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Workplace Bullying 2000, First National Conference
by Bill and Gloria Ryan
The First National Conference on Bullying and Mobbing in the Workplace was
held in Oakland, California January 27-28, 2000. WAGE members attending the
conference included Leuren Moret (her article
"Mobbing
at the University of California"
appeared in the Fall 1999 Newsletter) and us
(see The Gloria Ryan
Case, Fall 2000).
The conference was attended by leading national and international authors
and experts in the field. Mobbing is a hot social topic else where and specific
laws against mobbing in the workplace have been passed in other countries.
Some attendees of special interest to WAGE were:
- Gary Namie, Ph.D. and Ruth Namie, Ph.D., who wrote The Bully at Work and who
run the web site:
www.bullybusters.org.
- Noa Davenport, Ph.D. and Ruth Distler Schwartz, co-authors of the excellent
book
Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace.
A must read for WAGE members, its picture of abuse is frighteningly
recognizable
and similar to our experience at UC.
- Sue Baxter of Sweden, former assistant to Dr. Heinz Leymann.
Leymann is recognized as the father and leading expert on "mobbing"
a term that he created 20 years ago. Baxter is translating his work into
English.
- Daniel Levine, editor of
www.disgruntled.com
and author of Disgruntled: The Darker Side of the World of Work.
He has worked as a business reporter for the Oakland Tribune and
the San Francisco Business Times.
We spoke at length with Rafter and Schwartz regarding UC´s practice of
targeting and inciting mobbing while blaming the victim. They both felt that
WAGE is filled a necessary role as historian/conscience to help UC do the right
thing.
We gave them and Namie information on WAGE and UC cases.
California, we learned, was at the heart of the first book on employer
abuse,
The Harassed Worker, written by psychiatrist and anthropologist
Dr. Carroll Brodsky and based on claims filed with the California Workers Appeal
Board.
(Since 1994 we´ve reported UC for using Workers Compensation as a tool to
cover
up injuries and further injure the worker but these reports have never been
investigated;
Gloria has not yet been compensated for her injury, reported in February of
1994;
and her treating doctor is being ignored.)
Rafter and Schwartz said that it is very common for husbands to become
targets
when they step in to defend their wives. Schwartz commented that, knowing us, it
was obvious we were decent, healthy people and that it made UC look bad to be
doing these terrible things to us; she wondered how they could ever justify what
they
were doing to our children. Reading Mobbing was like a soothing salve for
our souls.
Our whole family has lived a nightmare of escalating mobbing by UCSD since the
fall of 1993.
We had never spoken to the authors of Mobbing before this conference, yet
we
feel their book was written from our experience though the authors phrase it
more clearly and
elegantly then we. WAGE members will not feel so alone after reading this book.
WAGE members might want to use Mobbing and experts from this
conference,
as expert witnesses in court.
-wage@wage.org-