Strengthening the Healthy Workplace Act—Lessons from Title VII and IIED Litigation and Stories of Targets' Experiences

Jerry Carbo

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DOI: 10.2190/WR.14.1.f

Abstract

Workplace bullying is a severe and pervasive problem in the United States. Bullying in the workplace is destructive to organizations and more importantly strips targets of their most basic human rights. Little has been done to address this problem in the United States. Current legislative, common-law, and administrative remedies in the United States do little to address the problem. Yamada has introduced the Healthy Workplace Bill as a proposed solution to this problem, and 13 states have at least brought this bill to the stage of a legislative proposal. However, the bill as currently written suffers from many of the same problems as the current harassment laws and intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED) laws in the United States. This bill sets too high a standard in terms of the bully's conduct, the harm to the target, and the reporting requirement placed on the target. Further, the requirement of showing malice and the focus on repetitive acts will leave many targets of workplace bullying with no legal recourse. In order to fully address the problem of workplace bullying, I propose a law developed around the experiences of targets of workplace bullying.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.