Bullying and Harassment
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Bullying
Bullying occurs when a person or a group of people repeatedly behave unreasonably towards you and the behaviour creates a risk to your health and safety. Bullying can include:
- aggressive and intimidating behaviour
- abusive or offensive language and comments
- belittling or humiliating comments
- practical jokes or initiation rituals
- unjustified and unreasonable criticism or complaints
- actions that deliberately isolate another person
- conduct that is continuously and pervasively insulting, undermining or derogatory.
Bullying is unlawful under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth).
Harassment
Harassment is unwelcome verbal or physical behaviour that intimidates, offends, belittles or humiliates a person or a group of employees because of a particular personal characteristic such as sex, age, race, gender, disability, religion or sexual orientation that is unreciprocated and often repeated but can be a single incident.
Workplace harassment can include:
- derogatory jokes
- asking intrusive questions about someone’s personal life, including their sex life
- verbal abuse and constant ridicule
- repeated threats of dismissal
- humiliating a person through gestures, sarcasm, criticism and insults
- spreading gossip or false, malicious rumours about a person, and
- sabotaging a person’s work, for example by withholding or suppling incorrect information, hiding documents or equipment, not passing on messages and seeking to get a person into trouble.
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