Last week's stories of cyber-bullying in schools has renewed complaints that workplace bullying is not being adequately dealt with, writes Theresa Judge
Minister of State for Labour Affairs Tony Killeen has said further research on workplace bullying, which has not yet been commissioned, will have to be completed before he can make any recommendations to Government on an expert report unveiled last August.
Killeen was responding to criticisms that there has been a delay in implementing the recommendations of the expert advisory group which was established in 2004. Prior to this, a Government task force on the issue was established in 2000 which commissioned ESRI research on the prevalence of the problem.
Killeen says he believes further research is now needed because there is "a very strong case that there has been a substantial increase in the numbers being bullied". The expert group also recommended that further research be carried out.
While he had indicated at the report's launch in August last that "the timescale for publication of legislation would be a year", he believed then that new research would have been completed by now.
It had been delayed because an advertisement for tenders for the research project last autumn had failed to attract suitable responses and it was necessary to readvertise.
Killeen says he could not make recommendations to Government on the possibility of introducing legislation without having the latest data.
"If one was to rush through some kind of cosmetic legislation to be seen to be doing something and it didn't address the issue then it would be very likely to create more problems than it would resolve," he says.
A further problem is that there is no legislative model in any other EU state to follow, he says.
Employers body Ibec, which was represented on the expert advisory group, opposes two of its main recommendations and has since challenged claims by some researchers about the problem's extent and its cost to the economy.
A Health and Safety Authority psychologist, Patricia Murray, who was a member of the expert group, says it is "unfortunate" that there has been a delay in implementing the group's findings. She says it has been recognised that a gap exists in the State's response to the problem of workplace bullying as there is no outside independent body to hear such complaints.
The expert group recommended that the Labour Relations Commission be designated as the State agency to deal with bullying allegations for all employees and it also called for decisions in cases to be legally binding, a recommendation rejected by Ibec.
Dr Jean Lynch of Trinity College's anti-bullying centre says that while there has been a lot of talk about workplace bullying "in terms of action taken, the system has been very slow". She says she has seen very little change over seven years.
Lynch says that while studies have differed on the prevalence of workplace bullying, it is a "fairly consistent figure" that 6 per cent of people report being bullied within the previous six months. "When you consider the population, 6 per cent is an awful lot of people," she says.
Trade union Siptu believes a figure of 6-7 per cent is an underestimation. Siptu's Michael Hayes says: "It is exploited and exaggerated at one level, but similarly it is being suppressed and repressed at another level."
Lynch says she believes an outside independent body is needed to hear cases. "I think it has to be taken out of employers' hands. We need an outside, independent body to make a fair and honest judgment and then decisions have to be legally binding," she says.
The expert advisory group included representatives from a broad spectrum including business and industry. In presenting its findings, the group said the problem was growing, that existing measures were insufficient to tackle it and that: "The impact of bullying on the individual is so severe that strong action on the part of employers and the State is called for."
Killeen then opened a period of public consultation and gave the opportunity to both the trade unions and Ibec to make submissions even though they had both been represented on the expert advisory group.
Another of the expert group's key recommendations was that employers would be required to include anti-bullying policies in safety statements. This would open the way for the Health and Safety Authority to prosecute employers for failing to have anti-bullying strategies in place. Ibec opposes this.
Ibec's director of industrial relations and human resources, Brendan McGinty, says that Ibec had made "a clear and unambiguous" statement that workplace bullying was unacceptable. However, in Ibec's view, the increase in the number of complaints might be due to "the increasing inability of some people to accept the right of others to disagree with them or to accept the right of managers to manage performance, discipline or work assignment".
McGinty says Ibec has no difficulty with the Labour Relations Commission being given the task of dealing with allegations but decisions on cases should not be legally binding.
"We should rely on existing codes of practice and on the status of the Labour Court findings under the Industrial Relations Act," he says. Labour Court findings "were accepted in the vast majority of cases", he says.
Ibec does not support the expert group recommendation to make it a legal requirement for an anti-bullying policy to be part of an employers' safety statement as this would "add to the already costly regulatory burden" on businesses, particularly small to medium-sized ones.
McGinty says there is a need for "independent, comprehensive and accurate information" and he disputes findings that most bullying is perpetrated by managers. He says the ESRI survey has shown that people are as likely to be bullied by a colleague as a manager.
Lynch says there is a need to include anti-bullying policies in safety statements as this would "take the onus off the individual, who is usually worn out and exhausted by the bullying, to take action, and it would allow outside bodies to ensure the correct procedures are in place".
Patricia Murray of the Health and Safety Authority says that while she believes adjudication decisions have to be legally binding, "a crude and totally legalistic approach is not a panacea" and she has sympathy for employers as it is a very complex problem. She encourages early mediation and surveillance to try to resolve the problem "before people get frozen into their beliefs about each other".