We Just Started Working With SEIU Local 1000 On Their Bullying Issue

This week we had an introductory meeting with their Anti-Bullying Committee as a member of this committee. What is interesting is that some of the other members of the committee are teachers that work within the prison system. However, the scope of this issue is that it affects many state of California employees on a statewide basis. This union represents approximately 100,000 out of 285,000 state employees. They are the largest public employee union.

Based upon our national study, 46 per cent of all employee nationally are affected by bullying in the workplace. Nationally, the study indicates that 74.8 million employee have been affected Now if we apply these ratios to the union’s represented members, that means approximately 46,000 represented members have been affected by bullying in the workplace. Now if we apply this percentage to all of the state employees that means 131, 100 state employees have been affected. This is a result of CalHR’s policy of using Bullying as a managerial policy. Now you can see the numerical scope of the issue.

That is just the physical scope of the issue. Most of these affected targeted union represented member have been traumatize by the events of being targeted by the bully. So now, we are also talking about the mental health of these members. These affected represented members are now going to require trauma informed therapies on a huge scale. These therapies only teach the targets how to cope with these traumas, these targets never really heal since an event in their future can trigger a reliving a traumatic event that occurred in their past. Other events and these are physical types of events, such as broken heart syndrome, strokes, heart attacks, stomach ulcers, internal bleeding, migraine headaches, etc. All of this needs to be considered as part of the scope of the issue. Right now, the committee, has not considered all of these aspects of the issue.