Harassment turned ‘dream job’ into nightmare, woman says

REGINA With a passion for the environment and a diploma in environmental engineering technology, a Regina woman thought she had found her dream job when she was hired by the city to work at the landfill as a technologist.

Instead, she said, it quickly proved a nightmare.

The woman — who isn’t being named as she continues to fear for her safety — received her diploma in 2013 and was hired in September that year.

“This was actually a dream job that I had written down in my journals through school,” she said during an emotional interview on Tuesday.

“There was a lot of potential at the landfill to do very interesting work ... This was a perfect job for me.”

But she said what appeared to be an ideal situation soon proved the opposite. Her experience and that of two female colleagues was the subject of a recent decision by the Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board (SLRB), which determined the women were let down badly by both their union and the city as they endured “extremely serious” sexual and gender-based harassment at the hands of male colleagues.

The woman said her own problems began almost immediately.

On her first day, her supervisor — one of the women who were applicants in the SLRB hearing — warned her about various workplace problems, including what she described as a toxic work environment.

“It was very glaringly obvious, because the second day that I was there, there was a man ... who was very sexually inappropriate with me,” she said.

It didn’t end there. She said the behaviour by various men toward her and female colleagues ran the gamut between inappropriate comments to unwanted sexual touching and other intimidating actions.

The final straw came in March 2014 when she and her supervisor arrived at work to find the door to their lab kicked in, and two men standing nearby in what she viewed as a threatening manner.

She found a new job, but says individuals from the landfill continued to stalk her.

The woman said she and her colleagues spoke with various members of senior management, then — as was addressed at length in the SLRB decision — their union, CUPE Local 21, both to no effect. She and her colleagues filed a total of 72 formal complaints with the city, which eventually brought in an independent investigator to assess the situation. According to the SLRB decision, the investigator deemed many of the complaints to be well-founded.

But throughout much of their experience, they felt alone.

“No one had our back, except for each other,” she said.

By May 2014, the woman’s health was so stressed that her doctor ordered her to take time off work. She was also diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.

The woman wiped away tears as she described the way the situation changed her from confident, friendly and career driven to fearful and socially anxious. She’s since managed to find another job in her field, a position that enables her to largely avoid contact with people.

“I was completely destroyed on every level of my life,” she said. “... If they would have just owned the problem, both the union and the city, we would still be in our ideal positions doing good work.