This is something that I have never understood as a Steward that understands the state’s thinking on this subject. Here are some facts. There are approximately 285,00 +/- state employees in the State of California’s civil service employees. Bullying in the Workplace is the Workplace is the number one labor issue facing the unions’ memberships.From what I know about this scourge, why is the state ruining the lives of its employees? Now, if you take into account that most of these employees have families to come home to and bring home to these families the issues that they have at their work and talk about it to their spouse.

So let’s explore this in more detail. First let’s start this discussion about some other facts. Let’s start with the definition of Bullying in the Workplace:   
Workplace Bullying is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons(the targets) by one or more perpetrators. It is abusive conduct that is:

• Threatening, humiliated, or intimidating, or
• Work interference-sabotage-which  prevents work from getting done, or
• Verbal abuse

The key words in this definition are “repeated” and “abusive”.

Okay, now that we have defined what bullying in the workplace is. Now, lets look at our research from our national studies. According to our latest studies, depending upon your type of environment we know :

If you look at the first line, these are people that have been bullied on a national basis in these work environments. The first column of data represents all remote workers. The second represents people that work in both the remote and spends part-time being on-site, while the third column is the worker that spends their full-time being on-site

Since Governor Newsome, order the state workers to work in a hybrid environment. These figures are from our latest national survey to give us what the extent of the issue of Bullying in the Workplace. So our focus now should be on the center column of how many are being bullied . In this column, if you add line 1 and line 2 you get 66.5%. We know that the people witness others being bullied constantly live in fear that they maybe next. This means that they are placed into an environment of constant stress. Now, let’s apply this study to the population of the state workers, whose jobs are important to the taxpayers. By the way, it is my experience that all of these state workers took their jobs to do a good job for the taxpayer as a sense of duty. When we apply these figures to the number of employees that the State of California which is approximately 285,000+/- and apply the hybrid numbers to this number, we get that 189,525+/-  This is number of employees that are affected by bullying in their jobs as state employees.

Now, like I stated above, most of these have spouses and children at home. We know that when someone is bullied, the first thing that happens is shame. “Why is this happening to me?” is their common question from these targets. They internalize the issues that they are having when the bullying starts. From there, the bullying will gradually increase. It may not stop for years, Bullying puts this target under constant stress, which is a natural reaction. But, it gradually wears down the targeted person. In addition, the witnesses are in constant fear hoping that it never happens to them. Also, it is common, if the target does not get help, they can go to the dark-side of  depression and suicidal tendencies. Both of these can also affect their families in dark ways. Also, if the target does not get help, after a while they tend to try to end it on their own by trying to kill the perpetrator. We used to call this as going ‘postal’. In the state’s employee population we have seen this on several occasions occurring with rank-and-file employees killing their supervisors. 

Again, I asked CalHR why do you consider this as a managerial style? You call ruining approximately 190,000 lives plus their families lives as a managerial style? Lets go a bit deeper now. I have represented many state employees over my tenure as a Shop Steward. Let me tell you what I have seen these employees have endured. Let’s start with the physical effects of bullying; Internal bleeding, strokes, heart attacks, anxiety, ulcers, high blood pressure. Now lets talk of the psychological effects that I have seen: PTSD, C-PTSD, etc. Targets are also highly emotional people after the bullying starts. Every time that I met with a target, I kept a box of Kleenex at the ready in case just in case it was needed. What this leads to is that these targets are becoming traumatized. Once these targets do get some help, they just learn to cope with their psychological injuries and they never really get over it. I say this is that we know, that once in a while something will trigger and they will relive these events that caused a previous trauma. What I am saying is that being bullied does not cause a temporary injury psychologically, it is actually a more permanent injury. Therapy for these injuries, is akin to applying a band-aid on an open wound. Additionally, we know that another effect of Bullying in the Workplace can lead to Domestic Violence and also it is also considered to be the same as Domestic Violence in the Workplace. In effect the targets can also exhibit battered-spouse syndrome as well. 

Therefore, I do not understand  why CalHR’s policy.