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Every day, without even realizing it, each of us sets the world in motion.
Our global economy is a huge machine made up of smaller pieces: our societies.
And they, in turn, work through organizational activities that are related to each other:
states, unions, consumer groups, and companies.
Each of these organizations are part of the global mechanism but each one works in a different way. Why?
Because the core piece of this machine is us: human beings.
And as such, we contribute our values, thoughts, and ideas; that is, our culture.
The same thing happens in our jobs: each is organized and works differently.
However, there is one particular mechanism that appears throughout the world: work violence. And it affects us all.
Why?
Let’s look at some examples and find the common patterns that cause it.
There is a group of young salespeople who work at a store.
Their employer demands that they help customers and do other tasks for which they haven’t been properly trained.
Here is a group of waiters. Their wages are very low, so they have to depend on customers’ tips.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, a group of telemarketers are trying to sell a product.
These employees are victims of their supervisors’ constant pressure to reach sales objectives.
They have only been trained in sales and they work very long shifts.
In another hemisphere, there is a group of bank tellers. They have been trained in administrative work and
are constantly threatened that the world crisis is putting their jobs at risk.
Now, let’s imagine that these employees must help a customer and that the customer verbally or physically attacks them,
threatening to stop buying, or consuming, or close their account. That customer is using violence.
What are the elements that are repeated in each case?
In each one, there is an aggressor and a victim. And the aggressor has a resource he or she can use to mistreat the victim.
In this case, the resource is money. That resource brings power.
Money is only one type of resource. Training, hierarchy, and security are some others.
This means that workers should have their own resources—that’s right! But unfortunately, they’re too scarce.
And here we find the fundamental component that puts violence to work: inequality.
Where does inequality appear? Workers have little security, which makes them fear losing their jobs, not receiving a tip,
or not making a sale: all factors on which their livelihood depends.
This makes them endure situations that they would otherwise not put up with.
And with little training, even if they wanted to face this situation, they wouldn’t know how.
Therefore, an employee has significantly fewer resources than a customer.
However, violence often seems unavoidable. Think of workers facing a robbery,
for example, a security guard, and a truck driver who carries valuable cargo.
What resources should these workers have to confront violence? Security elements, an alarm system that protects them,
and training in how to react to these problems.
If workers do not have these resources, they are more prone to become victims.
However, the aggressor is not always an external agent of the organization. Many times he or she is part of it.
As we know, in every organization there is a system of relationships, functions, hierarchies, and a series of like values.
This means that some workers have power to give orders and penalize those of a lower rank.
Therefore, they have more resources and they can be used to exercise violence.
Let’s imagine an office. It could be a graphic design house, postal office, insurance company, travel agency
or it could be from any other economic sector.
A supervisor constantly harasses an employee in his or her office.
The rest of the colleagues realize it, but they don’t do anything for fear of losing their jobs.
The harassed employee submits a claim to the supervisors, but it’s not investigated. Finally, this situation becomes intolerable
and the harassed employee resigns. The aggressor never receives any punishment.
This is a case of mobbing, or work harassment, and it generally occurs between workers in different hierarchies.
Hierarchy is a resource that aggressors use to systematically mistreat other employees. There are several types of mistreatment;
for example, humiliating or mocking others, assigning tasks employees cannot do or giving them no tasks to do,
isolation from the rest of the group, unfair penalizations, or excessively controlling employees.
In every case, there is violence at work.
But hierarchy in it itself does not generate violence. There are other elements that increase inequality:
in this case, other workers’ attitudes and above all, collective behaviour.
There are missing values such as solidarity, or fair company policies, which help violence work, with unchecked force.
These are resources that increase inequality.
What other type of inequality can we find in our organizations? Gender inequality.
Gender is a group of social ideas that assign men and women different roles.
And in general, male roles are more highly valued than female ones.
These social ideas are sometimes transferred to working environments and force women to take lower ranking positions,
earn less money, and get fewer training opportunities than their male counterparts. That is, they get fewer resources.
So now, let’s think what happens if we add a new dimension to our examples: gender inequality.
As with any other inequality, this will reinforce violence, which will in turn be exercised to a higher degree
against those with fewer resources. In this case, women.
And there is a particular kind of violence exercised against women: *** violence, or *** harassment.
*** harassment occurs when a person receives sexually-based comments, jokes or gestures, improper behaviour,
suggestions or pressure to date, or *** intercourse, touching, psychological abuse, and even ***.
Now we can see how gender inequality makes women become possible victims of violence,
to a higher degree than their male counterparts.
And violence will be more frequent if the aggressors are bosses or supervisors, because on top of all the other resources,
they have the power granted to them by their place in the hierarchy.
We can now complete the mechanism of violence at work: there are certain resources that cause inequality,
and the greater the inequality, the more the probabilities for violence to appear and work.
When this happens, all the organisation’s machinery starts malfunctioning. Why?
Because violence affects all employees, not just the direct victims.
Violent cases, in any way, shape, or form, produce high stress levels.
Stress consists of bodily reactions to changes in our environment, and it helps us adapt to them.
The problem appears when that stress overwhelms our bodies.
To understand this better, let’s go back to machinery and gears: imagine that our bodies are machines
that run on rechargeable batteries. Whatever is going on in our environment makes the machine work.
The more the activity demanded from it, the faster it will use up its energy.
If the environment becomes stable, the energy can be recharged. But there are situations, like violence, which demand the body
to use up all its energy and the machine is damaged or blows up!
High stress levels not only lead to psychological effects, but also physical ones in the people who suffer from it.
It can cause heart or bowel problems, abuse of legal or illegal substances, depression, or even lead to suicide.
The mechanism of violence, therefore, works by depriving us of a healthy life, and it affects us all. The time has come to stop it!
How?
By getting rid of the gears that make it work.
Work violence does not take place only because of certain individuals’ attitudes;
it appears in certain organizational structures more than in others.
Reviewing and modifying these structures will help stop violence.
And to do so, we have an invaluable weapon: the concept of decent work.
Decent work is that which protects all workers’ lives and health.
It’s a kind of work where there is no difference between men and women and there is no such thing as discrimination or unfair policies.
Decent work is job security, appropriate leisure and working time.
It is work where there is a discipline system that does not foster power abuse, and it punishes violence.
Decent work provides training, because training not only prevent violence from happening, but also helps one face it.
Decent work, in short, is fair work.
And we are all responsible for attaining it. No organization works in isolation and we cannot rest on employers’ good will,
when the main objective is higher and higher profits.
That’s why workers and unions must work together.
In each sector, we must start a movement of exchange with employers, cooperating with them
in building evaluation strategies and prevention policies.
We need to form security and health committees, and ensure they are included in national and sector collective bargaining agreements,
provisions in terms of violence control, and contingency plans.
We must provide training and inform people about how to prevent violence.
Gradually we must organize more and more workers. We must foster the culture of solidarity and participate more actively.
When workers are supported by unions, they can face unfair treatment and fight back without fear.
Training is also a tool for cultural change.
Through tripartite dialogue, we must promote and demand polices to create decent working conditions for everyone
and inspections that guarantee those policies are fulfilled.
We must work transversally to eliminate gender inequality, and all other kinds of unfairness
that exists today as “gears” in our organizations and societies.
Our goal is equality of opportunities.
Our goal is decent work for everyone.
Let’s stop the mechanism of violence.
We must start now.
We, male and female workers, are the most important element.