Workplace abuse and mobbing is a severe and pervasive phenomenon in the U.S. involving a violation of the basic human right to dignity. Bullying tactics include false accusations, exclusion, withholding necessary resources, sabotage, verbal abuse, put-downs, and unreasonable demands — resulting in a host of stress-related symptoms including anxiety, depression, PTSD, suicide ideation and suicide itself.

Simply put, workplace abuse and mobbing ruin lives and kill people. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in September 2015 revealed that bullied targets are "twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts than those who were never bullied" — and it can happen to any one of us. Hope is abandoned over time when bullies are not deterred. Abandonment by coworkers who don't want to lose their job or become the next target can lead to loneliness and despair. The natural human stress response is provoked to the breaking point. It is inhumane.

Here's who workplace abuse and mobbing impact:

Anywhere from 30-90% of US workers are either targets or bystanders. Targets suffer significant mental, emotional, and physical health harm. There's also a ripple effect on witnesses and families. There's more: targets of workplace bullying are often women, Black workers, Latinx workers, workers over 40, the LBGTQ community and workers with disabilities. When discrimination law moved from a focus on impact to intent in the 1980s, the law became much less effective in dismantling the social hierarchies at work that keep white men in the vast majority of power positions in the US workforce, according to University of Chicago researchers in a 2017 study. Right now, we simply don't have adequate protections from bias that manifests itself in abuse of power that prevents women, Black workers, Hispanic workers, workers over 40, workers in the LBGTQ community, and workers with disabilities from getting ahead. This bill would give more protections to all workers, especially those who suffer from legal discrimination (the kind they can't prove).
Organizations. Workplace bullying costs employers billions of dollars annually in lower productivity and morale, increased absenteeism and turnover, training costs, and higher employee benefits costs. Higher-ups, cashing exorbitantly large paychecks are ill-advised legally (typically by one of the highest paid employees) to ignore complaints of psychological abuse and then proliferate the abusive behavior, through willful blindness and deafness to push the targeted employees out of their jobs, nose blind to the stench of human carnage. One study shows that “companies who focus on effective internal functioning and communication enjoy a 57 percent higher total return, are more than 4.5 times more likely to have highly engaged employees and are 20 percent more likely to report reduced turnover when compared to competitors who demonstrate ineffective communication practices” (Civility Partners LLC, 2009).
Society. When employers ignore employee well-being internally and push targets out, they externalize health care and basic needs costs onto taxpayers. Unemployed targeted employees are also left uninsured at a time of grave injury. Their health has deteriorated to a point where treatment expenses are far greater than intervention would have been. This bill would incentivize employers to address employee well-being and stop the extrapolation of costs to the US taxpayer. Research shows there's ZERO evidence to support targeted employees brought on the abuse. In fact, evidence shows the opposite. Targeted employees are high performing, highly ethical employees whose competence poses a threat to their low performing, low ethical co-workers or bosses. Research shows that the bully's motivation is an ego-driven control move that's about abuse of power and hiding their own inadequacies.
Prevention is both less expensive and more effective than remediation. Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer says US employers causing workplace stress may be responsible for "120,000 excess deaths per year," which would make workplaces "the fifth leading cause of death," and account for about "$180 billion in additional healthcare costs." About "half of the deaths and 1/3 of the excess costs could be prevented," meaning they resulted from not tending to well-being.

We have environmental regulations to limit environmental risks. We don’t leave environmental pollution to the discretion of CEOs. So why do we leave psychological safety up to CEOs — when CEOs have a long history of leading in ways that serve neither their employees nor the public but rather the entity's self-interest.

How the WPSA will solve the problem
The WPSA will protect an employee's basic human rights including an inherent human right to dignity at work by prohibiting all forms of psychological abuse in the U.S. workplace. It provides a comprehensive understanding of both workplace bullying and workplace mobbing.

WPSA is rooted in these principles:

Workplace abuse isn’t covered by existing law. Harassment isn’t illegal unless targets are members of a protected class (sex, race, age, etc.) under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and can prove the abuse is from their protected class membership. Employers know there’s a loophole in the law and exploit it willfully to employee detriment. The bill will fill that gap in the law. WPSA will provide targets a clear avenue to be made whole and to continue their careers.
Employers often don’t enforce their own policies and retaliate against those who report bullying. Because employers aren’t required to follow their own policies, a law requiring employers to create anti-bullying policies and training doesn’t protect targets. Tennessee passed a bill incentivizing workplace bullying policies, and California passed a training-only bill. Neither have proven effective. WPSA does not give employers immunity simply for having a policy. Instead, WPSA creates an incentive for employers to acknowledge, prevent, monitor, dissuade and adequately address psychological abuse in the work environment.
Employers need incentive to change. An effective bill must require employers to adopt all necessary steps to eliminate workplace bullying and organizational mobbing. Failure to do so must expose employers to meaningful penalties. Established defenses have not been effective. An effective anti-bullying bill must avoid adopting immunity defenses.
We can’t prove intent. We’ve learned from US and international jurisprudence that it’s often impossible for targeted and victimized employees to prove the bully’s intent or the employer's willful negligence. WPSA does not require targeted and victimized employees of bullying and/or mobbing to prove intent.
As the EEOC has recently reiterated, we want to stop harassing behaviors as soon as possible. An effective bill must establish a standard of harm that mirrors the EEO laws that the toxic work environment or the psychological abuse itself is enough of a harm to have a cognizable claim. WPSA recognizes the hostile environment created by bullying is also a harm that should have a legal remedy.
Legal action must be affordable to everyone. The majority of US workers are unable to afford access to the pay-to-play legal system. An effective bill must account for this lack of access. Governmental agencies with enforcement and oversight are necessary. WPSA would assure targets several paths to remedies including access to a state and agency with enforcement power and private litigation should they choose that route.
U.S. workers deserve safe work environments free of all forms of abuse - including psychological abuse.