So here we go again, another attempt to legislate against workplace bullying. This is not the first – back in 2001 there was a Dignity at Work bill, a fantastically inept piece of drafting crippled alike by internal processes more complicated than the wiring diagram of a battleship and the inevitable (and as it turned out, insurmountable) problem of defining its core subject.
Now there is a new proposal, the subject of a parliamentary Motion earlier this month. This suggests a legal framework akin to the existing harassment regime under the Equality Act, but dropping the requirement that the offending conduct be related to any protected characteristic. For the reasons below, this amounts in effect to a right to be happy at work, and for that reason alone — there are many others to choose from — the prospect of this becoming law (which is very far from certain, let alone imminent) should hold enormous concern for employers.
The parliamentary Motion itself is laced with histrionic language as the justification for the proposal – “slowly and painfully the worker dies inside . . . for some of the pain is so great that they simply crumble . . . some never recover and some lose their lives. The power of a human to destroy another is very real“. Come on, folks – this is about iffy workplace behaviours, not depleted uranium. Of course, for the relatively few very serious cases of what can properly be described as bullying, this may well be true, but to legislate effectively to...
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