"Violence in the workplace begins long before fists fly, or lethal weapons extinguish lives. Where resentment and aggression routinely displace cooperation and communication, violence has occurred. Such violence surfaces as threats, intimidation, harassment, and sub-lethal assault..."

As suggested in the BullyBusting Strategies section of the book, The Bully At Work, everyone should first hold employers accountable for faithfully enforcing their own lofty, noble internal feel-good, "respect for all" policies. Short of breaking a law, conscientious employers, who care about credibility with employees, expect to be held responsible for violating internal policies. However, the reality is that policies designed to restrain negative behavior are typically aimed at non-supervisory employees. "Violence prevention" means stopping employees from being violent, while ignoring daily psychological violence perpetrated by supervisors and their enabling managers who refuse to apply policies to themselves.

Obviously, the Postal Service thinks anti-violence policies do NOT apply to their managers. Of all governmental and quasi-governmental agencies, the Postal Service, more than any other should be intolerant of abusive misconduct by anyone since they spent $4 million to produce the fall 2000 Califano report on the unsafe workplace at USPS focusing on the role of physical violence there. The erroneous conclusion of that myopic report was to raise the salaries of managers to attract a better class of managers, ostensibly to improve the 1/20 chance employees will experience physical violence rather than to tackle the unfettered exposure of employees to verbal abuse (as illustrated below) that affects 1 in 3 USPS employees!

Here is a real story about a federal arbitrator working in Wisconsin who stated the obvious about bullying in a Nov. 2000 ruling. Despite the Postal Service denials through all steps of a union grievance process, the courageous arbitrator punished the agency in a unique way that certainly provided the bullied letter carrier with a greater sense of justice achieved than most people who pursue legal remedies in court. (See Remedies below)

The ruling described below should give hope to all bullied individuals and unions who feel hopeless facing down bully managers armed with nothing more than agency policies. Bullying is part of the Anti-Violence Policy upon which this grievance was based and the term is used throughout the arbitration Decision and Award document, as part of the Arbitrator's own language.

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