First, there were the CBI allegations. “Everyone should be bullied once in their lifetime,” an employee was allegedly told during a “campaign of verbal abuse” at the organisation.
There was Dominic Raab’s indignant resignation – he had rashly promised in advance to accept the findings of a bullying inquiry against him, only to find that in the event he didn’t accept them at all. And now new bullying allegations are surfacing, this time around the health secretary, Steve Barclay.
It is the public reaction, I think, that has been most revealing – from commentators, old colleagues, allies and enemies of the accused and victimised. These past weeks have uncovered a nation that is at once deeply confused about workplace bullying and keen not to take it all that seriously. We don’t like bullying, but we think of it as essentially tricky to define: at what point does being a hard-driving boss with high standards tip into actual abuse; or, alternatively, a character test for its victims? (Whether or not the civil servants working for Raab or Barclay were sufficiently resilient has been a major talking point.) One vanguard adopted the view, too, that there are exceptions, particularly high-ranking or valuable people can get away with bullying, and others must adapt.
Our general cultural understanding of workplace bullying – unpleasant but vaguely inevitable and too easily confused with “robust” styles of management – runs counter to the reality, and indeed the way it is defined in law. Spreading malicious rumours, picking on or regularly undermining someone, sabotaging their opportunities: the legal definition of workplace bullying doesn’t find it too difficult to pin down after all. Bullying is deliberately insidious and disguised but, after all, hard to confuse with a boss simply pushing for high standards. Even the 1992 paper responsible for coining the term puts it rather succinctly: “It is about persistent criticism and personal abuse – both in public and in private – which humiliates and demeans the individual, gradually eroding their sense of self. It is designed to undermine a person’s ability and convince them that they are no longer good at anything.”
Surveys find that it is extraordinarily prevalent. About a third of Americans say they have experienced abusive conduct from colleagues and managers – a recent YouGov survey finds 21% of Britons have been bullied as adults, nearly all of them at work. This amounts to many millions of unhappy people who are also suffering threats to their health; bullying victims are almost 60% more likely to develop cardiac illnesses. Mental illness and diseases of the immune system are a risk too, not to mention the scars meted out to careers. It is a serious business. Yet there is no big rebellion of bullying victims – no awareness campaign or movement that touches the scale of the problem. Few victims even report. Complaining is still more likely to harm the career of the junior person than the senior.
I wonder, though, as these public figures topple and allegations increase – cases brought to the UK’s employment tribunal have jumped in recent years – whether bullying is due a cultural reckoning: its own #MeToo moment. This may strike people as laughable: after all, our culture treats sexual harassment as serious and workplace bullying as basically trivial. But that wasn’t always the case; not too long ago, they were both seen as trivial.
In fact, there are quite a few parallels between bullying now and sexual harassment then. Before its 2017 #MeToo reckoning, harassment was also seen as very hard to define (where did friendly banter end and abuse begin? Were we in danger of prosecuting workplace romance?) and something victims earned their stripes learning to put up with. When in 2016, just a year too early, the journalist Isabel Hardman dared to make a complaint against an MP who spoke of her to her face as “totty”, the Daily Mail ran a column headlined “Strong women don’t need to whine about sexists”. “Having had numerous such experiences over the years” the columnist wrote, “I strongly suspect that the ‘culprit’ was being mildly, if clumsily, flirty.”
Now journalists write that they themselves have suffered the rough and tumble of a shouty workplace, and speculate that Raab’s abrasive manner was a result of a high-stress environment. (Juniors had interpreted wrongly.) Victims of sexual harassment once rarely discussed their situation because it was seen as humiliating and unserious. That is the predicament bullying victims find themselves in.
It is not a stretch to imagine an anti-bullying culture shift might follow on the heels of #MeToo. It would not be the first time the two ideas were linked. The concept of workplace bullying emerged in the 1980s, in the wake of a new awareness of “sexual harassment”, a term invented in 1975.
Will there be a time that we look back on our tolerance of bullying – the lack of recourse and general cultural insouciance – in horror? It is not impossible. It is easy to forget how quickly moral fashions can change. “How did we miss this? Why didn’t we see?” was the chorus that greeted #MeToo’s great slew of allegations. But we had known all along. (We just hadn’t known we should take it seriously.) Human moral compasses are endlessly adaptable – our sense of right and wrong is more socially produced than we like to acknowledge. The trivial might become serious in a moment.
Workplace bullying does deserve more of a reckoning. We are social creatures and to be picked on and outcast by our community causes great psychic pain (once it could mean death). For most, the workplace dominates; it has supplanted once robust religious and neighbourhood communities. The right not to be bullied should be more fundamental.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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