His job became hell. And it was not 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 it) that takes serious psychological and physical tolls on those who fall into that well.
These are their stories told at the Fontelles law firm (Barcelona), specialized 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 job opportunity that this woman started on the wrong foot. Harassment at work, and also sexual, surfaced in this case already in the selection phase. The choice of the candidates was a task that the vice president of the company reserved for himself. Something smelled, therefore, very bad from the beginning, since it is not logical that such a high position of a firm performs that 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. He was mainly looking for slender and beautiful women. In addition, he ordered that the hair color of each candidate had to be in accordance with the features of the country. The Spanish: brunette; the Swedish or the Finnish: blonde. But in this story there is much more fabric to cut. The vice president traveled to each country (another unusual job assignment) to personally interview the selected candidates. Those interviews used to be done in a hotel. And the vice president scheduled various meetings. Pilar immediately realized that the "manners" of this director crossed all limits. She took advantage of the meetings to harass and abuse (with touching) the candidates. Some, Pilar recalls, endured these abuses, while others left their jobs.
Pilar decided, however, that this harassment had to be stopped at the root. So she told her 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. She continued to attend 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 its vice president.
The company, very afraid that this scandal on a European scale would become public, kept Pilar in her post for two years, until one day, without just cause, it fired her. The woman has now taken her case to court.
Antoni found a good job in the banking sector. He was happy, animated and eager to work. But that optimism was short-lived. It was a mirage. Antonio was fired after an internal inspection sponsored by his own 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 at this job and the harassment suffered by his own 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 maintains, of a very well orchestrated and premeditated plan. In banking procedures you have to comply with a series of protocols (mostly bureaucratic steps) that often are not processed. This is how Álex Fontelles, the lawyer handling the matter, tells it. He has been able to verify this in the investigation carried out to defend the case.
And it was Antoni's own colleagues who told him that it was not necessary to carry out all the procedures that the protocols establish. And they pointed out the ones that could be skipped. "If you do everything to the letter, you will not sell anything," they told him. Antoni relied on that advice without being aware that he was falling into a trap. It was the rest of the staff, says Fontelles, who encouraged the management to open an internal investigation into the application of 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 forms and variants in the catalog of workplace bullying. One of the techniques, the one that tends to leave the most anxiety and psychological sequelae, is that of ignoring or indifference. It is deployed when you keep someone in an office without giving them work and ignoring that person, as if they were not there. This is what happened to Maria. This woman had the position of bank branch manager. A good job that she, she affirms, she did professionally and she liked it. From one day to the next, her company restructured its offices, and María went from being a bank manager to a telephone operator. Other directors suffered the same fate.
It was a hard blow, despite the fact that the entity maintained the salary (around 50,000 euros) for those positions previously with high responsibility for a job with a much lower salary. It is a formula widely used by companies. A silent harassment that seeks to undermine the morale of those neglected workers. María says that many of her colleagues could not stand this situation and accepted the "ridiculous" compensation proposed by the company for the dismissal. María endured, threatening to take the case to court, and her insistence earned her just compensation.
Manel's case points to another labor harassment of the book: that of overexploitation until the worker is burned. He is a computer scientist, and his dedication was key in the progress of a family business. Now in that firm there are more computer scientists, but he "continued to eat all the browns," says his lawyer, Álex Fontelles. He had to be operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. His colleagues – who were the ones who established this hellish shift of guards – cared very little if Manel suffered from anxiety or was stressed by so much work. And one day he exploded when he did not find support from his bosses either, who told him that the shifts should be divided among all the computer scientists. He has filed a complaint in court.
