I have a good friend with whom I have worked these last few years on flushing out discrimination and putting it to the sword. We both know the equality field very well, some would say too well, but we also have a broad and deep constituency of experience of working with and for people who identify in many different and diverse ways. We have both encountered bullying.
This post is about giving some oxygen to her experience. My own story can be told some other time. I will call her Ruth [not her real name] so that I can stop using the impersonal 'she' as much.
Ruth is no shrinking violet. She has worked in some rough environments, both literal as well as metaphorical. She has not been sheltered and knows what goes on in the world in those hours which come out long after Sunday Post readers have had their Ovaltine and gone to bed with a Mills & Boon thriller.
Ruth has caring responsibilities. I won't get into these in detail, as many people have caring responsibilities. Suffice to say that these are a daily constant in Ruth's life, even if it is simply thinking about the person she cares for. Her pay is modest. Her work is good. Her impact is even better. Her familiarity with politicians and senior policy shapers is part of how she changes the corners of our society where bigotry flourishes and yet from time to time government officials who fund her organisation and her job get tetchy and slap her down for her 'over familiarity'. Bullying. Introduces fear into the relationship. Keeps the status quo comfortable for people who are already a good way up the slippery pole which serves to represent their model of success.
Ruth has been off work for some time now. She works for a voluntary sector organisation funded by government to help Scotland deliver a society in which discrimination has been removed. She has been systematically bullied and abused at work by her manager. She has tried to get her situation dealt with by the organisation. The organisation has neither the experience nor the will to deal with what Ruth has described of her personal experiences. This is not an unusual situation. At any given point across Scotland, colleagues of us all are being bullied, and getting made ill, usually through stress, as a result. I know GPs who offer the view that stress and bullying is the most common cause of long-term absences from work, including from the NHS itself. In some rare cases, it is not unknown for people to choose to kill themselves rather than take any more.
And yet. Ruth works for an organisation whose mission is to make the world fairer, more equal, and one in which bullying - a natural enemy of equality - is put to the sword.
We have come some distance from the days when our parents and grandparents were expected to tug forelocks to the factory owner or to the local gentry, wave flags on the streets when the great and good travelled past. When people lived in fear of the churches. When ill-health was feared as much as death itself. The flourishing of what is often termed a meritocratic society in the late 20th century has not meant these fears have been banished or the fundamental causes eradicated.
How many of you directly, I wonder, have had or are this very week undergoing the experience of being bullied at work? All too many seems to be the reality. The bullies are not the factory owners or the clergy or the dukes. Today's bullies are the manager class and who wield that most visceral fear in 21st century Britain - unemployment. Scotland is witnessing a contemporary re-imagining of the historical clearances. This time it is not in the biscuit-tin Brigadoon Scotland. It is next-door Scotland where the clearances are taking place and hitting your family, friends, relatives and neighbours. They are all under daily threat of losing their job. With that context, bullying has been given the most fertile ground.
This is Friday night. It is a time when many people who know me sigh heavily and suggest I switch off for the week-end. I will. Once I have set out this post. It is the least I can do for Ruth.
Ruth has her Friday night ahead of her too, only hers will include wondering if next week there might be an end to her nightmare of being bullied.
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