His workplace became hell. And it wasn’t overnight. Pilar, Antoni, Maria and Manel are victims of this workplace harassment, the cruelest, sustained over time. A “disease” on the rise (30% of workers in Spain are at risk of suffering from it) that takes a serious psychological and physical toll on those who fall into this pit.
These are their stories told at the Fontelles (Barcelona) law firm, which specializes in labor law.
Pilar, a resident of Barcelona, ??was selected to work as a sales director in Spain for a foreign pharmaceutical multinational. A good job and a great career opportunity that got off to a bad start. The harassment at work, and also sexual, surfaced in this case already in the selection phase. The choice of female candidates was a task reserved for him as the vice president of the company. The whole thing stank from the beginning, since it is not logical for such a high position in a firm to exercise this function.
That vice president was concerned, before interviewing the candidates, that each director of the European subsidiaries made a first selection based on physical aspects. I was mainly looking for slender and beautiful women. In addition, he ordered that the hair color of each candidate had to be in line with the features of the country: the Spanish, brunette; Swedish or Finnish, blonde. But in this story there is much more cloth to cut. The vice president traveled to each country (another unusual job assignment) to personally interview the selected female candidates. Those interviews used to take place in a hotel. And the vice president scheduled several meetings. Pilar immediately realized that the manners of that manager exceeded all limits. He took advantage of the meetings to harass the candidates and abuse them (with touching). Some, Pilar recalls, endured the abuse, while others left their jobs.
Pilar decided, however, that this harassment had to be cut short. So he explained it to his boss in Spain. That superior of Pilar communicated the situation to a senior position in the pharmaceutical company. The answer? He was fired. Pilar did not give up. He continued to go to meetings with that vice president every time he came to Spain with a hidden tape recorder. Those audios were the ultimate proof. The multinational, now yes, fired the vice president.
The company, very afraid that this scandal on a European scale would become public, kept Pilar in her place for two years, until one day, without just cause, they fired her. The woman has now taken her case to court.
Antoni found a good job in the banking sector. He was happy, excited and eager to work. But that optimism was short-lived. It was a mirage. Antoni was fired after an internal inspection favored by his colleagues. It seems they didn’t want a person like him on the team. Because? Antoni is convinced that everything that has happened to him in this job and the harassment suffered by his colleagues is because he is gay.
As usually happens in these cases of workplace harassment, Antoni’s dismissal was not overnight. He was the victim, this man claims, of a very well-orchestrated and premeditated plan. In banking procedures, a series of protocols must be followed (mostly bureaucratic steps) that many times do not go through. This is explained by Álex Fontelles, the lawyer handling the case. He has been able to verify this in the research he has done to defend him.
And it was Antoni’s own colleagues who told him that it was not necessary to go through all the formalities set out in the protocols. And they pointed out the ones he could skip. “If you do everything to the letter, you won’t sell anything”, they told him. Antoni trusted that advice without being aware that he was falling into a trap. It was the rest of the staff, says Fontelles, who encouraged management to open an internal investigation into the application of the protocols. The result was sung. Antoni did not pass that test – it remains to be seen whether or not there was collusion between the management of that bank and the rest of the workers – and the homosexual employee was fired. Antoni has taken his case to court.
There are many ways and variants in the catalog of workplace harassment. One of the techniques, the one that usually leaves the most anxiety and psychological sequelae, is that of disregard or indifference. It unfolds when you keep someone in an office without giving them work and ignoring them as if they weren’t there. This is what happened to Maria. This woman held the position of bank office manager. A good job that, he says, he did professionally and he liked. From one day to the next, her company restructured its headquarters and Maria went from being a bank manager to a teleoperator. The same thing happened to other directors.
It was a hard blow, despite the fact that the organization kept the salary (around 50,000 euros) for the positions that previously had a high responsibility for a job with a much lower salary. It’s a formula that some companies use a lot. A silent harassment that seeks to undermine the morale of the belittled workers. Maria explains that many of her colleagues could not stand that situation and accepted the “ridiculous” compensation proposed by the company for the dismissal. Maria persevered, threatening to take the case to court, and her insistence helped her collect fair compensation.
Manel’s case points to another form of workplace harassment: that of over-exploitation to the point of burning the worker. He is an IT specialist and his dedication was key to the progress of a family business. Now there are more computer scientists in that firm, but he “continued to pay for the broken plates”, says his lawyer, Álex Fontelles. It had to be operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. His colleagues – who were the ones who set up this infernal guard shift – did not care if Manel suffered from anxiety or was stressed by so much work. And one day he exploded, since he also couldn’t find the support of his bosses, who told him that the shifts had to be distributed among all the IT staff. He reported it to the court.
