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Calling Workplace Bullies To Account
By Katherine Hermes
April 20 2007
By Katherine Hermes
April 20 2007
It is almost two years since my childhood friend of 33 years, Marlene Braun, took a revolver out of its box, loaded it, put it to her temple and pulled the trigger. Her eight-page suicide letter to me declared that she had come to her decision because "my boss ... has made my life utterly unbearable."
When Marlene died, she was 46 years old, healthy, well-loved, respected nationally as a land manager and employed in what she had once called "the best job I ever had." Unfortunately, she was maliciously abused to death.
The General Assembly is considering and should approve a bill, Senate Bill 371, called "An Act Concerning Workplace Safety" - a workplace bullying statute to protect people in similar circumstances on the job. Sixteen other states are considering such legislation, modeled after a proposal by the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash.
The bill would make it illegal to subject employees to verbal or physical abuse done with malice in the workplace. In other words, instances wherein the employer intends the employee to suffer and is aware of the suffering. These abusive acts must be such that the employee resigns or suffers retaliation for reporting them. It allows the employee to sue the employer.
I learned what "malicious abuse" meant firsthand from Marlene, who was a high-ranking federal employee. In her journal she recorded that her new boss turned her life into a nightmare, starting benignly, but escalating quickly. In the following months, bad management grew into abuse directed solely at Marlene. She confided to friends that she lost weight, had trouble concentrating for the first time in her life and experienced panic attacks. Her doctor prescribed anti-anxiety medication.
E-mails from her boss, she wrote, "managed to put me down in all of them, curtly and rudely." And then matters worsened.
Marlene's boss essentially took over her job without formal notification or documentation of her job performance. He brought her into his office because she sent an e-mail to colleagues about a mistake he had made, without sending him a copy. He screamed at her so abusively it made her cry. "He adopted the tone of an angry father talking to a child," she wrote. "I felt like a bully had just beaten me up."
Desperate, Marlene turned to a federal employees' advocacy group. They said there was nothing they could do. She consulted an attorney, who also said there was no legal remedy for her situation. She was not being sexually harassed and there was no clear case for sex discrimination. There were no other employees who were the objects of his abusive behavior, and of two other supervisors, one was currying favor with her boss by also throwing tantrums and screaming at her.
She served a five-day suspension without pay for sending the e-mail about her boss's mistake. Her perfect employment record was stained. She appealed and lost. On April 27, 2005, she received two memos from her boss threatening her with more disciplinary action. Her career, she realized, was over. She would lose her job with the federal government and her home.
Had there been a law like Senate Bill 371 in California where Marlene lived, she almost certainly would have used it. What her boss did was "with malice." He meant to ruin her. He refused to help her transfer or give her a letter of recommendation for another job, but he wanted her gone. For whatever reason, he singled her out and intimidated her verbally and physically on many occasions. One of her colleagues from a partner organization noticed and told people in her group this was like witnessing spousal abuse. Marlene said it was worse than being married to her alcoholic ex-husband.
In an internal federal report, the government acknowledged that bad management was to blame, although it fell short of recognizing the situation for what it was - malicious abuse. Marlene's former boss has since been reassigned.
Connecticut's proposed law would have protected Marlene, while providing safeguards to ensure employers are not unfairly accused. Workers cannot sue unless they try to fix the situation in the workplace, as Marlene did by appealing her suspension and seeking help from a human resources office.
One bad day with the boss won't be the grounds for a lawsuit. It took 13 months of growing, regular abuse before Marlene ended her misery.
Connecticut should pass the workplace safety act. Men and women who suffer intimidation and threatening behavior need protection, and they don't have it now. Let our state be the first.
Katherine Hermes, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history and co-coordinator of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Central Connecticut State University, and the trustee of the Living Trust of Marlene A. Braun.