 years. According to her research, “one in three employees are affected by workplace bullying.” (Her figure includes bullying targets, bystanders and perpetrators.) Workplace bullying increases the risk of depression, anxiety, chronic stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal thoughts and behaviours, according to the beyondblue research. Field lists a further litany of negative health outcomes among those who are bullied. “Two thirds put on weight, that's pretty standard. A third would lose hair, a third to a half would have headaches, blood-pressure problems, skin problems, gastro problems and headaches. Some people will go on to have fibromyalgia, cancer and heart attacks,” she says. As if that weren’t alarming enough, Field goes a step further, stating “humiliation and ostracism are bad for the brain”. “We know that when children are bullied between the age of six and 12, it changes the structure of their brain. So I can assume that bullied adults will also have structural changes and their brain will be injured,” she says. Field predicts that within 10 years it will be possible to view neuroimaging scans and clearly observe the difference between a normal brain and a bullied brain. Interestingly, the beyondblue paper also states it’s not just the victim who is affected: “Witnesses and perpetrators of workplace bullying are also at risk of mental and physical health problems, career disruptions, and poor job performance.” The impact of workplace bullying goes far beyond the individual. In 2001, a team of academics from Griffith University’s School of Management estimated that workplace bullying costs the Australian economy between $6 billion and $36 billion annually. Sixteen years later, we can only imagine what the current figure might be. With so much at stake, you’d expect the state and territory bodies charged with protecting our safety at work to be hypervigilant when it comes to bullying. Yet both Field and Bornstein are highly critical of their performance. “The complaints are pretty universal all over the country that in cases of workplace bullying the occupational health and safety [OHS] watchdogs aren't adequate. And why? One, because they don't investigate most complaints and two, if they do they're handled poorly,” Bornstein says. Field is also disparaging of the Victorian compensation scheme, WorkCover (administered by Victorian OHS regulator WorkSafe). “WorkCover [Victoria] makes everybody worse,” Field says. “Instead of saying, ‘This person has been injured, let's give them six months of counselling and an income and get them back to work,’ they question, they challenge and they re-bully those people,” she says. She gives the example of one of her clients – formerly an esteemed professional in her field – who was bullied to the point she can no longer work. Field claims the company managing the insurance claim on behalf of WorkCover persists in keeping her client under surveillance. “It's 13 years since she was bullied, she's been on WorkCover benefits for years. All the 22 psychiatrists who have assessed her say she will never work again and they're still following her,” Field says. In response to these criticisms of WorkCover, Fairfax received the following statement: “WorkSafe will continue to do everything it can to improve the service provided to injured workers and to ensure that every decision it makes is done in a fair and sensitive manner.” While there isn’t a typical bullying victim, workplace culture is a key factor. “At the end of the day bullying is about poor management and a toxic culture,” Field says. “The fish rots from the head down.” She points to the so-called caring professions as bullying hotbeds: teachers, nurses, social workers, doctors, welfare workers. “Let me put it this way,” says Field. “I see very few accountants in my office, very few engineers.” Bornstein cites “command and control” workplace cultures – such as the military, police and air traffic control – as those that “often produce pretty terrible bullying cases and with some catastrophic health consequences”. In the face of so much dire evidence about the incidence of workplace bullying and its impacts, it would be easy to despair. Thankfully, there have been positive changes. In January 2014, a federal government law came into effect that makes bullying conduct unlawful. It gives workers the right to seek redress through the Fair Work Commission. (Astoundingly, there was no legislation that specifically prohibited workplace bullying until then and workers had to rely on a patchwork of other state and federal laws if they wished to pursue legal action.) Despite critics of the law “who predicted Armageddon because they said there'd be too many complaints [and] the system wouldn’t cope,” Bornstein sees the legal changes as “a fantastic development … It’s given victims of workplace bullying a forum to get assistance quickly.” Prior to this law, he says, people “had to endure the problem until they became almost irretrievably unwell before they could get a case before the courts”. The system might be improving but it isn’t fixed. Field would like to see bullying addressed in workplaces with “a collaborative, restorative process, not an adversarial one, and that's where the system is falling down. It should be primarily a medical issue, not legal issue.” If Bornstein had a magic wand, he’d make workplaces legally accountable. “These days all workplaces have great policies about workplace bullying. I would require them to promise to each employee in their employment contract that they would uphold that commitment. “I would [also] change the law to make workplace bullying actionable, just like a form of unlawful discrimination at work.”
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