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Workplace psychological abuse frequently takes the form of false accusations, sabotage, and repeated verbal abuse. It can result in:

• Individual harm: mental and emotional harm (loss of self-worth, anxiety, depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and suicidal ideation), physical harm (cardiovascular disease, digestive problems, cancer, and other stress-related illnesses), financial harm when targets lose their jobs or careers, and social harm when targets feel isolated and trapped or their spouses, other family members, and friends don’t validate them or know how to help them. Targets also bring the depression home to their children, who lose parental support due to rumination.
• Organizational harm: billions of dollars annually in employer costs of lower productivity and morale, increased absenteeism and turnover, training costs, and higher employee benefits costs. To avoid liability, higher-ups most often ignore complaints or retaliate, including pushing targets out of their jobs. 
• Societal harm: externalized health care and basic needs costs onto taxpayers when employers ignore employee well-being internally and push targets out. Targets who leave unhealthy work environments are frequently uninsured. When they get sick, they turn to ERs for care, where delivering primary care is not cost efficient. By the time they get there, their health has already deteriorated to a point where treatment expenses are far greater than earlier intervention would have been. Workplace bullying and mobbing can also lead to physical violence (suicide and homicide).

Workplace bullying and mobbing are employee exploitation often rooted in asymmetry of power and implicit bias. Employers are not explicitly liable for the psychological harm of their employees — nor do they want to be. At its root cause is avoidance of employer liability. The status quo, employers are negatively incentivized to address the issue even if they claim to value safe workplaces. Employers choose to avoid a perceived threat of liability over human well-being.

There’s a pattern to abuse at work. Here’s how it works:

1. Workplace bullying typically begins when one employee, who is generally insecure and/or jealous, is threatened by the competence or demeanor of another employee. The bully targets an unsuspecting employee to minimize and/or eliminate the perceived threat the employee poses to them. Bullies use persistent psychological abuse to control the narrative. They try to convince the employee they are incompetent. They try to convince others the employee is incompetent.
2. In toxic work environments, when employees report psychologically abusive behavior to proper workplace authorities, those authorities ignore their complaints (mobbing). Employers are not liable for psychologically abusive behavior, nor do many want to be. The employer misleads the unsuspecting employee to believe they have a legitimate complaint process to remedy the problem.
3. The employer fails to alter the employee’s work environment. The employer doesn’t remove the stressor. The emboldened bully continues to abuse the target without consequence or deterrent. The complaint process is unnecessarily prolonged.
4. The unsuspecting employee voluntarily leaves, dies, or is fired, succumbing to the silent killer stress of the work environment. There is significant physical, mental, and emotional injury as well as severe economic harm. Game over. The bully wins. Her perceived competition is gone. The employer wins. Their perceived threat of liability is gone. The unsuspecting employee had done nothing to provoke either.
5. Trauma upon trauma. When the employee realizes the institutional duplicity and complicity of tampering with their health and livelihood, forcing them off the payroll to avoid liability, trauma upon trauma occurs. The employee further realizes there is no legal recourse for any of it.

Anti-discrimination law has been ineffective at protecting workers from mistreatment in the American workplace. Bullying and mobbing are forms of psychological abuse that make our work environments unsafe. Mistreatment at work has a discriminatory impact. According to the 2016 EEOC Select Task Force for the Study of Workplace Harassment Report, “During the course of fiscal year 2015, EEOC received approximately 28,000 charges alleging harassment from employees working for private employers or state and local government employers.” Their findings:

• “…anywhere from 25% to 85% of women report having experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.”
• “…70% of the respondents reported experiencing some form of verbal harassment and 45% reported experiencing exclusionary behaviors [in a survey regarding racial and ethnic harassment].”
• “35% of LGB-identified respondents who reported being ‘open’ at work reported having been harassed in the workplace.”
• “…20% of respondents with disabilities reported experiencing harassment or unfair treatment at work because of their disability.”
• “…8% of respondents reported having been exposed to unwelcome comments about their age.”
  (https://www.eeoc.gov/select-task-force-study-harassment-workplace)

Workers not in a protected class have even less protection in the American workplace when it comes to bullying and mobbing.

The Workplace Psychological Safety Act (WPSA) provides a cause of action for employees who suffer from workplace psychological abuse.

Just as our government steps in with abusive families, our government needs to take action with toxic employers.

1. It gives targeted employees legal recourse for employers creating a toxic work environment with a focus on specific, common behaviors that a reasonable person would deem toxic. Right now, it’s perfectly legal to be abusive at work in the U.S., even though it’s illegal in most of the industrialized world. Employers simply have way too much power. Targeted employees will be able to:

• File a restraining order against the employee who violates this Act depending on state law.
• Call for an internal investigation.
• Bypass a rigged internal process by calling for an investigation from the state human rights commission.
• Sue the employer and/or individual(s) in violation of this Act directly for economic, compensatory, and/or punitive damages and attorney’s fees. Employees can also sue criminally and choose to anonymously publicly disclose the case outcome, removing employers’ ability to silence them with non-disclosure agreements.

2. It requires employers to acknowledge, monitor, detect, prevent, discourage, and adequately address incidences of psychological abuse. Employers will no longer be allowed to sweep abuse at work under the rug and pretend they’re following protocol while ignoring abuse or retaliating to avoid liability. They’ll be required to:

• Adopt and implement policies and training
• Conduct an annual anonymous workplace climate survey to monitor the prevalence of abuse in their workplaces

We offer advocates:

• Training and financial support for introducing the Workplace Psychological Safety Act in their state.
• Strategy, base-building, marketing, volunteer management, fundraising, expert and high-profile advocates recruitment, and coalition-building on the national level.
• Monthly expert speakers to address obstacles with navigating and healing from workplace abuse.
• Tools to collect email addresses and build state teams.
• Connection through quarterly progress reports.