Drawing from personal and professional experiences, Jeffrey Recht shares insights and strategies for addressing workplace bullying, empowering individuals and organizations to foster healthier work environments.

I have handled a lot of cases as an Union Steward of Bullying in the Workplace. The first thing that I found, was that intuitively that I thought that surely this was a horrible issue that the union did not recognize. Yet, my members wanted me to fix it right away and yet, I did not know much about it. This was a dilemma of mine and yet I wanted to the best that I could. So, I set out to educate myself. About 5 years later, I taught classes to Stewards about bullying, as well as individual Stewards in my building. To my surprise, bullying in the workplace, really can be best described as a scourge on our society. Let’s go into this briefly.

First let’s define what we mean by Bullying in the Workplace as:

Repeated, health-harming mistreatment that disrupts the flow of work. This abusive misconduct by one or more people can take the form of:

·      Verbal Abuse

·      Physical and/or nonverbal behaviors that are threatening, intimidating, or humiliating

·      Work interference or sabotage

·      Or any combination of the above

Examples of behavior observed in the workplace:

·      Yelling at a target

·      Slamming doors; papers or books on a desk 

·      Gaslighting

·      Work sabotage

·      Isolation of a target

·      The “silent treatment”

·      Sending targets messages through third parties

·      Disparate treatment·      

. Assigning work against medically ordered restrictions when a target is temporarily or permanently disable

The first thing to understand here is that the target of the bullying behavior, is usually an employee that really understands their job and the supervisor or manager does not know what the employee does for their job. The Perpetrator thinks that the target will make them look bad. Bullying behavior is actually ego driven behavior. Now here is how the down-slide of the target. The first reaction by the target is shame, in the form of what did i do to deserve this happening to me? Next they go through depression which leads to PTSD if they do not receive some educated help/support. One thing that I found, targets typically wait from 1 to 5 years to get some help. After this time passes , the symptoms of many of these psychological issues are beginning to show. Besides this, they also get headaches, high blood pressure, stomach issues, due to the flight or flee response of their body. Now they find themselves under constant stress. Our research indicates that there are some real detriments to being under constant stress. Some of these include cancer, heart attacks, strokes, Ulcers, with the constant stress, the brain is constantly getting cortisol which can lead to brain shrinkage, which can lead to a diminished activity of the brain, etc.

Some of the ways, that I found to fight this behavior, is the complaint process, organizing the workplace against that perpetrator. Sometimes, if the Supervisor or the Manager was on probation, I was able to make a case with management that this Supervisor or Manager should not get tenure. I got rid 10 managers and supervisors in this manner. When management would refuse to meet with me over these cases, I would flyer the building, before I did, I ran the flyer by the union’s legal department to make sure the flyer did not say anything that could cause a lawsuit. But my fliers were effective as my fliers caused 10 Labor Relations Officers to lose their jobs. When I pursued this method, I had a 100% success rate but not every case could I do this with due to member’s decisions. Most of the time, I would meet with management and i had a rule with them, It was better to work with me, than against me. I also saved approximately another 30 jobs. Management chose wisely was to work with me. When I flyer-ed, that was when they were trying to fight me, they always lost those fights. It took them 5 years to learn this the hard way.

Effective representation on these kinds of cases involves effective listening, novel strategies with dealing with these cases since no two of these cases is exactly the same, so you have to be a strategic thinker.Also, in many of these cases, you have to treat the target with kid gloves or what I refer to as a fragile flower. It does not take much to make a target cry in one of these cases. In addition, you have to do a lot of preparation for each meeting with management and prepare the person that you are represent in a similar way that an attorney would prepare a witness to testify. We never filed a grievance for these cases since they were not covered by the collective bargaining agreement.

Due to my experiences in this fight, I am advocating for better steward training from unions on Bullying in the Workplace, a new law that encourages employers to create new aggressive policies that rid the workplace of these behaviors and make the perpetrators liable for their behaviors, since the old policies can turn good employees into low productive, sick employees or even dead ones. In my building, we had several employees to die at their desk from the constant stress that they were under. People who want to do their best job for their employer, should not come to work to die! These cases take a lot of documentation on both the employee and the Steward’s behalf.The benefits of this approach, is to lower, both the employer’s Workman’s Compensation Insurance costs, the employers legal costs, and their training costs due to better employee retention. These are just a few of the employers costs that would be generating savings for the employer.

To date, I have now 18 years with these behaviors, Now, Psychologist compare these behaviors as akin to Domestic Violence in the workplace. We should treat it as such. It is that bad to the people that are targets and the perpetrators seem to get away with these behaviors by the protections of the Human Resources Departments of the employers. Targets behave like a battered wife with battered wife’s syndrome.