Bad days at the office

TROUBLED RELATIONSHIPS: As if the recession alone weren’t bad enough: the financial crisis has led to more bullying in the workplace. According to research in Britain, numbers have doubled in the past ten years.

The conciliation service Acas estimates that one in ten workers has experienced workplace bullying. Another survey, by the union Unison , says that more than a third of workers have been bullied, twice as many as ten years ago. “The fact that bullying has doubled in the past decade is shocking,” Unison’s general secretary, Dave Prentis, told The Guardian.

Employment solicitor Fraser Younsen says that, as a result of the recession, some employers are becoming more aggressive. “In the last year or so, as running businesses has become more difficult, the way managers interface with their staff has become more demanding. Managers are chasing things up, becoming more critical,” says Younsen, who is head of employment for Berwin Leighton Paisner . “If they are not trained to deal with increased levels of stress, then we are seeing them do this in a way that makes staff feel bullied.”

"If managers aren't trained to deal with stress, staff can feel bullied," says Fraser Younsen.

Bullying often takes place behind the scenes, but some cases get widespread attention. In December, two yeomen working at the Tower of London were fired for bullying. The men had repeatedly harassed their colleague Moira Cameron, the Tower’s first female yeoman warder .

“We are getting a very high level of cases,” says Samantha Mangwana, an employment solicitor at the firm Russell Jones & Walker . “Most of the people who come to us with a problem at work talk about bullying. It frequently arises in people’s line manager relationship.”

Even organizations that help bullied workers are feeling the strain. “We have been overwhelmed by a huge rise in complaints over the last two years,” says Lyn Witheridge of the Andrea Adams Trust helpline. “We had to close the charity and the helpline because we couldn’t cope with the number of calls — they more than doubled to 70 a day.”