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Mobbing - New scourge
among union members?
Are threats, insults, sabotage all in a day's work? Seemingly so, according to a recent outpouring of horror stories at a labour gathering in Montreal. Canadian journalist Jean-Sébastien Marsan reports on how mobbing is becoming the new bane among workers, and what worker and employer representatives can do about it.
MONTREAL, Canada - A female employee receives daily rape threats via anonymous e-mails, driving her to a nervous breakdown. A manager removes doors from the toilets, accusing his employees of wasting time there. Day-shift miners, at odds with the night-shift, purposely neglect to mention which underground gallery walls are liable to collapse on them.
All in a day's work? Unfortunately, increasingly so. The above examples were cited last year at the XIVth Annual Conference of the Social Delegates of the Montreal Metropolitan Regional Council of the Federation of Quebec Workers (FTQ, in French), the most important central union of Quebec Province of Canada.
Each of the 252 social delegates of the Council, meeting in a Montreal hotel for a day of conferences and workshops, had a horror story to tell. This year, harassment and violence were the theme of nearly all of their regional meetings.
In the opinion of the Montreal social delegates, moral (or psychological) harassment has recently been added to "traditional" violence (fighting, sexual aggression, racism, sabotage, etc.). The cause? "All of the pressures related to the reorganization of work and the lack of staff," says Denise Gagnon, coordinator of the network of social delegates of the FTQ, without hesitation. "People become physically or mentally ill. Or else, to relieve the stress, they will actually attack each other."
The role of "social delegates"
Unknown to the general public of Quebec, social delegates are trained by the unions to form a self-help network. In the 1980s, they targeted primarily personal problems: drug addiction, family breakups, debts, compulsive gambling, depression, suicidal tendencies, etc. Since the 1990s, they are concerned far more with interpersonal conflicts related to the organization (or disorganization!) of work.
"The social delegate is a natural assistant in one's work environment," explains Jean-Luc Pagé, social delegate of Local 301 of the SCFP (a blue-collar workers' union of the city of Montreal). "He plays the concurrent role of listener, mediator and, in extreme cases, of supplying resources. That's done on a person-to-person basis; they aren't therapists, priests or members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their primary role is to take people under their wings and refer them to professionals (psychologists, doctors, etc.)."
The programme of the social delegates of the Regional Council of the FTQ was launched in 1984. The FTQ counts some 1,200 social delegates in Montreal and nearly 2,300 in the whole of the Province of Quebec. A network of "social workers" who have no equivalent in the other central unions of Quebec.
François Courcy is the author of a study of 600 workers (including 318 FTQ members), concerning violence in the workplace. An industrial psychologist, he was invited to the Conference, where he painted a portrait of vicious hostility, more verbal and psychological than physical.
The violence of the twenty-first century is indirect (for example, by not contradicting a false rumour rather than insulting someone in person) and passive - not notifying a worker of a risk of accident rather than provoking the accident oneself, or psychologically destroying an employee simply by ostracizing him, by ignoring or isolating him from his colleagues. The victim's co-workers will close their eyes to the situation, out of fear or cowardice. The aggressor gets off free.
"The problem is the competition among workers for the job, especially for overtime work," maintains Francine Burnonville, coordinator of the network of social delegates of the Metropolitan Montreal Regional Council.
To keep a job or to get overtime work, "the violence won't be racist or sexual, which is no longer acceptable, and there won't be a punch in the face", Francine Burnonville explains. "The behaviour will be on another level, passive violence: accusations of incompetence, manipulating things so that an employee seems insane, so he doesn't have his tools, in other words petty, mean things."
The employer's responsibility
Between 1990 and 1999, the number of complaints before the Quebec Commission of Health and Security in the Workplace (CSST, in French) for "psychological injury" doubled. François Courcy pointed out that five to six Quebec workers commit suicide every week for a work-related reason. Every week!
Rather than changing the organization of work, which is often based on performance at any price, employers prefer to attribute the violence to what François Courcy calls the "myth of the profile of the aggressor".
A small, practical book published recently by Les Editions Transcontinental, "Un collègue veut votre peau" [A Colleague Wants Your Scalp] (Montreal, "S.O.S. boulot" collection), describes three archetypes of the aggressor:
1. The "brute", a brutal person beyond redemption, who since childhood has enjoyed destroying the dignity of others.
2. The "politician", an ambitious employee who harasses a colleague and takes the colleague's ideas for his own, to get a promotion or to curry favour with management.
3. The "imposter", an incompetent employee who hides his mistakes by maligning others.
Three types of victims correspond to these three types of aggressors:
1. The "brute" chooses easy targets, who are emotionally fragile or who cannot afford to quit their jobs.
2. The "politician" goes after employees considered competition which has to be eliminated.
3. The "imposter", to protect himself, discredits his former colleagues.
These types of behaviour, no doubt useful, have the shortcoming of not questioning the employer's responsibility. The author of "Un collègue veut votre peau", limits the problem to relationships between employees, as though it is entirely up to the workers to warn of and treat this aggression. This doesn't help at all, since workers are often being individualists and insensitive, and each one is looking to keep his job at all costs.
In his famous "Le harcèlement moral: La violence perverse au quotidien" [Moral Harassment: Vicious daily violence] (Syros, Paris, 1998), a book which has had a significant impact in France and elsewhere, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Marie-France Hirigoyen writes, "One must not trivialize harassment by making it a fatalistic characteristic of our society.
This is not the result of the current economic crisis; it only stems from an organizational permissiveness."
In 2001, the author continued her thought in "Malaise dans le travail: Le harcèlement moral, démêler le vrai du faux" ["Unease at Work: Moral harassment; separating truth from fiction"], in which she hoped governments would require enterprises to provide prevention programmes against what is not a personal weakness, but is in fact a collective disease. In France, the idea of moral harassment has very recently appeared in the Labour Code.
"This means that there is some violence in a certain milieu; it is the way in which the people are managed," says François Courcy. "And who manages at the end of the day? The employer." The social delegate Jean-Luc Pagé goes even further: "Work organization is violent. People become intolerant, impatient, tired, worn out, aggressive, and nobody listens to them."
François Courcy, during his field investigations, noted that the majority of employers close their eyes to violence. This has important repercussions on the enterprises: increase in absenteeism, drastic reduction in productivity, loss of customers, increase in the number of grievances, costs of replacement of employees who resign or are on sick leave, increase in contributions to CSST. End result: lower profits.
Union violence?
The trade unions are not immune. Despite vigilance by union officials, members may use violence or harassment to pursue their ends. This was "the" question of the annual Conference of the Montreal social delegates last November: what to do with violent unions?
Jean-Luc Pagé of the very militant blue-collar union of the city of Montreal, confesses: "We are considered a union which is rather violent, but everything is being done to counter violence. There may be dysfunctional individuals in a union; I've known some of them. The unions must raise awareness among their members and their organizations to combat this scourge more effectively, but I don't think our union organizations are inherently violent."
"Labour relations are power struggles; this is not an area without violence," according to Denise Gagnon. "I've been campaigning for 25 years. At first, collective bargaining was a policy of table-thumping rather than argumentation," says the unionist. "Today, one collects information and is better prepared before the negotiations begin, in order not to run into a blank wall. Twenty years ago ten per cent of [labour] contracts ended in conflict; today one speaks of 3 to 5 per cent."
In a case of violence in the workplace, a union has the duty to represent equitably the aggressor and the presumed victim before the CSST or the tribunals. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the social delegates of the FTQ prove that labour relations go well beyond banners and collective agreements.
Jean-Sébastien Marsan (jsm@mlink.net) is an independent journalist based in Montreal (Quebec).