by Chris – Unemployment-Tips.com
(Colorado)
Sexual harassment is one example of illegal workplace discrimination that any thinking rational person should never tolerate in silence.
If you can live with your own silence then .. I guess there’s no problem .. right?
But being silent is to tolerate illegal discrimination whether it is us who remain silent about harassment directed at us, or we uncomfortably witness it happening to someone else is allowing it to spread, regardless of why we fear speaking up.
Bullying a person is an ugly human behavior, but when it rises to being illegal, it is because it touches those who are a member of protected class via the Civil Rights Act, or additional laws to more clearly specify a type of harassment.
Illegal bullying and harassment are no longer contained to what happens only inside the workplace. It’s out of our control online, but this also means it’s getting out of control of a business, or manager that use to rely on strategies from lawyers that have allowed a certain level of blindness to employee complaints.
Those HR strategies have provided a degree of plausible deniability for an employer when you make complaints after becoming unemployed .. and in case you end up feeling forced into quitting, with no proof of good cause, and fired for something trumped up, with no documented rebuttal argument on a write-up, or attached to a termination notice and placed within your personnel file .. per how personnel file laws say employers must comply.
Bullying, harassment, and all the other ugliness that result from bad behavior at work, including retaliation for simply complaining about something that is wrong, may now include what happened to you online by co-workers not at work.
A workplace bully can be a cyber-bully when you, or the bully are not at work.
This case really should give HR professionals pause because of those digital trails created online do take some control over what potential documentation is created for the benefit of HR compliance professionals and lawyers dealing with complainers.
Hell, people are fired for posting on the FB wall, something a company thinks has the potential for damaging their brand .. why wouldn’t an employer be held accountable for turning a blind eye to cyberbullies, bullying a co-worker.
The article driving me to this, another minor rant for the sake of measly unemployment benefits, drove the point above home.
This brand of workplace harassment operates outside the world of those surveys, workshops and seminars that company lawyers make everyone take, which do nothing to reduce sexism, but only exist to thwart lawsuits in case a caveman boss demands sex for a promotion.
Ignore your employee rights at your own risk .. because that’s what literally makes a person a doormat for a bully who needs to be stopped. And if you let it happen to someone else because you .. tell me about it when you too are denied unemployment benefits .. because you couldn’t prove the truth to be the credible facts about your job separation.
Source:Was a Va. firefighter humiliated by co-workers online before she killed herself?