A new Massachusetts Senate Bill, presented by John Menard, targets workplace harassment, bullying, and mobbing, without regard to protected class status. Senate Bill 699 states that between 37% and 59% of employees directly experience health-endangering workplace bullying, abuse, and harassment, and the mistreatment is approximately four times likely to occur than sexual harassment alone.
These numbers are staggering, and indicate why other states may be considering similar bills. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of this bill, when it passes, and the development of similar legislation elsewhere. The Massachusetts bill will hold individuals liable for workplace abuse.
A recent report released in April of 2009 by the Southern Poverty Law Center illustrates some troubling survey results featuring 500 low income Latinos – including legal residents, undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens from five separate locations in the South. The locations were Nashville, Charlotte, New Orleans, rural southern Georgia, and cities in northern Alabama.
The survey shows that many of these employees were subject to discrimination and violations of civil rights and other workplace abuses. They also faced poor working conditions, were cheated out of wages, and denied basic safety and health protections.
The report clearly indicated that reform legislation is needed in order to protect these victims from labor and civil rights violations. Many of these victims, like most victims of workplace harassment, do not file complaints for fear of retribution, or termination of employment. For more information on this report, please go to www.splcenter.org, and review the full study titled “Under Fire: Life for Low-Income Latinos In The South.”
I wrote some articles on ehow regarding new approaches to sexual harassment training, and sexual harassment policy development. I plan to write additional articles in the future. If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, please write to me. You can find my articles on my site or on ehow under their Business section. Thanks.
This site began as an effort to prevent workplace harassment. Unfortunately, harassment comes in many forms and is not gender specific. Although much of our focus has been on sexual harassment, it’s important to note that workplace harassment includes a variety of offenses that we’ve yet to cover in this blog. I intend to open this topic and expand this blog to include all forms of workplace issues, and allow our readers to raise experiences, questions, or comments related to all forms of workplace offenses.
I was recently contacted by a wonderful woman and documentary producer named Beverly Peterson, who asked if I’d share two of her documentaries with our readers. As you’ll see in her short documentaries (one featured above), the women were the victims of harassment and were treated with emotional abuse, workplace bullying, isolation, and other highly-disturbing conduct that should not be tolerated in the work environment. In the 28 years I’ve been managing Human Resources, I, too, have occasionally confronted a manager who believed he or she was above the law (or for that matter, company policy), and was able to write their own doctrine with respect to the treatment of human beings. The only reason these individuals are successful is that companies fail to address the problem. For a variety of reasons, bad or ineffective managers continue to mistreat their employees through workplace misconduct and employees pay the price. Some employees simply leave the company — others try to seek resolution to their problem through the Human Resources department or other mediation groups. But some employees suffer through the harassment because they cannot afford to leave or lose their jobs due to the economy and they fear retaliation if they raise a complaint.
There aren’t too many “bullying” laws that I’m aware of, but bad managers can be dealt with by an effective corporation with strong values and a good employee policy manual. Awareness and education is key to understanding and addressing all forms of harassment, so I encourage our readers to visit Beverly Peterson’s site at http://nojobisworththis.com. View the documentaries and share your thoughts with us.
Together we can work towards ending harassment in the workplace. It’s a lot of hard work, but it needs to be tackled.
