Description
Barsteadworth College is a book about workplace bullying, the
damage it causes and institutional suppression of the truth about
both. Workplace bullying is a hot contemporary topic. It crops up
in conversations between friends and colleagues and not
infrequently in the television, radio and print media. It can often
seem that everyone has either been bullied at work or knows someone
who has. However, cases where a victim of workplace bullying has
taken on 'the system' and won are few and, because of this, are big
news when they happen. This is due in no small part to the routine
use of 'gagging clauses' in 'compromise agreements', which bring to
a close the one-sided battles that take place between bullied
employees and their employers/managers. Victimised employees can
find themselves placed in situations where they have no alternative
but to resign and then contractually prohibited from speaking about
their experiences by the agreement that terminates their
employment. Thus, it is ensured that the extent of the kind of
abuses described in this book remains hidden and that one of the
routine social sicknesses of our time and the knock-on actual
sicknesses that result stay largely invisible and unchallenged.
The author, Dr Stephen Riley, has experienced workplace bullying
and its damaging consequences firsthand and, like many, he is
prohibited from speaking by a 'compromise agreement'. In
Barsteadworth College he therefore uses fiction as means of
describing and analysing the issues: Dr Dan Ripley, a Fine Art
Lecturer, moves from Manchester and takes a job at a provincial art
college in the south of England. After a time, a new manager
arrives and starts to appoint friends and family and to create
preferential working conditions for herself and her clique. Those
outside of the clique - Dan and two others - are then subjected to
a wide range of undermining activities from their line-manager,
including staged public humiliations at meetings, unmanageable
workloads and endlessly contradictory instructions. The book
describes the gradual corrosive effects of the bullying: fatigue,
loss of confidence, confusion and then depression. It then
describes what happens when Dan complains: the college's managers
close ranks and connive with the bullying line-manager to discredit
the allegations, eliminate evidence and vilify the complainant.
Ultimately, Barsteadworth College is an appeal to law and
policy makers to address the current situation, which is hopelessly
skewed in favour of workplace bullies and against their victims
and, within this, to address the question of how, when suitable
policies are in place, institutions can be made to adhere to them
and be answerable if they do not.
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