Topic : Workplace Bullies

  I'm currently in a similar boat- at a Home Health Care Agency! 

  My MD took me out of work, and I'm on disability and terrified to return to work.  

  Did you know that workplace bullying is ILLEGAL in the UK?  I wish we could have legislation that didn't limit the rights of individuals not in a minority group.   

   

b/c i was treated alot like  that recently  at my  job so im  quiting i dont  like  in work place  bullies and dont get  respect when your hurt?  well i am  i  have a knee injury and im not  happy at the  lack of  respect or  even askin me how im doing?  never got it..  did you? 

  

Cheryl 

My husband has just left his job due to a hostile work environment. His boss bullied, threatened him with bodily harm,  and threw things around the office. The day my husband left, he decided he would erase some files from the stand alone pc he used.  They found out about it and called the police. A police report was filed.  My husband was smart enough to make a back up disc and he came back  at their demand & put the info back into the pc. After my husband left, the first thing the owner of the company did was call my husband's new employer (yes, he found out where he works) & slander him. He proceeded to tell his new boss that my husband is a uses crack that he is a  drunk, etc.  Of course the new boss knew this man & how he is, so he basically told him where to get off. 

The job he had before was suppsed to be in sales, but he did very little sales.  He mainly cleaned the shop, did inventory, ran parts out to the guys (he is in the A/C business) and occassionaly did a sale or two. He was paid a salary.  He was made to do service calls and never once got compensated for the overtime-this included going to customer's houses on Saturdays and Sundays.  He was told he was to be on call 24/7 no matter what.  He has had a full week deducted from his pay for going to our son's wedding in May after they approved it.  He was told that since he didn't work the day before the holiday, he wasn't getting paid. (We left on the thursday prior to Memorial Day-he came back on Sunday-the day before the holiday) They were closed Monday and he went into work on Tuesday.  I had to send his child support out of my pay so he wasn't behind. 

I want him to report them to the Florida Labor board to at least get the overtime he is due.  What advice or suggestions does anyone have for us? 

Call an attorney and SUE them!  The new employer will have to write a letter stating that the OLD boss called and lied to him.  You will win big! 

Good Luck 

bronze 

but call the Florida Dept of Labor and make sure you have everything documented.

I work in a grocery store in deli, I work with a women who is in no other words a bully!   I am not the only employee who knows this.  She is just horrible to the student employees, really the worst to them.  The manager is aware of this, although I believe she is intimidated by her also.  If you stand up to her, she will NOT back down.  It makes it worse.  We do have a union, and the last girl to take it that far has now quit.  This women made her life such hell she just quit instead of dealing with all the crap.  If it is not HER way its wrong.  If you try to explain to her why you are doing it your way she will curse and put you down.  It is absolutely ridiculous what she gets away with.  Having a union is great for her, she gets to keep her job, tornmenting the rest of us, while we try to just do our jobs. Our dept. is small, and of coures we all want to get along, so we try to let things slide, but it has come to a point where the slide ends, and someone falls in the sand.  Now what?  I don't know how to handle this women.  I have told her, "My husband doesn't talk to me that way! What make you think you can?"  Of course she has no answer to that.. but common, whenever I confront her about how she treats me or other employees she becomes beligerant!  How dare I question her!! Yes she does have 3 years seniourity on me, but having more years on me doesn' t make her right or able to abuse me or other employees this way.   I am not sure how to deal with her anymore.  She seems to never push it so far that I have to call a union stewert, but far enough that I am so mad I am shaking.  What to do.....?

My life was ruined by workplace bullies.  It started when a young new girl started.  I like to say she was kind of a Monica Lewinski.  She moved right in and started sucking up to the higher ranking male employees, flattered them, told them how indebted she was by them and how smart they were, bought them presents.  I was the only high-ranking female.  I had 7 years seniority on her.  My immediate supervisor and I had some old (prejob) history, so there were some complications there or at least a situation ripe for conflict, but we had been getting along and were very friendly.  This new girl was his absolute pet.  She had a sob story to tell anyone who became annoyed with her.  Before long, she was his assistant and not really doing any work, but spent her days talking on the phone and sucking up to salesmen.  At some point, I was told to filter certain work down to her and she would do it.  I already had my antennae up about her, because it was clear to me that she was a real operator and that men were blind to it.  (She wasn't really a looker either, as you might think.)  I gave her a simple task that should have been back to me inside a week and was time-sensitive.  I was patient but when I hadn't heard anything in 3 weeks' time, I asked about it, and she told me and my supervisor that I never gave her the work.   

  

This is a three-year long story of deceipt and I can't put all the details here, but over a three-year period of time, she eroded all my credibility with my supervisor and the VP of the company, who was also relatively new.  She did it just by lying and flattering the men to gain their support.  Before long, they tried to scapegoat me when other people she was screwing around came to me with similar complaints.  They didn't go to my supervisor (their supervisor) because they knew she was his pet and were afraid to.  I was next in line with seniority, and they came to me, a couple of them.  Then the VP and supervisor, after I let them know what was going on, turned it all on me and called me the "ring leader," saying I had ganged up on this evil person.   

  

This was a career I had wanted ever since I was a teen and had worked very hard to pursue, as it was a man's world when I first got into it.  It was my dream, and this one stupid lazy manipulative lying you know what completely ruined my career for me.   I did eventually, as a last-ditch effort, go to the President of the company, who by now was pretty uninvolved with my area, but when he hired me he said if I ever needed to, I could come to him, so I did, fully expecting to be stonewalled and simply turn in my resignation that day.   

  

But when I told him what had been going on, he said his nephew was running a retail store that this same evil girl was working in at night, and that he had reported something along those lines to him.  So he believed me, and he told the VP and my supervisor that when it was my word or hers, they were to take my word, not hers.  But she wasn't fired, which clearly she should have been.  She wasn't fired because a bunch of good ol boys wanted her there to boost their egos. 

  

Time passed and she had more problems with people in another department and, I believe, though I was never told, that they gave her all the time she needed to find another position and even found one for her.  Meanwhile, though I felt better, the damage was already done to my relationship with my supervisor and the VP.  They both resented me and spent the next year trying to find an excuse to fire me.  Finally they did, and it being a very political industry, I was blackballed until 5 years later, the week when the VP got fired from his position and left the industry entirely.  For 5 years, I was unable to get a job sweeping floors in my industry in my part of the country, and probably beyond.  The week he was out of the picture, I was offered a branch coordinator job. 

  

This was all before the Anita Hill hearings.  Many of you may be too young to remember, but there was a time when nothing could be done about this sort of thing.  And the abuse is still rampant, but at least there are some options.  Some companies encourage you to report things now, which is an improvement. 

I had a similar problem at a constuction company I worked at only it was a secretary in the office trying to make her boyfriend, oneof the mechanics i worked with, jealous and uptight. She told him I said that he was chasing women when he went to his hometown and invited myself over to "console" her. He threatened all sorts of bodily injury on me and I told himthat when my lawyer got through with him he would bebegging me for permission to use the bathroom. As you can imagine 

things were cool between us tosaythe least. The real end of my time at the company came when I 

had to spend an extended period of time with this person working on a piece of equipment out on a jobsite that was fairly remote and he drove off with the keys to my rig and sent them back with a friend of mine some three hours later. When I finally got back to the yard allof my uniforms were cut up and the repair records I had to keep were thrown all over the ground. I didn't even call in to quit I just got on a bus the next day and came back to Oregon. The wierd part I found out just recently though, my brother came up to visit at thanksgiving and he told me that those twopeople did get married. They enjoyed wedded bliss for as long as it took her to drain his savings and 401k then she went to get cigarettes one night and never showed up at home. He was in the process of filing a missing persons report when he was served with divorce papers. He just disappeared after that. 

I figure he treated her about as well as he treated me but she had a degree in accounting so she got him back for it before she jumped ship. That's how I like to think it went down anyway@};-  

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that men promote and protect each other.  They will also promote and protect select women, in my experience, those who flatter them, but if push comes to shove, they will stand together and crowd out most any woman if it serves their purpose.  I've heard of many cases of workplace bullying, and I know there must be exceptions, but I've always heard about ones where it was women being bullied, which runs consistent with general criminal/victim percentages, which are almost all women victims.  Of course, it's not only men who do the bullying, as in my case below, where it was a group effort.  But you know, that lone woman couldn't have brought me down without the support of the good ol boy network at my company. 

Here is a link to a website that deals with workplace bullying.  You will be amazed at their psychological profiles of the different types of bullies, as they are truly predictable, as we're starting to learn in all criminal profiling.  They're painfully predictable, the different types  My bully fit right into one of their descriptions, to a T.  The website is a little hard to find your way around in, but it's worth the effort.  Once you see a description of your workplace bully psycho on there, at least you will know YOU'RE not the one who's crazy.   

http://www.bullyonline.org/