With the new year upon us, I’d like to start by wishing all CAUT members a very happy, healthy and productive New Year! Individually, may some of our key projects come to fruition in 2008. Collectively, let’s hope we continue to make headway against the forces of commercialization, privatization and corporatization of our post-secondary institutions and that academic freedom, solidarity and social justice will prevail once again.

In early December, CAUT held its annual senior grievance officers’ workshop in Ottawa. It was a highly informative and successful event, with 50 participants from member associations across Canada. Our 2007 workshop had a special emphasis on “the vulnerable grievor” and how associations can best fulfill their obligations in difficult cases, including conflicts between colleagues and mental health and accommodation in the workplace. Two of the main strands covered in the program were workplace bullying and stress and mental health at work.

There is so much material on all of these, and they are such important topics, that I decided to divide them up: I’ll be talking about the nature, prevalence and consequences of workplace bullying in this column and I’ll devote the February column to what we can do about it. Then in March, I’ll look at trends in workplace mental health issues related to stress and an association’s duty to accommodate in this context.

In one form or another, bullying in the workplace has probably existed for hundreds of years, but has only captured the attention of researchers and trade unions in the last 10 years as more and more information came to light about how widespread bullying is.

According to Angelo Soares of the University of Quebec at Montreal, one of the foremost experts on the topic and who recently gave an inspiring talk on “Bullying at Work: One Degree Below Humanity” at the western regional conference of faculty associations in Saskatoon, one of the wake-up calls was French author Marie-France Hirigoyen’s 1998 book, Le harcèlement moral : la violence perverse au quotidien. Hirigoyen’s book sold 500,000 copies within its first few months on bookstore shelves and just over a year after its release the French Government enacted its first anti-workplace bullying law.

The province of Quebec was the first North American jurisdiction to pass legislation against “psychological harassment” and Saskatchewan recently amended its Occupational Health and Safety Act to cover abuse of power and bullying in the workplace.

What exactly is bullying? We all think we know what it means, but the phenomenon is complex and definitions vary. The core of it is fairly straightforward, though: we are talking about offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, which is repetitive and which constitutes an abuse or misuse of power intended to undermine, isolate, humiliate, denigrate or injure the victim.

One author calls it “a form of psychological terrorism.” And it can have devastating consequences for the person being bullied: loss of self-esteem, depression and even suicide attempts, not to mention the harrowing ripple effects bullying can have on family and friends. Organizations also pay a high price for bullying. A poisoned work environment may lead to absenteeism, low morale, loss of productivity, staff turnover and costly lawsuits.

There are a good number of myths surrounding bullying. Here are two of them. One contends that it’s all simply part of our intellectual debates. Although our jobs as academics require us to analyze and criticize, we’re not talking here about rational discourse or professional differences of opinion over theories and arguments. Some bullies will target just about everybody but many will single out a particular employee, or group of employees, and constantly, systematically belittle them, berate them, make fun of them, dismiss their opinions or their work, and attempt to isolate and exclude them by circulating malicious rumours and falsehoods about them. Being bullied by a group of people is known as “mobbing,” a phenomenon University of Waterloo sociologist Kenneth Westhues has written about.

Another myth dismisses the problem as a question of personality: the “bullyer” is simply a strong-minded person who is direct and wants to get things done. The “bullyee” happens to be a weak individual who is incapable of being assertive and who can’t take a joke or criticism. Workplace bullying, on the contrary, is not about personality clashes, but about a power relationship whereby the “bullyer” is intent on controlling and harming a particular person. It’s not about personal conflict but about organizational deficiency.

And as Soares explains, certain organizational contexts are more conducive to allowing bullying to occur — conflict-ridden workplaces, those where work has intensified and been casualized, where new forms of authoritarian management have been introduced or where mistrust and negativity are widespread. Some workplaces have “a culture of bullying.” It seems that in certain corporate circles, like in hockey, “enforcers” are hired to get rid of certain employees by hounding them into leaving! At the senior grievance officers’ workshop, one participant claimed that a known American university was encouraging its faculty members to bully their way to the top of the totem pole.

But other structural factors shape the institutional context also, such as the widespread ideology of “excellence,” the mechanisms for allocating budgets and compensation to individuals (market premiums and the like), the “star” system in research, the quantitative measurement of workloads and the promotion of performance at any cost, all leading to manifestations of extreme individualism and competitiveness.

Just how prevalent is workplace bullying? A 2002 union survey of hundreds of workplaces in New South Wales, Australia, reported 74 per cent of respondents saying they had experienced bullying at work. According to Soares, workplace bullying is on the rise in Canada and has reached “alarming proportions.”

We are starting to have data on this. A recent occupational stress survey, which was conducted by CAUT (Catano et al., 2007), found that a significant number of respondents reported at least one incident of bullying in the past 12 months. Depending on the indicators used, between 10 and 45 per cent of respondents reported being on the receiving end of verbal abuse (“being sworn at, yelled at, subjected to negative comments or false accusations”), rude and disrespectful treatment, demeaning remarks about competence and having one’s opinions dismissed.

Furthermore, when the data are disaggregated, two worrying trends emerge. First, on practically all the measures, the worst offenders are co-workers, followed by either students or administrators, depending on the variable. Another study (Gilin and Catano, 2005) found that nearly 40 per cent of nursing staff in health institutions surveyed reported being bullied and although culprits extended throughout the local power structure, the main culprits were co-workers, ahead of administrators or physicians. Second, there is a constant gender difference, with women much more likely than men to be bullied — up to 65 per cent more.

This finding is similar to what a 2004 internal survey of a small Canadian university discovered, where more than half of the female respondents surveyed said they’d felt “threatened or intimidated over the past four years,” where a larger percentage of women than men reported feeling threatened or intimidated and where women “were more likely than men to report being yelled at or feeling concerned for their physical safety.” Perhaps additional data would uncover other groups being particularly targeted, such as younger faculty, or visible minorities.

Clearly, we have a lot of work to do to address this pervasive problem. Next time: What can we do about workplace bullying? Stay tuned!