Good on Lawyers Weekly for pointing this out………
Leaders have recently been urged to address bullying claims in the workplace – as, since the introduction of anti-bullying legislation 10 years ago, not much has changed.
In September this year, Colin Biggers & Paisley partner Megan Kavanagh said that in recent years, the shift to online work and changes in communication methods could give rise to increased bullying.
“Workers’ compensation regulators across the country have reported increases in claims for psychological injuries,” she said.
“The cause is unclear: is it the pandemic’s contribution to changes in the way we work? Is it flexible and hybrid working arrangements, the impact of technology and FOMO (fear of missing out) approach to digital solutions undermining our resilience and coping strategies, including connecting with people, sleep and outdoor time? The reasons for an increase in claims for psychological injury [are] complex and multifaceted.”
Back in 2019, the total cost of bullying at work in Australia was estimated to be up to $36 billion per year. That same year, the International Bar Association published the Us Too? Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession report, which revealed that levels of bullying and sexual harassment in legal workplaces in Australia were “significantly higher” than the global averages.
According to that report, Australian legal workplaces were “ahead of the international average” when it comes to hosting anti-bullying and sexual harassment training, with 37 per cent of Australian respondents at the time saying their workplace hosts such sessions, compared to 22 per cent globally. Despite this, respondents at workplaces with training in place were more likely to have reported incidents of bullying and more likely to have used internal workplace channels to do so.
This came after Lawyers Weekly reported that 73 per cent of female respondents from Australia and 50 per cent of Australian male respondents reported having been bullied in connection with their legal employment.
In addition, 47 per cent of Australian female lawyers and 13 per cent of our male lawyers reported such misconduct.
In 2022, the IBA also released Beyond Us Too? Regulatory Responses to Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession, which explored the actions of legal regulatory and disciplinary bodies across the world to uncover and prevent this behaviour.
“The legal profession’s harassment problem is endemic, cultural and societal. This means that regulatory and disciplinary bodies alone cannot eliminate the problem; the profession’s leaders, individual lawyers, law-makers and professional associations will all play an equally important role in achieving this objective,” the foreword of that report stated.
So, has this issue improved at all? In 2023, as reported recently by Lawyers Weekly’s sister brand, HR Leader, 50 per cent of Australian workers have experienced being bullied, harassed, or exposed to conflict or inappropriate behaviour, according to the Australian Workers Union (AWU).
The findings accord with similar research by Safe Work Australia (SWA), which concluded that rates of bullying in Australia are “substantially higher than international rates”.
Following this news, Lawyers Weekly created a poll on its LinkedIn page, asking Australian lawyers if they had ever experienced bullying in the Australian legal profession.
Poll results
The results of the poll are as follows:
Read more
