Mobbing

The Law on Prevention of Abuse at Work defines abuse as any active or passive employer behavior towards an employee or group of employees which is reoccurring, the effect of which is the violation of the dignity, reputation, personal and professional integrity, health, position of the employee and provokes fear or creates a hostile, humiliating or offensive environment, aggravates the working conditions or leads to the isolation of employee or pressures them into terminating their employment on their own as well as cancel a contract of employment or any other contract.

The most common type of employee abuse is the so-called “mobbing activity”, which involves active behavior on the part of the abusers – the “mobber”, directed at the abused person: gossiping and ridicule, spreading gossip, defamation, and insults, unsubstantiated work criticism or ungrounded poor performance appraisal as well as excessive work control, hiding important information from the victim, and suddenly interrupting conversations when he/she enters the room, ignoring the victim, etc.

In addition to the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are often specific types of mobbing, such as:

“Empty table mobbing”, which basically means leaving the abused person without any work tasks for a long period of time;
”Cinderella mobbing”, which involves giving completely meaningless work assignments or assigning work tasks that are absolutely below the professional level of the abused person or overloading the abused person with work tasks.

In order to adequately protect against abuse at the workplace, it is important to identify the very beginning of abuse, the so-called “key event” phase, which, as the name itself implies, is an event that can be characterized as key to starting and directing abuse activities towards an employed person. In practice, abuse is much more likely to occur as spontaneous abuse of an employed person or a strategic abuse of an employed person, which would imply the existence of a prior agreement between the abusers in choosing the victim as well as the activities used to abuse them.

For an employee who believes that he/she is a victim of abuse the most important thing is to take the appropriate measures of protection:

• Addressing a person identified as the alleged abuser, with a clear warning that such behavior is unacceptable with the explicit request to terminate it;
• Addressing your superiors in order to point out the problematic behavior of the abuser;
• Collecting and keeping written traces of behavior that can be characterized as workplace abuse (sending notifications and written and otherwise to superiors, keeping e-mails, messages, and requests, etc.);
• turning to legal services (lawyers, trade union, S.O.S. centers);
• In order to protect your health and preserve you psycho-physical balance, highly recommended to contact competent medical services and counseling centers.

The issue of preventing abuse at work is certainly of great importance for employers and they have a legal obligation to deal with it. In practice, often employers do not react when cases of work abuse come up, which later leads to legal proceedings, or their reaction is inadequate and/or untimely. In rare cases, employers act preventively through continuous education of both employees and managerial personnel through the organization of seminars, lectures and practical training on the topic of recognizing and preventing work abuse.

In the end, a message to all employees – do not allow yourself to be a victim of abuse. Neither a permanent job nor a steady salary or any other benefits at work stands as adequate compensation for the consequences that ill-treatment can leave on the health, life, and family of the abused person.