The psychological abuse of workplace bullying
In October, the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development heard testimony in support of the Workplace Psychological Safety Act, one of two pieces of legislation focused on protecting employees from bullying and other kinds of workplace intimidation that are currently making their way through the Legislature.
Workers, employment lawyers, human resources professionals, and others detailed their experiences with bullying and psychological abuse, including the loss of careers, income, and their mental and physical health. The testimony included stories of employees being ostracized; isolated; micromanaged; having their pay or duties changed; being left out of critical conversations, events and projects; and having their concerns go unanswered. Through tears, one woman described going to work “like going into a leopard’s cage.” An employment lawyer highlighted the single mothers he has represented who have been the targets of workplace bullying. “Why did they tolerate it? Because the rent is past due, because the electricity is shut off, because the oil tank is empty.”
Rare is the worker who hasn’t had a bad day at the office. Many of us have been there. I know I have. Talking and writing about toxic workplaces has become normal these days, particularly after the rise of #MeToo campaigns that outed serial abusers and bullies. But defining what makes a workplace toxic and how to manage accusations of toxicity are less clear. But that doesn’t mean that bullying isn’t real. In fact I’ve heard from people in many industries whose workplaces left them emotionally and financially bereft.
I’ve witnessed managers either unwilling or incapable of dealing with toxic office behavior. The combination of internal politics, where only certain employees are protected, and a lack of human resources policies to identify and manage bullying are to blame. I often think about an executive who told me they “were not going to get in the middle” of a particularly thorny work relationship, considering it more of a personality clash between employees than an actual personnel issue.
According to a 2021 survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, approximately 48 million Americans say they’ve been bullied at work. (The WBI defines bullying as a “non-physical form of workplace violence” that includes “abusive conduct that is threatening, intimidating, humiliating, work sabotage or verbal abuse.”) The report found that workers of all political ideologies experienced bullying, but liberals said they were targeted more than moderates and conservatives. Even remote workers said they had experienced bullying on Zoom calls and other digital interactions with coworkers.
At the moment, Massachusetts employment law covers discrimination against workers who are considered part of a protected class, which is defined by a person’s race or ethnicity, disability, gender, age, or religion. People who fall outside of these categories are hard pressed to find lawyers who will take their claims of workplace abuse and will “pretty much fall through the cracks,” David Yamada said in an interview. Yamada is a professor at Suffolk University Law School and an author of one of the bills, which he testified in favor of in October.
Broadening the scope of who can file a lawsuit for occupational bullying and removing the protected-class clause would get at less obvious forms of abuse. Yamada gave the example of a misogynist who bullies someone but doesn’t use any vulgarity so their actions don’t have “the classic sexualized content that people associate with sexual harassment and a hostile work environment.” Instead the misogynist could treat female employees differently than male employees by more covert actions like isolating them from their peers, blaming them for things out of their control, or gaslighting them.
According to WBI’s report, two-thirds of bullies are men, which supports the image of bullies as belligerent bosses who intimidate and harass their subordinates, who tend to be women. But bullies and toxic workplaces can take many forms. Women can bully women, subordinates can bully bosses, and colleagues can bully each other.
In 2022, in the Harvard Business Review, researchers also explained how bullying behaviors can be direct or indirect (yelling at someone versus spreading rumors about a person) and overt or covert (humiliating someone in front of their peers versus withholding important information from them). Regardless, activists, experts, and victims say the results of such behaviors are devastating and not enough is being done to minimize the harm or prevent bullying from happening in the first place.
Vicki Courtemanche and Debra Falzoi are cofounders of the group End Workplace Abuse, which put forth many of the witnesses at the October hearing. Both of the women say they were victims of workplace bullying of varying degrees. Courtemanche, who is in her 60s, told me she hasn’t worked in five and a half years after a bout of workplace bullying left her “physically, mentally, and financially” incapacitated. Falzoi also shared her experience with me about being bullied at a school where she worked. Falzoi said that when she raised her concerns with the human resources department, they “were empathetic to a point” but did not take action to correct the bully. “I couldn’t believe there were no consequences,” Falzoi said.
Proponents of each of the bills agree on the basic premise that workplace bullying must be managed, but they disagree on how far the bills should go. The intent behind both bills is to allow employees the ability to sue their employers for bullying, similar to the leverage given to sexual harassment victims or those harmed by occupational health and safety violations.
Part of the schism is that bullying also flies in the face of the newer emerging workplace philosophy of “psychological safety,” which says that employees should be supported and not punished for airing their concerns, grievances, or ideas. In a past column, I wrote that employees can’t have “psychological safety” if they can be fired at any time. Courtemanche and supporters of the Workplace Psychological Safety Act say they plan to take on “at will” employment too, by challenging the right for companies to fire people as they wish.
That’s a step too far for Yamada and supporters of the less restrictive Healthy Workplace bill. “It’s one thing to create a law that states that you cannot treat people abusively at work,” Yamada told me. But attempting to create an environment of so-called psychological safety is akin to “trying to mandate a state of mind, which is often less about the law and more about the integrity of people in the workplace.”
In short, you might not be able to force your colleagues to be kind but you should be able to sue them if they cross the line.
The fate of both bills will be determined in the next year.
The testimony included stories of employees being ostracized; isolated; micromanaged; having their pay or duties changed; being left out of critical conversations, events and projects; and having their concerns go unanswered.