“Wealth is born and forged in the hands of workers. There is still no machine that can replace your creative strength. But they don't know it. "
In our Latin American reality, the worker faces serious difficulties in a situation of Moral Harassment. It is interesting to make a brief annotation of the nature of these and the most characteristic ways in which it is expressed.
As an example we point out the following, to which you may add the ones you deem appropriate:
1. Ignorance of the subject
It is anecdotal that, as my own experience shows, in the cases known to the undersigned, the workers have warned of harassment, discrimination, and systematic attacks of moral harassment, when they are at a higher level, that is, when the picture of personal health has been absolutely disturbed and the depression, anguish, in general, the neurosis at work, has manifested itself at a dramatic level. At this stage it has been the psychiatrist or psychologist who have warned about the consequences of moral harassment on the patient's health.
In other words, the worker has resisted aggression and workplace violence to the point of being physically and psychically examined. This should not surprise those who know the forms and effects of moral harassment, because it has also been called silent homicide or perfect murder, for reasons that in this brief comment we are not going to repeat, but rather emphasize that psychoterror As it is called, it is a permanent and continuous aggression that causes the destruction of the worker's dignity, attacking his psyche and causing real damage to his body.
2. Collective ignorance of the subject
Many cases of moral harassment are carried out by the harassing psychopath in such a way that it goes unnoticed by the majority of the group or group of workers who constitute the environment of the victim. It is redundant to explain that this circumstance causes more pain and despair in the harassed worker, because he cannot find a way to talk, communicate or report his problem even to his closest friends, who ignore or ignore the sinister and hypocritical practices of the harasser. In this regard, it has been observed that even the harassed's own coworkers do not believe him when he tries without any success to describe the harassment to which he is permanently subjected. The stalker has known how to act and disguises his performances in front of the other members of the group. This characteristic in the form of bullying,It is what makes it malicious and Machiavellian, according to Dr. Puerto Rican Wanda Soto, moral harassment and what allows me to maintain that it is a crime that involves the circumstance of repetition and cruelty in the victim.
3. The disoriented victim syndrome
The victim of harassment in his daily confrontation with the actions of the harasser ends up completely disoriented regarding the origin of his ills. We refer to the internal pain, the psychological decompensation that moves you to go to your workplace even when seized with psychological terror, you know that you will suffer abuse, ridicule, contempt, insults and other forms of harassment clearly defined by the specialists on the subject.. Any observer without knowledge of what it is, even the coworkers themselves wonder what is the reason for this person's work behavior? The one that appears with some degree of labor autism, without communication, participation or group interaction.
But, they themselves have not been able to realize that when faced with the first calls for help, say communication of their problem to the group, they closed the doors to any possibility of collective defense, by not believing, disinteresting themselves, even mocking the personal situation of the harassed, who are attributed, more than consequences of psychoterror, a galloping hypochondria or simply a lack of technical adequacy for their tasks.
This leads the victim to become disoriented in such a way that he ends up believing that the source of his ills lies in himself and not in the effects of the harassment.
A case that I have known lately refers to a worker who, being fully dedicated to religious life until she was twenty-two, chose to retire and go out to city life with the prospect of realizing herself in a different sense than the one she knew.
In her workplace she was attacked by her direct boss from a sexual point of view, that is, he sexually harassed her, which I consider a form of gender-based violence in general terms.
The attitude of rejection of the worker to her direct superior made her subject to moral harassment, derived from the frustration of the psychopathic boss of not having obtained any sexual advantage from the woman. The group with which he worked did not immediately notice the superior's intentional behavior, but gradually began to notice the changes in the worker's personality, who, from trusting her friends, transformed into a sullen woman and distant. The group had heard the worker's complaints, but they took it lightly and did not give it much importance. She was even the object of insinuations such as: "give her free rein to give you better opportunities"; "Take advantage of the situation", etc. Matter that managed to show that the labor group was not aware of the seriousness of the attack.
The worker, in this way, suffered a decompensation within her own collective, forcing her to withdraw into herself.
4. Reverential fear
Every healthy and loyal worker responds to his hierarchical superior like a soldier in front of his lieutenant. There is blind trust and reverential fear of the person who commands and directs work actions. It is presumed that he has the experience and wisdom to carry out the tasks and to obtain the best, most creative of each worker. However, no one is instructed that commanders also suffer, like all human beings, sometimes extreme weaknesses, which leads them to confuse reality with the actual conditions in which circumstances operate.
Far from me is to obtain a fatal advantage that occurred in the VIII Region, Chile, in the Cordillera, when an army colonel ordered a march of several kilometers to the conscripts of the mountain regiment, when the weather was not in good conditions., the soldiers were not dressed appropriately and the lower commanders noted the risks and difficulties of the march, but despite all this the march was ordered and the lower commanders obeyed, with the fatal consequence of forty-five young men killed. This fact can also be carried out to what happens in the company or in the public service, where superiors demand tasks superior to what the worker is capable or giving tasks superior to working time and to an adequate number of what can be humanly achieved.. The strange thing is that even so,Knowing the impossibility of success in the result, the workers strive and give up to their last strength. It is what is called "reverential fear." The fear not of force or mistreatment, but the fear of defrauding your superior, the father, the husband, the boss.
This “reverential fear” also acts in moral harassment to inhibit the worker from demanding better treatment, since, many times, he considers it appropriate for hierarchical superiors to apply management and discipline to the extreme. So, then, this factor is absolutely negative for the harassed, since it drives him to maintain a situation that morally diminishes him.
5. Job stability
I believe that job stability as a source of acceptance of unfair forms of work does not require further explanation.
In developing countries like ours, the possession of a workplace implies a privilege that cannot be accessed by close to a million nationals, therefore those who are working will accept a series of ill-treatment, threats, insults and other forms of discrimination and harassment, in wider ranges.
It is not strange to hear from foremen or supervisors: “to this ¿? He likes to be beaten. " Or the classic: "this understands sticks." But, it is not that the human being wants to humble himself.
It supports out of necessity, but attentive to this situation, as a secondary consequence a pressure is created that in the global community in the country, can mean in the medium or long term a social outbreak, in the style of the “Rebelión de los Colgados”. (Bruno Traven pseudonym TRAVEN TORSVAN CROVES, 1890.)
6. Absence of favorable legislation
Two situations contribute to the fact that bullying at work devastates our companies and the workers' homes, as well as the entire society.
One of them is the absence of a law sanctioning this serious crime and, what is worse, the lack of social awareness of the judges, who to date have allowed the fundamental rights of workers to be violated, without opposing it, giving rise to the lawsuits against moral harassment, or making ridiculous and inadmissible evidentiary demands, accounting for the most complete ignorance of the subject.
But it is not the fault of the legislators or the judges, who in large numbers are also subject to moral harassment at work.
This is the fault of a legal-political system that adheres with intellectual submission and interests, to maintaining the status quo, of the incorrect systems of production relations, either between private parties, or between workers and the State. Moral harassment has no borders and attacks all workers equally.
7. Absence of Culture in Health-Work
The absence of a policy aimed at enriching the knowledge of workers, or at least, informing them of their rights and of the relationship between work and their own diseases, caused by or on the occasion of it, is notorious and notable.
This is not a task proper to the Quixotes who write, risk their labor sources and teach on their own, the benefits of the law at work and health, but rather, it is a task proper to the State and intermediate bodies.
They are as guilty of this failure as the State, the employers themselves who benefit from the workforce, but also the unions, union leaders, public organizations and departments, state education and health, Mutuals and regulatory agencies..
What is required is a national policy in compliance with the conventions and covenants of the ILO and other concerned organizations such as international health-related organizations.
The II Congress of Health and Work, Cuba 2007, opens a space for concern, study, analysis and promotion of the harmful effects of moral harassment on the worker, his family, and society as a whole, always trying to safeguard human resources and support an iron defense of the Fundamental Rights of Workers.
