1. The lessons of bad bosses and toxic workplaces

By Suzanne Rent (from Halifax Examiner, 9 June 2020 - https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/bad-bosses-and-cranky-customers/

Lisa Cameron is giving a talk about her experience with bad bosses and toxic workplaces. Photo: Lisa Cameron

Lisa Cameron has had several bad bosses and she’s going to tell you all about them in a talk on June 23 with Equity Watch. I talked with Cameron on Monday about her bad bosses and some of the lessons she’s learned.

When she was 21, Cameron says her first toxic workplace was working under-the-table for a flower vendor at a farmers’ market in Kingston, Ontario. Cameron says the boss was invasive, asking questions about her health and physical strength, and she would send her home on days she was menstruating because she thought Cameron would be too physically weak to work.

Even at that age, with little experience, I knew that was a human rights violation. I think that was the first really toxic workplace I had.

She was hired at a restaurant where she says the boss was known to be “creepy” with the female servers. She says on her first day on the job, the boss walked in and pushed the server who was training Cameron against the wall, grabbed her behind, and said, “Just so you know, I can grab my waitresses whenever I want.”

She also worked in low-paying retail jobs where shifts would often be cancelled last minute.

That’s very hard to budget. It’s keeping you from finding other work because you have this obligation. How are you supposed to budget if you’re not earning the money you’re supposed to earn?

There are these misconceptions that minimum-wage work is entry-level work and there’s this trajectory that minimum-wage work is for university and high school students and this will give them the experience they need to excel later on professionally, or this is character building. And I think what confronted me when I got my third minimum-wage-paying job the reality was quite different than that. People were sustaining families on minimum-wage work, sometimes two, three, or four minimum-wage-paying jobs at a time. It was a harsh reality that confronted me and it was quite different than the stories I heard.

It was her first job working in an office that led her to labour activism. At that job, she says she finally felt like she had freedom from abusive minimum-wage-paying jobs. She had heard this boss was abusive, but she says she was happy to be earning more than minimum wage. There was also an in-house human resources department. But she eventually learned women were being paid significantly less than the men. When women talked about getting raises, Cameron says they were offered items like ice cream bars instead. At one point, Cameron needed two weeks off for urgent surgery. Her bosses asked her to provide three separate medical notes to explain the planned absence. When she returned from the surgery, she wrote a letter explaining why it was important the company adopt policies on how it treated its workers. After that, she says she was bullied extensively by male managers and was getting reprimanded for little situations like using too many Post-It notes and going to the washroom too frequently.

It was very clear the company took issue with me taking issue with their conduct.

She filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, which she says was a daunting process with limited support. She says she was well set up to access the process, but learned it would be awful for workers who didn’t have citizenship, or had children, or didn’t speak English as their first language.

What was so shocking for me in that situation was that it was impossible to get justice.

She was told because she spoke to a lawyer via a 1-800 number three months before, that she sought outside counsel, which made her unable to use legal support offered through the tribunal. Eventually, she went into negotiations and got a very small settlement.

It was really disappointing for me because I thought they should have been held accountable for what they had done. There’s a pattern of sexist behaviour, discriminatory behaviour, bullying, and intimidation. Also, the stress in pursing a bad boss is so unreal. You kind of want to be done with it at some point.

She says her colleagues were supportive and some added their names as witnesses. Eventually, she got into advocacy work, including the Fight for $15 and Fairness and the Halifax Workers’ Action Centre. She also works as a union organizer for the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

This isn’t dumb luck I’ve had with bosses. This is a climate we have in employment where bosses are able to get away with these kinds of things without any kind of consequences. Employees are really limited in solutions to this kind of abuse.

Workers know what kind of solution they are seeking. Having a democratic process for workers to find solutions at work is really imperative and I’d like to see that process simplified and made available to workers.

She’d also like to see employers be banned from requesting medical documentation to substantiate short-term illnesses. As well, she’d like to see every worker get 10 paid sick days a year, increases to the minimum wage, equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation, access to legal aid when needed, and stricter laws that would prevent employers from hiring workers as independent contractors. And she’d like to see proactive workplace investigations. Right now, the onus is on the worker.

Once a worker has made a complaint to the labour board, occupational health and safety, or to the human rights tribunal, it’s important that the workplace be investigated.

Cameron says being a good boss has its benefits.

Employers have so much to gain from treating their workers well. You see it with increased wages, safer working conditions, you see higher morale, lower turnover rates. The cost for training a new employee, I imagine, is quite high to the employer. When workers are more rested, they’ll be more dedicated to their job. Workers who are sick and are forced to come into work because they can’t afford to take a day off, they’re not going to be as productive, but they also risk exposing that entire workplace to that illness, which may have a longer-term effect on productivity … When you raise the minimum wage, the money is invested back into the local economy. Bosses benefit from a society that isn’t impoverished.

Cameron says for her talk with Equity Watch she wants to provide personal insight into workers’ concerns and big issues.

I would like to make clear that there’s no real value in looking at these issues individually, your struggle with your boss individually. That’s how were trained to look at it and see it. But there are real systemic issues that are making low-wage, marginalized workers — even above that, workers generally — that employers are allowed to behave in these ways and workers are limited in what they can do about it. This is a systemic, pervasive issue, not just one worker’s issue.

It’s really important the province of Nova Scotia makes an effort to improve labour conditions through basic minimum standards because workers’ ability to unionize is so limited. It’s pretty clear here and no coincidence that so many of us have had bad bosses in our lives. It speaks to a huge imbalance between boss and worker.

To register for the free webinar, Bad Bosses: My experiences in toxic workplaces with Lisa Cameron, click here.