Joseph Doescher, a hospital operating room perfusionist (the person who operates the heart/lung machine during open heart surgeries), sued Dr. Daniel Raess, a cardiovascular surgeon, for an alleged assault in the operating room. The testimony at trial was that Dr. Raess was angry at Doescher about reports to the hospital administration over the doctor's treatment of other perfusionists. Dr. Raess aggressively and rapidly came at Doescher "with clenched fists, piercing eyes, beet-red face, popping veins, and screaming and swearing at him." Doescher backed up against a wall to defend himself, believing that Dr. Raess "was going to smack the s**t out of" him. Dr. Raess then suddenly stopped, turned, and stormed out of room yelling to Doescher, "you're finished, you're history." For this conduct, a jury awarded Doescher $325,000.
Among the testimony that the jury heard what that of Doescher's expert witness, Dr. Gary Namie, one of the co-founders of the Workplace Bullying Institute. The Workplace Bullying Institute is the organization that is on the forefront of trying to get anti-bullying legislation passed. Dr. Namie testified as to the nature of Dr. Raess's behavior:
In my opinion it's an episode of workplace bullying.... I concluded that based on what I heard and what I read that [the defendant] is a workplace abuser, a person who subjected [the plaintiff] to an abusive work environment. It was a horrific day, it was [a] particularly aggregous [sic], outrageous ... episode.
The Indiana Supreme Court found no error in the trial court's ruling that allowed Dr. Namie's "expert" testimony. According to the court, the term "workplace bullying" can be used because the phrase is "like other general terms used to characterize a person's behavior...." It also found that the trial court did not err in refusing to instruct the jury that workplace bullying, in and of itself, is not illegal.
It should be frightening to any business owner that a court has legitimized Dr. Namie's theory of workplace bullying as some great societal wrong that needs to be fixed. My fear is that this opinion will embolden the workplace bullying movement, a movement that readers of this blog know I feel should die a quick death.
5 comments:
This will put the pressure on the bully him/herself. The employer who takes reasonable steps to prevent the bullying will not be the target of lawsuits. The bully will be.
No where in the testimony did the Bully appear to be representing his employer or anyone else besides himself. Assaults in the workplace are far too common and there should be laws preventing employees from being harassed and injured by psychopaths and other dysfunctional employees that wield power for their own selfish drives to dominate and hurt others.
I suggest you read the book: "The No Asshole Rule", by Robert Sutton to get an idea of how expensive workplace bullies are to a company in costs of productivity, turnover, stress related illness and litigation.
This will put the pressure on the bully him/herself. The employer who takes reasonable steps to prevent the bullying will not be the target of lawsuits. The bully will be.
No where in the testimony did the Bully appear to be representing his employer or anyone else besides himself. Assaults in the workplace are far too common and there should be laws preventing employees from being harassed and injured by psychopaths and other dysfunctional employees that wield power for their own selfish drives to dominate and hurt others.
I suggest you read the book: "The No Asshole Rule", by Robert Sutton to get an idea of how expensive workplace bullies are to a company in costs of productivity, turnover, stress related illness and litigation.
I agree that workplace bullies are expensive to companies in lost productivity and high turnover, and even increased medical costs from some stress related illnesses. The answer, however, is not more legislation that lets bullied employees sue. Instead, those companies will either falter because of their inability to recognize and correct poor management, or it will vet itself of its poor management with it determines that its revolving door has to stop.
Those that cannot handle working for a bullying boss will find work elsewhere, and the companies that tolerate or foster these types of managers will be left with a revolving-door workforce that ultimately hurts the bottom line. Thus, this is an issue that will, in the long run, regulate itself. Bullying, however, is not akin to the historic, invidious, systemic discrimination that needs legal intervention to remedy.
"Scapegoats at Work" by Dyckman and Cutler, is a book that I read that addresses the costs of bullying at work, and strategies for dealing with it. Bullying / scapegoating is a significant drag on productivity when it's not addressed by employers, and manageable when it is, just like sexual harrassment is.
Employers may fear that this will "open the floodgates" of vague and unsubstantiated claims for behavior over which the employer has little control. The same concerns were expressed over laws that addressed sexual harrassment and race and gender discrimination.
Most employers have addressed these problems systematically and effectively once they were mandated to by law. Workplaces are more productive as a result. Absenteeism is reduced. Stress related symptoms are reduced. The losers? Those who bully employees and co-workers. The winners? Everyone else.
I feel I must disagree with the idea that people that "can't handle it" should just move on. This is very close to a "blame the victim" ideology. What if the employer is either one of only a few places where one lives where their job exists, or is the ONLY place where someone lives where that job exists? Are we going to expect the victim to spend large amounts of money to move to a new city? Are we going to expect the victim to spend large amounts of time and money in retraining for a different job simply because the attacker has a lack of respect for others?
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