£800,000 for this?

One of the biggest British news stories of the past week, apart from the carnage in Lebanon that is, was the payout of £800,000 ($1.52 million) to a woman who had been the victim of bullying at the London offices of Deutsche Bank. The bullying, carried out by four female colleagues in what was described as a “department from hell”, amounted to a “relentless campaign of mean and spiteful behaviour designed to cause her distress” according to the judge, consisting of the colleagues telling her she smelled, blowing raspberries at her, laughing in her face and ignoring her. The four women also victimised seven other female colleagues.

The Indie has an interview with the woman who brought the case; today’s Sunday Telegraph discusses why she was able to bring the case and why the payout was so huge, and what it means for business. Most of the payout covers future loss of earnings, since Green will never be able to work in the industry again. As the article points out, bullying is institutionalised in parts of the City (that is, the London banking industry), and this case sends a clear signal that it can’t stand unpunished for much longer:

“It’s very significant and the shock waves it will send out will be huge,” says Gillian Howard, an employment lawyer with Howard and Howard. “The City should be very, very fearful. Bullying is institutionalised – even condoned – within the City. We’ve had banks insisting tellers sit with a cabbage, a cauliflower or even a stuffed donkey on their desk when they fail to meet targets.

“That won’t be happening again. Now the courts have recognised that the employer has to be liable for wholly inappropriate acts by their staff. And if that effect is that those on the receiving end of the bullying find they won’t get another job after taking a case, then the employers must compensate them for that.

(Of course, the fact that an employer can sabotage someone’s career by giving them a dud reference is not up for discussion here. The reference system we have here is iniquitous, with a former employer being able to dish the dirt with the employee having no means of answering, as anyone in receipt of the reference is forbidden from showing him. This has happened to me personally.)

While I’m glad that bullying is being taken seriously, it’s depressing that the biggest payout in British legal history has gone to a victim of workplace bullying. When the harrassment takes place in an environment like a school (to say nothing of prisons and the armed forces), where victims cannot simply leave, financial compensation is very rare indeed despite the far greater potential for harm. A case that was settled out of court this February, for example, resulted in a payout of just £20,000 (£38,000) to a woman who said her life had been ruined by bullying. No doubt there are those who would say that this woman should pull herself together and all that, but in my experience school bullying causes enormous damage.

While I’m sure the treatment Helen Green received would cause anyone a lot of distress if it went on that long, it’s not recorded that she was beaten up on dubious pretexts time after time or pushed down a toilet head first; at the end of the day she went home, and I presume she was not attacked by her colleagues in the street, sent obscene text messages out of hours, or made to sleep in a dormitory with them. The payout demonstrates that, after murder, the worst thing in the eyes of the law is to stand between the wealthy and their wealth: someone whose life is made a misery by malicious bullies while authority looks the other way gets less than a woman denied the chance to be a wealthy banker, being forced instead into a career in the “impoverished” world of academia.