Mobbing: emotional abuse at work. (Occupational Hazards).

Workplace bullying is reaching epidemic proportions. Mean jokes, put-downs, humiliating treatment are all part of this type of abuse. While men are also affected by psychological harassment, women are by far the favorite target due to the patriarchal culture that favors male abuse of power over women.

It all starts with an apparently banal act: a spiteful comment, a shrug of the shoulders, or a hostile glance. Did the boss or a colleague get up on the wrong side of the bed? Perhaps, but it might also be the first in a long, sick chain of humiliation, abuse and attacks that seek to emotionally unbalance the victim in the hope that she (or he) will finally quit or ask for a transfer. This situation is known around the world as emotional abuse in the workplace, or "mobbing." In some countries, including Sweden and Australia, mobbing is a crime punished by the labor laws.

According to psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Marie-France Hirigoyen, millions of workers, both women and men, endure this harassment every day at their place of work. "Mobbing," Hirigoyen explains, "entails abusive procedure, hurtful comments, double messages, looks and gestures that, due to their frequent and systematic nature, affect the person's psychological or physical integrity."

This bullying is the work of a disturbed individual whose perversion can be expressed in a variety of forms. One of the most common is sexual harassment. Above all, mobbing uses the victim as a object to satisfy the bully's need to exercise power.

In Argentina, this term is unfamiliar. But although there is no legislation on mobbing, the situation is well-known to workers in subordinate positions. "The boss is really riding me hard" and "he's out to get me" are common workplace expressions.

According to Violence at Work, a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO), mobbing is one of the forms of violence in the workplace that has increased most in recent years. According to this report, an ILO study in England revealed that 53% of all employees have endured some form of emotional abuse on the job, and 78% stated that they had witnessed mobbing. The report also states that in 1998 in Argentina 6.1% of men and 11.8% of women endured some sort of physical or psychological violence in the workplace, while 16.6% of women workers reported that they had been sexually harassed. These figures place us nearly at the top of list of countries for workplace bullying.

Profile of the Aggressor 

The workplace bully is a person with narcissistic characteristics not qualifying as serious mental illness or psychosis. He (or she) has most likely been abused or endured hardships and has unmet needs that have generated neurosis, emotional wounds and feelings of emptiness. The aggressor is coolly rational and does not perceive others as human beings.

The first act of mobbing is to immobilize the victim through vampiresque seduction. But in order to reaffirm themselves, bullies eventually must destroy. They also tend to have successful careers, thanks to their lack of scruples, which also makes their bullying must easier, especially when the victim is a subordinate.

Mobbing is an abuse of power in which the aggressor seeks to maintain his or her position and sees the victim as a threat.

Typically, they use indirect language with double messages: the real message is hidden in a formal one. This way, if accused, the bully can hide behind the formal message and deny the subliminal message that seeks to psychologically destabilize the victim.

At the same time, the bully's abusive strategies often go unperceived by others at work because the narcissistic abuser is highly skilled in "lying and fabricating realties, with great ease," Hirigoyen explains. The victims, on the other hands, hide behind a wall of silence built by fear or shame.

Hirigoyen warns that anyone can be subjected to emotional abuse in the workplace and that there is no precise profile of the victim of mobbing. However, victims are frequently people with low self-esteem. For this reason, they may be more vulnerable to accusations along the lines of "you are useless," "this is a terrible job," "you've screwed up again," "you can't do anything right," etc.

Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, defined mental health as the capacity to love and work. Mobbing aims to break the victim emotionally. The abusers know that someone under psychological strain is much more likely to make mistakes at work, take more sick days, or have a public breakdown, factors that they use to make the victims look like "hysterics" or simply incompetent.

When the victim reacts or tries to rebel, the latent aggression is replaced by open hostility. At this point, a stage of emotional destruction called "psychological terrorization" begins: no holds are barred, not even to physical violence.

Most Likely Places for Abuse

Mobbing is very common in workplaces where power can be gained quickly, such as organizations that work for humanitarian causes; there is no profit, but there is power. Emotional abuse may occur in the public or private sector, but in the latter, workplace bullying accelerates more quickly, is more violent and obvious, and always provokes an outcome. Mobbing may end in firing, legal proceedings or reconciliation.

In public administration, however, in which the hierarchy is more rigid, bureaucracy complicates the firing process. As a result, the harassment lasts much longer, is more insidious, and there is no escape for the victims. Under such tremendous pressure, they may suffer serious breakdowns from which it may be very difficult to recover and heal.

Power favors unhealthy attitudes, and harassment thrives in the shadows. When an employee does something obviously wrong, they are told: "This is not working out." They are rebuked, and the problem is solved. Harassment is a way of speaking without words, of threatening someone who has done nothing wrong. In administrations rife with corruption or embezzlement of public funds, there is a tendency to pick a scapegoat, usually someone who denounces such practices or who won't "play by the rules."

Labor law specialist, Hector Recalde explains that in Argentina, where jobs are ever more precarious, people put up with an exceptional amount of abuse. Employment statistics reveal the reasons for their endurance. Today, in our country there are 2 million unemployed and millions of underemployed workers. Approximately 3.8 million people work "under the table," and 45% of all legally-contracted workers are overworked, logging an average 56 hours/week. This provides the ideal conditions for all sorts of abuse and harassment in the workplace. "If you don't like, leave," is the tacit or explicit attitude of businesses in response to employee complaints. Workers are totally defenseless. Labor laws provide increasingly less protection; solidarity among colleagues is dissolving and fear increasing. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find anyone willing to come forward as a witness to the abuse. Workers are afraid that the business will give them a bad reference, and they will never again find work.

Consequences

The psychological and physical consequences of mobbing are devastating. Stress, anxiety and depression are common. Harassment in the workplace can, in the long run, lead to posttraumatic stress, just as in victims of battering or rape. In terms of physical responses, mobbing lowers the victim's defenses, and illnesses to which the victim was predisposed may surface, such as dermatological, cardiovascular or gastrointestinal problems or allergies.

The Best Defense

Mobbing may seem like a dead-end street, but there is a way out. Recognizing the situation is the first step: realizing that this harassment has nothing to do with job performance and that behind all the minor daily details is a concrete intention to force the victim to suffer and eventually leave.

The second step is to denounce the situation of abuse to the aggressor's superiors.

Above all, the victim of harassment in the workplace must remain calm. The bully is trying to goad the victim into losing control so that they make a serious professional mistake or have a nervous breakdown. Shrugging off the harassment, while making careful note of each incident and preserving any evidence of this aggression, is a sensible move.

While there are no laws that punish emotional or sexual harassment in Argentina, there are other laws and international treaties that can be used to defend victims of mobbing, such as Argentina's Law 23.592 against discrimination, Article 18 of Argentina's Constitution, or the Civil Code's statute on emotional abuse.

The best way to deal with harassment at work is to undo the problem and not be undone by it.

Harassment Denounced in Argentina

-- June 1998. The head of security at the Wal-Mart in Talleres, Cordoba, subjected 36 female employees to a strip search in an attempt to find a missing 6,000 pesos.

-- March 1999. Five faculty members of the Social Science Department at the Universidad de Buenos Aires filed a complaint with the Instituto contra la Discriminacion, la Xenofobia y el Racismo (INADI, Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism), reporting abuse by a member of the Department Committee. The female faculty members stated their opinions were not respected and that they were discriminated against and verbally abused. They stressed that because the aggression was often expressed in the tone in which they were addressed, the abuse did not appear in the minutes of the meetings.

-- October 28, 1999. One hundred fifty female employees at a clothing factory in La Pampa reported that they were forced to submit to a strip search. The head of the company maintained that they were within their legal rights to search their employees.

-- September 1, 2000. In Posadas, Misiones, Gloria Baez (the author this article) has written numerous letters to the ministry of Social Welfare and the Vice-Governor of her province, denouncing "psychological harassment" by her direct superior (a woman) and another female employee at her workplace. To date there has been no response. Ms. Baez also has presented local legislators with a proposal for a national and provincial law on "psychological harassment." The author is an Argentine psychologist specializing in mental health and violence.

The author is an Argentine psychologist specializing in mental health and violence.