Barsteadworth College: How Workplace Bullies Get Away With It by Dr. Stephen Riley. About the book: 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 frequently in the media. It can sometimes 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.
When workplaces bullying does reach the headlines, it tends to be of that very visible, ranting, intimidating sort. Barsteadworth College describes the other sort: that quiet, insidious, underhand kind of bullying, which is both hard to challenge and to protect against. The author, Dr Stephen Riley, has experienced this kind of workplace bullying and its damaging consequences firsthand and, like many, he is prohibited from speaking by a gagging clause. In Barsteadworth College he therefore uses fiction as means of describing events and analysing the issues:
Fine Art Lecturer, Dr Dan Ripley, takes a job at a provincial art college in the south of England, where he is respected by colleagues and proficient in his work. 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 humiliating public reprimands, to unmanageable workloads, to endlessly contradictory instructions. Dan even finds his office chair removed and replaced by a filthy one rescued from a skip – with his manager’s connivance and approval. The book describes in detail the progressive destructive effects of the relentless undermining: fatigue, loss of confidence, confusion and depression. Worse follows when Dan complains: the college’s senior managers see it as an affront to themselves as a corporate body and close ranks with the bullying line-manager. Uninterested in the content or validity of Dan’s complaint and with many reasons not to want the subject of ‘nepotism’ raised, they connive to discredit his allegations and eliminate evidence, manipulating and abusing their own Grievance Procedure to smear Dan’s reputation, in order to punish and silence him, and make the complaint go away.
Barsteadworth College uses wit and fiction to further the debate on workplace abuse and to appeal to law and policy makers to address the current situation, which is not transparent and is hopelessly skewed in favour of workplace bullies and against their victims.
Available from Chipmunka Publishing (link)