The Post spoke to a number of people who claimed they were victims of workplace bullying. Were they? You be the judge.
For “Janie” (not her real name), the abuse started when the assistant to a corporate muckety-muck at her old financial management firm in Manhattan decided that she “was a slut, a troublemaker,” she says. False rumors that she was sleeping with colleagues spread, and though the bully considered her “insubordinate,” she was given almost three times the workload of her peers. She was also falsely accused of abusing expense accounts, she says.
“It just seemed that they were targeting me and targeting me,” Janie says. “At that point, your confidence level is so low that you start believing everything they say. I just wanted to go to work and get paid.”
She says the company was unresponsive to her complaints, and that co-workers sided with the bully so they wouldn’t become targets themselves.
“I still have, like, an after-effect,” she says. “I’m not the same person that I was.”
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“Lou,” a Brooklyn resident who worked for the state, says he spent four miserable years under one abuser. The woman would badmouth him to other managers, calling him a “poor producer,” and once pulled his arm and tried to push him before an important meeting. She also tried to have him escorted out of the building when he left for a new job.
But it was the lollipops that got to Lou. The boss would hand them out as a reward for good work, though it seemed to Lou that it was only poor performers who got suckers.
“It was a way to show how little we were valued,” he says. “It really reminded people that they were little children at a doctor’s office who were told to behave themselves.”
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“Claire” clashed with her boss at an upstate IT firm almost immediately. He was two-faced, she says, telling her in private that her ideas were great before bad-mouthing her when she wasn’t around. “He kept trying to undermine me.”
The boss eavesdropped on her conversations, picking sentences out of context and misrepresenting them to others. He’d lose his temper in public to embarrass her. He even criticized her taste in perfume, says Claire, adding that the bullying took a toll on her marriage.
She tried to maintain a positive attitude, but to no avail: The company let her go, in spite of giving her a positive review a month earlier.
“I couldn’t control the situation,” she says. “I could have gone in with the best team player attitude I could have and it still wouldn’t have been good enough.”