How safe are public sector workers?

You could be forgiven for thinking there’s been a reckoning on bullying and harassment in the workplace in the past decade.

Unfortunately, the evidence (such as it is, more on that later) does not point to much of a seachange – not even in the public sector, which you’d expect to be leading the charge.

An Employment Court decision released late September gives us a peek into how these situations can go badly wrong when organisations – including Crown-owned ones – fail their employees.

I’ll try to make a long story short. A ‘‘loyal and diligent’’ cook who’d worked on a Niwa research ship for 20 years was wrongfully sacked, and then partly blamed for her own sacking. Kim Ashby was (according to

Niwa’s own investigation) sexually harassed by the first mate of the NV Tangaroa in 2009. In

2011, Niwa promoted her harasser to Master, thereby making him Ashby’s boss.

This would have been difficult enough, but Ashby continued to do her job until, in 2014, she made a confidential complaint that the Master was bullying her. She asked for a shift swap – a request she would make again and again as the relationship between her, Niwa and the Master deteriorated.

There followed years of back and forth, another investigation (bullying unproved to WorkSafe standards), lawyers and mediators became involved, and still Niwa refused to budge on the shift swap that could have (once again, the Court’s words) kept Kim Ashby in the job she loved.

These decisions can make for pretty dry reading, but picking through the legalese shows Niwa comes off badly. The Court criticised it for not doing enough to keep Ashby in her job, wrongly sacking her, and (partly) blaming her for it. When Ashby repeatedly pleaded to swap shifts, it refused. The Court said Niwa was wrong on both counts, and ordered Niwa to pay Ashby $35,000 in damages and a year’s pay.

One sentence in the decision raises big questions about whether senior managers in the public sector understand the effects of bullying and harassment, and how they respond. It says Niwa Vessels Managing Director Greg

Foothead ‘‘gave evidence that he could not justify a (shift) swap based on a personality clash and a communication problem’’.

I tried to interview Foothead this week, and for a while it looked like that might happen. In the end Niwa refused, saying it ‘‘does not comment on individual personnel issues’’.

Call me unreasonable, but I think top-level managers of Crown-owned entities should be transparent and accountable. It’s entirely reasonable for the public to know why Foothead thinks a proven sexual harassment case which led to serious mental health outcomes for an employee of 20 years, amounts to a ‘‘clash of personalities’’.

Here’s some of what I wanted to ask Foothead. Niwa’s KPIs (as per its website) include that it must ‘‘be a good employer’’ – did Foothead meet those standards? Does he understand the effects sexual harassment can have on victims of it? Has he had any training in handling these situations? Has he apologised?

I asked Niwa the same questions but was told school holidays meant it couldn’t respond by deadline.

How widespread is the problem? Unfortunately we don’t know. In March, BusinessDesk reported asking 21 public service departments how they gather information about harassment and bullying, what their staff surveys say, and how many complaints have been made. The OIA responses journalist Oliver Lewis got showed a very unclear picture. Some use calendar years, some financial years, some don’t code for bullying, others don’t allow the information to be released ‘‘for privacy reasons’’.

Set this against a 2021 Diversity Works survey showing more than 37% of public sector respondents said they’d been harassed or bullied, and you can see how important good, consistent data would be.

I don’t enjoy comparing Aotearoa to Australia unfavourably, but Australia gathers bullying and harassment statistics using unified metrics across the public service for an annual State of the Service report.

Here, after BusinessDesk’s investigation, Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes punted responsibility back to public sector chief executives. The commission gave ‘‘guidance’’ including model standards released in 2019, but preferred to ‘‘focus ... on creating positive and safe workplaces and crowding out poor behaviour, rather than standardising an approach around definitions and processes for bullying across the system’’.

Hughes said he believed this was a more effective system. I’d argue Niwa’s Employment Court case shows Hughes’s approach is optimistic, at best.

Picking through the legalese shows Niwa comes off badly.