"Should I Stay or Should I Go?": Aggression in the Workplace

The Case of Eric Donovan

The following submission is from guest writer Richard Schwindt. Richard is a social worker in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of Emotional Recovery from Workplace Mobbing and Counselling People Targeted by Workplace Mobbing: A Guide for Clinicians.

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Eric Donovan could be a prankster, so when Lisa, his wife, found him collapsed in their home on Halloween, 2013, she wondered for a split second if he was pulling one over on her. Lisa and the paramedics performed CPR for over an hour, finally getting his heart beating again. 

Eleven days later, the agonizing decision was made to remove him from life support. She had remained by his side, slept beside and talked to him, but he never regained consciousness.

He had only just returned to work after a month-long leave following an attack by a developmentally handicapped client that had resulted in a serious back injury. 

But even on leave, he fielded near daily calls from the office, and when he finally returned on an “ease in” schedule, immediate efforts were made by management to override attempts to moderate his workload to make it more manageable.

Eric was a conscientious man. He coached his son’s ball and hockey teams. When his daughter was diagnosed with a non-verbal learning disability, Eric joined the Learning Disabilities Association of Prince Edward Island. He later became the organization’s president. 

These qualities made him an exemplary father, husband, and employee. But while loved by his family and colleagues, Eric’s employer saw his commitment to the organization's mission as an opportunity to run him into the ground. 

In the year before Eric went on leave, returned, and then died, he was forced to step back from many activities. According to Lisa, he was stressed, and his work schedule was changing all the time, so committing to doing what he loved became too difficult. 

When I asked her if his employer preyed on his sense of responsibility, she answered with an emphatic “yes!” His main defense against stress, she told me, involved stuffing down his emotions and carrying on with his responsibilities. But before his death, these defenses had faltered. He wondered aloud how he would carry on.

Lisa reproaches herself for not pushing him harder to address the issues at work. When she did, he fell back on saying he had to do his job, for his family, and for the clients. 

I told her that makes him like most victims of workplace aggression. In my office, “Should I stay or should I go?” comes up in almost every session. Knowing the grim determination with which targeted individuals hold on to abusive jobs, no matter how dire the stress, I often align with the spouse who wants their husband, wife, or parent of their children to remain alive. I tell them that disconnecting from people who are trying to destroy them and reconnecting with those who love them can help them to escape the killing stress. 

Eric had a heart attack, and Lisa Donovan knows why - he was harassed to death. She went to extraordinary lengths to prove that fact, enlisting doctors, cardiologists, and other experts throughout Eastern Canada. 

How Workplace Aggression Manifests

If you decide to provide counselling services to targets of workplace aggression, you are opening yourself up to a world of cognitive dissonance, a place where nothing works the way it is supposed to, least of all “anti-harassment” policies. 

You are immediately struck by the gap between the desperate and occasionally unhinged individual presenting in your office, and their story. Workplace narratives can sound banal, challenging the listener to discern between normal everyday frustrations and a pattern of behavior targeting an individual. 

You hear about your clients being “accidentally” left off the mailing list for meeting agendas, or how their memos keep getting deleted. It can sound like not much at all as they try to relate details of the slow and deliberate unraveling of a lifetime of commitment to a career by colleagues at work.

That said, if you catch these clients further on in the process, they will have graduated from the ordinary, to events and rumours that beggar credibility, to extraordinary examples of aggression by employers. For example, American anthropologist Dr. Janice Harper was accused of gathering materials to make an atomic bomb in the context of a campaign by the University of Tennessee to oust her. However absurd this accusation was, it did not stop US Homeland Security from appearing at her door and confiscating her hard drives.

At some point, many targets are going to be labeled as having “difficulty getting along with others” or being “mentally unwell.” With time, sufficient pressure, and covert abuse, these become self-fulfilling prophecies. 

To the extent that much of what takes place at work is hidden, clients will often slip into situational paranoia. This runs concurrently with daily affronts to their ability to reality-check their situation.

Another seemingly large contradiction in these cases is the nature of the aggressors, who are typically the embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s observations on “the banality of evil.” Could Natalie from HR and Joe from Accounts Payable really be inciting the work team to collectively destroy another human being?

The answer is yes. The truth of the matter is, a Human Resource department’s interests have little to nothing to do with protecting the employee and everything to do with protecting the interests and objectives of the company. They almost certainly engage in behaviours with a specific purpose and goal in mind, often ousting an individual from the organization in order to send a message to the rest of the workforce. 

We have all seen and recognized these kinds of inconsistencies in most other forms of abuse. Recognition of this reality does not come easily, but it does come once we pay attention to what victims tell us. It may be hard to believe that Father Jones sexually abused a child, or that Mr. Smith next door beat his wife, but it is not impossible once we know the dynamics of abuse. 

Two of the challenges particular to understanding the dynamics of workplace aggression center around understanding the notion of a collective attack, as opposed to one workplace bully, and another is understanding that, in terms of gender, workplace bullying is more equitable than other forms of abuse, often featuring women in starring roles. 

Janice Harper has articulately explained how group dynamics tell us more about how workplace aggression transpires, likening it to a “gentle” form of genocide.

Eric Donovan is far from the only person to be harassed to disability or death in ordinary work settings, well-lit meeting rooms, maybe with a box of donuts on the table, nursing stations, teacher prep rooms, and faculty lounges. 

What makes his story unique is the presence of a spouse who persisted in doing something about it. His is typically the kind of case – to quote his  union’s post-mortem response to Lisa – that “dies when he died.”

Workplace aggression creates all kinds of ills. Eric Donovan died, as noted by sociologist Kenneth Westhues, of a stress-related illness. But suicides are also common in extreme cases, as are the occasional homicide, usually labelled as “going postal.”

The tactics used in workplace aggression vary, and usually constitute the means most wounding to the individual targeted. With Eric Donovan, this involved excessive work demands, delivered at all hours. 

One way to understand Eric’s continued involvement in this environment is through the context of situational leadership, which takes place at the nexus of experience, motivation, and skill. An inexperienced worker may be highly motivated but need more experience and training. An experienced worker may be skilled but unmotivated and therefore need encouragement, or in more extreme cases, a reprimand. 

But what of workers who are experienced, trained, and motivated? In an abusive environment, they can be overloaded. Given excessive demands that impinge on work-life balance, the risk is not so much that they will fail to meet the demands, but rather that they are determined to try.

For another employee, the cruelest employer tactic may involve providing no work at all. For another, an organization might make demands that simply cannot be met, or destroy the foundations of worker well-being. 

People often note the prevalence of workplace aggression in the public sector, unionized environments, and organizations with strong job security. This seems, on the face of it, contradictory. These ought to be safe places, right?

Again, we must reach into our knowledge of groups to understand why this happens. On television, Donald Trump can say, “You’re fired!” and off the employee goes. This is not an option available in the public sector, where ousting someone is neither easy nor quick. And if this employee happens to be competent and outspoken, getting rid of them is even more difficult. You have to make them want to leave, or in extreme cases, make it impossible for them to remain in their job. 

What was the end game with Eric Donovan? Rudimentary common sense suggests you might want to lighten up on a grossly overworked man who only just returned from an assault-related injury. 

No matter how horrific the circumstances, these events are usually couched in bureaucratic language. One of the most publicized and egregious examples comes to us from the case of Telecom France. 

One article in HR Director Magazine reports: “France Télécom had faced tough market conditions and challenges when it was privatised in 2004, [and] many changes were needed.”

Okay, so what did they do? They began “a conscious strategy of bullying that was intended to ‘destabilise’ employees and help with cost-cutting.”

And the result? “Between 2008 and 2009, 35 employees of France Télécom committed suicide. One woman threw herself from a fifth-floor window in front of her colleagues. Many had left notes explaining that the ‘terror’ of bullying from management had made them feel they had no other choice.”

The case, once revealed, shocked the people of France and became international news. While several top executives were sentenced to a year of house arrest in 2019, the convictions have since been appealed. 

The Eric Donovan Act

The starting point in addressing issues associated with workplace aggression is simply declaring an obligation to address it in the workplace. That is exactly what the Eric Donovan Act (An Act to Amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act) achieves.

While a relatively short amendment, the crux of it is one unequivocal sentence: “An employer shall establish and implement as a policy, in accordance with the regulations, measures to prevent and investigate occurrences of harassment in the workplace.”

CBC journalist Sally Pitt reported in 2019, “A precedent-setting finding that linked workplace bullying to the death of a group home worker on P.E.I. has been rejected by the Workers' Compensation Act Tribunal (WCAT). The decision confirmed that Eric Donovan died from workplace stress, but concluded there wasn't enough evidence to prove his stress was due to bullying at work.”

Although disheartened by the finding, Eric’s wife, Lisa Donovan, vowed to carry on her advocacy, and she has. When the Eric Donovan Act was finalized in 2018, Sonny Gallant, PEI Minister of Workforce and Advanced Learning, gave her credit for bringing all the interested parties together. 

Lisa can be tough-minded. Advocacy aside, this is a woman who worked thirty-five years in child welfare. But when I spoke with her, I saw a down-to-earth islander, a grieving widow, and a loving mother and grandmother whose pain is never far from the surface.

She has recently become involved with Threads of Life - Association for Workplace Tragedy Family Support, a Canadian registered charity dedicated to supporting families after a workplace fatality, life-altering injury, or occupational disease. 

Her hope is to help build their presence on Prince Edward Island and support education on the existence and realities of workplace harassment. She is hoping to speak at a May 6th P.E.I. Roadrunners event in 2023. She didn’t pick the date, but it would have been Eric’s birthday.

This is where Lisa is headed now with her advocacy, and, based on her track record, I have little doubt she will achieve her goals. As she told me in an email: “When we know better, we should do better.” 

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Richard Schwindt is a social worker in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of Emotional Recovery from Workplace Mobbing and Counselling People Targeted by Workplace Mobbing: A Guide for Clinicians. He tweets from @rgschwindt