Workshop takes on bullies

By John Quinlan, Sioux City Journal

The Devil may wear Prada in the workplace, but her bully minions elsewhere could be sporting Armani, Ralph Lauren, hard hats or hospital scrubs. Such is the state of workplace bullying, an insidious problem in America that Dr. Gary Namie calls a “silent epidemic.”

Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., and his wife Ruth Namie, co-author with him of “The Bully at Work,” will present an introductory workshop on “Workplace Bullying” on Oct. 9 at Western Iowa Tech Community College.

He sees it as a chance to raise public awareness of this issue and provide tools for human-resources people to deal with the problem, explaining the approach they should take in writing a workplace bullying policy. “The real trick is how to create a set of enforcement procedures. So it’s very pragmatic,” he said.

Namie has been working on this issue for about 10 years. It came to his attention through his wife’s own personal experiences with a bully and escalated from there to the institute they created.

Most of their early workplace bully work involved the health care field but it quickly spread to education and government. “And now it’s everywhere. It’s just rampant,” he said. “We get stories from domestic abuse shelters, for crying out loud. How can you be focused daily on abuse when you’re getting abused as a worker?”

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