British Gas workers to strike against bullying bosses

GMB members working for British Gas have voted resoundingly (81% in favour) to strike against bullying bosses.

Winning respect at work

From Workers' Liberty.

“Work is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body... It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.” Studs Terkel.

Bosses have always used harsh discipline and authoritarian measures to keep their workers in line. In a context of economic crisis, management bullying has intensified as bosses claim that harsher sickness and absence policies, staff cuts and workload increases are all necessary parts of the belt-tightening demanded by the “new austerity”. What is “bullying” and how can we fight back?

Unions accuse Crown of "aggressive" approach to staff

From Packaging News.

Trade unions in the UK and North America have accused metal packaging giant Crown of "aggressive behaviour" towards its staff.

Unite the Union in the UK and the US-based United Steelworkers revealed yesterday that they have written to Crown Holdings chief executive John Conway to, in their words, "challenge the company's aggressive behaviour towards some of its employees around the world".

Your legal rights

Many workers aren't aware of their legal rights and don't know that the way their boss treats them could technically be illegal. We offer a selection of online resources to help workers learn about what the law says about our legal rights.

Defining workplace bullying

The basic relationship between workers and bosses is one in which the former (us) is exploited by the latter (them). That relationship is fundamentally unjust, even when the day-to-day interactions between workers and bosses are conducted on pleasant or friendly terms. Campaigning against bullying does not mean justifying that basic relationship, but when the administering of that relationship by managers takes on a particularly harsh, authoritarian and disciplinarian form it is worth resisting; in order, as much as anything else, to expose the basic inequality at the heart of all boss-worker relationship, whether they involve “bullying” or not.

Precisely because of the inherently exploitative nature of the boss-worker relationship, part of the problem with resisting workplace bullying is the difficulty in defining what constitutes “bullying” and what are merely ordinary symptoms of the basic relationship. We offer here a selection of resources which attempt to define what workplace bullying is.

Why would you trust management when they treat our staff like this?

From Tubeworker

Elaine Holness is the RMT rep on Waterloo Group. London Underground have stood her down on allegations of racial harassment because she, a black woman, gave evidence against her white male manager in an employment tribunal! London Underground management are inventing a whole new concept of justice to suit their own ends. LUL is trying to silence reps from speaking out against the company. They are saying that even evidence in court can be used as a disciplinary matter!

Unison's "Bully Busters" campaign

Unison, the public sector union, recently launched a “Bully Busters” campaign. We would question the launch of such a campaign in conjunction with Company magazine and we would disagree strongly with Unison's focus on winning compensation for workers who've quit their job as a result of bullying. We believe that bullying bosses should be fought collectively in the workplace. However, the press statements accompanying Unison's campaign launch provide useful case studies of bullying as it is suffered by workers on the shop-floor.