Bullied staffer gets $1m payout after five years of hell
Mental injury too severe for return to work, psychiatrists find.
The interrogation came out of the blue and continued mercilessly, even while she was doubled over sobbing.
The Australian woman, who was 41 at the time of the incident, has been awarded more than A$1 million (NZ$1.07m) in a negotiated workplace bullying settlement.
The bullying she experienced at a New South Wales government agency five years ago has rendered her unable to ever work again.
As two bosses hurled accusations at her during a meeting called to provide her with feedback on an internal job application, the woman who could only speak on the condition of anonymity, said she was in shock and disbelief.
Now aged 46, she still has no idea what motivated the attack which had come without any warning.
A string of psychiatrists have provided evidence that her mental injury has rendered her unable to return to work.
‘‘I can never get those five years back. I can’t do what I used to do,’’ she said.
‘‘My career was going well. The agency had just paid for me to do a public service management course. I thought I was earmarked for senior management and then this happened.’’
The woman’s lawyer, Lucinda Gunning from Carroll & O’Dea Lawyers in Sydney, said the more than A$1m payout was made up of two components – one for total and permanent disablement, which was paid out by a private insurer, and a workers compensation payment, for past and future earning capacity.
‘‘In my experience, this is the highest sum that I have seen paid for a workplace bullying claim,’’ she said.
Like many cases of workplace bullying, the circumstances at first glance appear trivial.
The woman who worked in middle management had made an error in an internal application for another job within her state government agency.
She had accidentally duplicated an answer to one question in response to another. She says she accepted the error had effectively invalidated the application.
However, her bosses insisted on meeting to provide feedback despite her saying it was unnecessary because she understood her error.
When she sat down with a male and female supervisor, they accused her of having an inappropriate relationship in the office and of passing off a colleague’s ideas as her own, which she flatly denies.
‘‘I was blindsided by it. I couldn’t understand where the allegations were coming from,’’ she says.
‘‘Had they given me some sort of notice or asked me in a less hostile environment, I could explain it. It was just incorrect. But they just kept going and going.
‘‘I was sobbing and doubled over and they were still making allegations sharing.
‘‘It just didn’t stop. At one point they said, we can put you in contact with the counselling service.
‘‘I said I will absolutely need it after this meeting and still they went on. I don’t know why I didn’t walk out. It went on for ages.’’
When the meeting was finally over, the public servant went on annual leave.
When she returned to work, she was forced to work with one of the supervisors who had bullied her in the meeting.
‘‘I asked to be moved out of that department. But they felt the need to humiliate me further by sitting me outside their office and the team I used to manage,’’ she said.
‘‘I wasn’t allowed to contribute. I couldn’t breathe in there. I felt so useless.
‘‘It got to the point where I would sit in the bathroom for six hours and no one would notice I was there. I didn’t do any work because I couldn’t.’’
The woman, who described herself as a resilient person before the experience with bullying, was sent to a mediation session with the female supervisor.
‘‘The woman attacked me again to the point where the mediator told her to stop. It was horrible,’’ about information she said.
By May, 2012, the woman left the organisation feeling ‘‘hopeless’’. Every time she entered a lift she would look to the ground to see if she could identify the shoes of her supervisors.
‘‘I was terrified. I couldn’t be near them,’’ she said.
The woman’s complaints were initially investigated in-house in what she describes as an unfair process.
It took five years to finalise her claim, during which insurance companies put her and her children under surveillance.
‘‘This is a psychological injury, not a physical one,’’ she said.
‘‘Everything was challenged. I was pushed to the absolute limit. I’m surprised I’m actually still here.’’
After five years of ‘‘hell’’, the woman said she had hoped to feel better now the pressure is off.
‘‘But I still don’t,’’ she said. ❚ Fairfax