Bullying and harassment



Employers have a duty to provide a safe and healthy working environment. This includes protection from bullying and harassment.


However, a 2015 poll carried out by YouGov for the TUC revealed that:



• nearly a third of people (29%) are bullied at work;



• women (34%) are more likely to be victims of bullying than men (23%);



• the highest prevalence of workplace bullying is among 40 to 59-year-olds, where 34% of adults are affected;



• in nearly three-quarters (72%) of cases, the bullying is carried out by a manager; and



• more than one in three (36%) people leave their job as a result of bullying.



The survey also showed that nearly half (46%) of people said that bullying has an adverse impact on their performance at work, and the same amount believed it has a negative effect on their mental health. More than a quarter (28%) said it has a detrimental effect on them physically, and around one in five (22%) had to take time off work as a result of being bullied. 



The TUC survey followed a survey by law firm Slater and Gordon. It commissioned a survey of 2,000 workers in August 2015 and found that almost six in 10 workers have either experienced or witnessed bullying at work. Of those questioned, 37% reported having been bullied themselves and a further 21% had witnessed colleagues being subjected to abuse. The bullying reported included intimidation, being humiliated in front of colleagues and being excluded from social events. Almost a quarter said they were shouted at, and one in 20 had had things thrown at them.


Two-thirds of those who had experienced bullying reported that a colleague had been subjected to a sustained period of harassment. But while 37% of those questioned had been bullied themselves and a further 21% had witnessed colleagues being subjected to abuse, less than half (48%) did anything about it. A quarter thought that bullying was just part of their workplace culture, 20% feared becoming the target of the bully themselves, and one in 10 feared losing their job if they complained. One in six of those who had witnessed colleagues being bullied reported that a co-worker had been subjected to inappropriate sexual remarks, while one in 10 had heard racist insults.


Meanwhile, in August 2016, a TUC report revealed that nearly two in three young women have experienced sexual harassment at work. Still just a bit of banter?, carried out for the TUC by the Everyday Sexism Project, is the largest of its kind for a generation. It found that more than half (52%) of women said they had been sexually harassed at work, with nearly one in three (32%) of women subjected to unwelcome jokes of a sexual nature while at work and more than one in four (28%) being the subject of comments of a sexual nature about their body or clothes at work. Shockingly, nearly a quarter (23%) of women have experienced unwanted touching and a fifth (20%) of women have experienced unwanted verbal sexual advances at work. In the vast majority of cases, the perpetrator was a male colleague. Nearly one in five respondents reported that their direct manager or someone else with direct authority over them was the perpetrator.


Around four in five women who said they experienced sexual harassment at work did not tell their employer about what was happening, in some cases because they thought it would impact negatively on their relationships at work. Some said they were too embarrassed to talk about it while others did not think they would be taken seriously. 



The TUC has published online guidance Bullying at Work – guidance for safety representatives which is available on the TUC website.


Information on how unions have tackled bullying and harassment can be found in the Labour Research Department booklet, Bullying and harassment at work — a guide for trade unionists.