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British Worker Awarded £800,000 (US$1.5 million) in Bullying Payout
August 2, 2006
August 2, 2006
A City (London) worker has won £800,000 in damages from Deutsche Bank in a landmark workplace bullying case. The award is said by legal experts to be particularly high and likely to be appealed.
High Court judge Justice Owen said that the campaign at the secretariat division of the international banking firm Deutsche Bank Group Services (UK) Ltd. against Helen Green involved a "relentless campaign of mean and spiteful behaviour designed to cause her distress" that left Green on some occasions crying silently at her desk. She worked there from 1997 to 2001.
Owen awarded her a total of $1.5 million for pain and suffering and loss of past and future earnings. He also ordered the bank to pay her legal costs, beginning with an interim payment of $650,000.
The largest part of the award is the £640,000 awarded for future loss of earnings and a pension, and it is this portion which marks the case out as unusual.
"We have seen cases like this before a number of times but the court has awarded such a large amount because it took the view that this person would not be able to work at this salary level for a long time in the future," said Tom Potbury, a lawyer specialising in employment law at Pinsent Masons.
Green, 36, had said she was subjected to "offensive, abusive, intimidating, denigrating, bullying, humiliating, patronizing, infantile and insulting words and behavior" and subjected to crude and lewd comments from her former colleagues. Her colleagues would move her papers, hide her post and remove her from document circulation lists. She alleged that some of the colleagues had ignored and excluded her, that her personal and professional authority was undermined, and her workload increased to unreasonable and arbitrary levels.
Her lawyer said medical experts on both sides of the case agreed that Green developed a major depressive disorder, but there was disagreement about its cause.
Deutsche Bank said it had not breached its duties to Green and denied that she was bullied, saying she had had a predisposition to mental illness. Deutsche Bank paid for stress counselling and assertiveness training for Green but she had a nervous breakdown before returning to work and suffering a relapse.
"The best way for companies to deal with workplace bullying is to have a clear policy in place and to make sure that employees know about it," said Potbury. "The policy then has to be enforced. If someone complains it is important that the employer does not sweep it under the carpet," he said. "That is the best way of protecting yourself against claims. You can better defend yourself if you can show that you have done everything you can."
Green said she was delighted by the ruling, adding that she had learned bullying was a problem throughout London's financial world. "My case was not an isolated one," she said. "At the trial the court heard evidence about other victims. Not only does Deutsche Bank have to put its house in order, but all City (finance) businesses will have to do more than pay lip-service to this hidden menace."
A Deutsche Bank statement said that "No decision about whether to appeal has been made at this stage".
Part of Green's case was argued under the Protection from Harassment Act, a 1997 anti-stalker law that is beginning to be used in employment cases. A House of Lords ruling last month permitted its use in employment cases, and the law differs substantially from existing employment legislation.
"I don't think anyone imagined when the law was made that it would be used against employers," said Potbury. "Employers have no real defence against this law. If an employee is harassed at work on more than one occasion they can be liable and there is nothing they can do about it."
In the case on which the Lords ruled, the NHS (National Health Service) was vicariously liable for the harassment of employee William Majrowski, even though it was not guilty of causing the behaviour or of failing to prevent it. Previously, employees had to prove that the employer had been negligent in preventing bullying, but that is no longer the case.
Though the award will concern other City financial institutions, Potbury said that the problem of bullying at work was very real but very widespread. "It is a problem, but it is not confined to City firms. People get bullied at work everywhere, though the City is a higher stress culture than other workplaces," he said. "This will make other City firms make sure they are doing everything they can to avoid this."
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The Sunday Times (London)
August 6, 2006
Bullying Court Case Led Victim to Lost Family
Jasper Gerard
THE City executive awarded £800,000 compensation after years of bullying at a merchant bank has described how the traumatic court case has led to one of the most uplifting experiences of her life: the tracing of her lost family.
Helen Green, who won her case again Deutsche Bank last week, tells the story in today's Sunday Times News Review of how she was given up for adoption aged two. Her birth to an unmarried orthodox Jew and an Italian man had caused a scandal in conservative Jewish circles in the early 1970s.
Green, 36, underwent a campaign of harassment at the hands of her co-workers at Deutsche Bank, particularly a gang of four women who continually made offensive and mocking remarks. The judge agreed that her nervous breakdown should be attributed to this "wholly abnormal stress" rather than to her troubled early years.
Green describes how, after her mother lost a custody battle, she suffered sexual abuse from her adoptive father.
Green said that in preparation for the court case Deutsche Bank had investigated her family to see if her mother was a schizophrenic and whether this could have been passed on to her.
Initially Green was horrified by the intrusion but it set off a train of events which, she says, have been more significant to her than her award.
"I was so hurt and horrified [by Deutsche's investigation]," said Green. "I didn't even know the full circumstances of my adoption. But last year I contacted social services and discovered my natural mother had passed away two years ago; I just missed her."
Amid this bleakness, Green finally found joy when she was united with the blood brother she had never met. "He is lovely," Green said. "He was able to tell me so much. I feel I could write a book about my family."
Before landing her job with Deutsche Bank, where she was appointed assistant company secretary, Green had suffered a breakdown caused by the trauma of reporting her adoptive father to the police for child abuse. Eventually she balked at testifying against him, but he was cautioned and put on the sex offenders' register. He has since died. The bank contended that Green should have made greater disclosure about her psychiatric history prior to her appointment, but Green claimed: "Deutsche's message is: if you have been abused you cannot work for us."
Green said that she was not psychologically damaged by her childhood; rather it was the bullying endemic at the bank that drove her to two further breakdowns and a stint in hospital on "suicide watch".
"I'm not some little wallflower," she said. "I played hockey to county level, I won a golf competition. I skydived with people from the army. I am used to the odd lewd comment. I didn't crumble at the first push."
Green describes herself as "very proud" of winning a position at Deutsche, but her dream job degenerated into a nightmare of bullying, which the judge, Mr Justice Owen, described as a "Darwinian, survival of the fittest campaign" to undermine her. At one point a member of the "gang of four" was heard boasting to colleagues that she had nearly made Green cry.
Another colleague, Stuart Preston, was described at the trial as having behaved like a "football hooligan'".
Green was not the first victim of the Deutsche bullies. Seven other women, the court heard, suffered "subtle" victimisation in an environment of "extreme bitchiness".
Further evidence of the nature of bullying in the workplace has come with a poll of 3,500 victims by the Andrea Adams Trust. The poll found that humiliation and ridicule had affected 65% of respondents. Other methods of bullying included excessive monitoring, exclusion from meetings, exclusion from social events and physical abuse. Half the respondents said that the bullying had lasted more than a year, while 80% said it affected their sleep and 30% said it made them drink or smoke more.
Green's case illustrates how bullying can destroy careers. "This case has broken my heart," she said. "All I wanted to be was a company secretary".
Read the related contemporaneous U.K. survey documenting employer denial of bullying's presence
WBI Note: The legal basis for this very rare legal case is the the Protection from Harassment Act. Even in the U.K. the proposed (but not yet passed as of the date of the Helen Green decision) specific anti-bullying Dignity At Work legislation. Remember that what happens in Britain does not influence legal proceedings in U.S. cases.
For a similarly successful legal outcome to happen in the U.S., the WBI anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill will have to be enacted and used by the courts.