help with poss harassment

[rondall]

can someone answer questions for me Please!!!!
Iam a RN with in the state of illinois.
I currently work in family medical clinic. There is an Lpn
who has been given the lead posistion over the rn's
who takes everything anyone says and miconstrues and
exagerates the truth to management, therefore they
are constantly telling us that we are negative and angry
yesterday this lpn and a member of management stood
in the nurses station discussing issues and suddenly
stopped and went into a room and shut the door. I later told
this lPn that itmakes me paranoid when they gointo a room
and shut the door Ialso told her that when the manager stood behind by back I cringe due to childhood abuse
that she reminded me of my stepmother who would sneak behind me and hit me. This was relayed back to the manager
and I was given a written warning on how unprofessional,destructive and angry I was. I was also warned that if anything was said or that this lpn received
any ramifications from this that I would be fired. yet the manager came up and brought the doctoe who i work for into
this, ha had nothing to with this. Help what should I do

 

[cbg]

Stop talking about the LPN to your co-workers. It's only going to get you into more trouble.

Nothing illegal has transpired. If they want to pay attention to the LPN that's their business. When you go talking about how upset it makes you, it's only proving their point about the negativity.

 

[frani810]

You know, cbg, the world is really funny. I understand your position, and you do know your stuff .

Some people are really innocent as I read through some of this stuff; and some people are born to suffer. Power falling into the wrong hands can be detrimental. You know, it's really a shame. And most of the time, if you file a grievance, you make it worse. The workplace is a very personal institution . . . you are at work more than you are with your family or at any other place. It's a shame that there are no laws out there to protect humanity and mistreatment. When power falls into the wrong hands, it can be another lifetime gone by before management will admit they made a mistake. Mistakes do cost a lot.

I just had to comment, hope you don't mind. I guess if manipulation is just shy of breaking the law, that makes it ok. The second guy always gets caught.

 

[cbg]

Part of the problem, Fran, is that fairness is in the eye of the beholder. So is mistreatment. I've no doubt that any number of the people who post here and on the other boards where I respond honestly believe that they are being treated poorly. I also have no doubt that an unbiased observer would have a different opinion in many (by no means all) of the cases.

Because of this, there are any number of situations where no matter what the employer does, SOMEONE is going to perceive it as unfair. To give you an example; Joe and Jim (or Mary and Sally, if you prefer) are both up for a promotion. Only one of them can get it. You can bet that whichever one of them gets the promotion, no matter what criteria was used to make the final decision, the other one is going to think it unfair. A parent wants to leave work early to go to his kid's soccer game. He's going to think it unfair if the employer says no, but to the employees who have to do his work while he's gone, it's unfair if the employer says yes. And so on.

I don't mind your commenting, but I've got a somewhat different perspective on the question, having spent many years as the HR manager who's supposed to make it fair for everyone, no matter what.

 

[frani810]

I appreciate your position - you're the professional in the field.

 

[rondall]

harassment

Thanks Fran for your comment, you give peace to understanding. I was not talking to my co-workers
about the Lpn. I was talking directly to her. I guess I
don't understand why what I said was so negative.
I didn't know that being honest and stating your
feelings in the work place was wrong. I know that there
is always going to be someone who feels that they have
been wrong. If someone had come to me stating those
feelings I certainly would have not run to management
with a blown extortion of what was said. However how
do you say something to management about a person without
being ostersized(? spelling)I'm not the only person this has happened to by this particular Lpn. Please advise ? thank-you

 

[frani810]

I am ostracised from everything in my department. I had a lot of bad or negative things put directly on me. . . all the people who were manipulating and controling that kept telling me not to take it personally. . . that is extremely easy for someone else to say. Because I got upset, reacted, spoke my mind - they still have me there, but I have a life of hell. The latest is that I was just dumped by a close friend (who happens to hold the same position as I and share the same boss). Nothing in the place is genuine to me. It's a very difficult life; but I try to stay to my beliefs. It's really funny, but everyone in control goes to great lengths to make sure they have a feeling of being needed, being important, being in the crowd to party together. . . and they're the ones who put me out. I am so hurt by everything. Nobody has a care about it at all.

Everybody wants to get ahead of the next guy, that's it.

 

[frani810]

I have to say also, that common sense and judgments can be manipulated, played around with, and challenged. However, common sense, maturity, and level-headed judgments can also be easily identified; and in few and far between circumstances, tremendously respected.

I am very sensitized, I've had a lot of hard times in work; isolating myself in solitary confinement just to give myself peace and eliminate the arguing from the good morning to good night greetings.

I am very taken advantage of. . . I've been hurt so badly. The latest someone pretended to be a friend for five years, and now coldly dumped me. . . They know how to hit on me.

The management knows whats happening. They are very close-knit and family-like amongst themselves. Comaradary and personality overflow with prim and proper treatment. And in their judgment, they are treating me fine. Yes, the hurt is overwhelming. . .keeping quiet and isolated is the best I can do for myself. If I go to anybody, I am immediately labeled complainer, jealous, odd, quirky, etc., etc., and probably a lot of other bad things.

What is good is not good for all. . . and the majority will rule in the numbers game, so they don't see a problem.

No laws are broken. . . but yet the workplace can be hell. The management is fully aware of their actions. Retribution to the one that files a negative grievance toward them. The management can't and won't handle negativity; but will throw it right back on the person trying to make good for themselves.

And that's the way it is.

 

[cbg]

Fran, you may be surprised to hear that I have on two different occasions been in exactly the same situation you are. In the first case, I endured it for three and a half years, believing that I was too sensitive and that I was imagining a lot of the negativity. Then a new employee started and on his third day asked me what (the manager) had against me. My resume went out the next day.

Fifteen years later I went through the same thing at another company. This second time I have no doubt that had I wanted to, I could have successfully sued the owner for gender and racial discrimination. I chose not to. Instead I quit after only slightly over a year and went on to what became my dream job - it was the best move I could possibly have made.

My point is that you are expecting someone else to fix your problem for you; preferably the law, but certainly HR if not. You can sit back and wait for someone else to see that you're being mistreated, or you can make your own luck. I mean this in the most friendly way possible, but you are not showing any signs of willingness to take responsibility for yourself. If they've been mistreating you for twelve years, don't stay! Find another job where you'll be appreciated! Start a job search! Don't endure it any longer!

"Oh, but then they win. They drove me out," I hear you saying. So what? You're the only one who's getting hurt by staying. What possible difference can it make if they "win"? You're the one who gets into a better situation.

Again, I mean this in the most friendly way possible. Stop whining, grow some backbone, and get out of the situation.

 

[Girlnterrupted]

I can totally relate to what everyone's describing here. It is indeed a reality that there is an incredible amount of mistreatment and unfairness in a great percentage of workplace settings. It can even be seen as abuse; however, psychological abuse is only legally actionable if it's a family setting, I believe.

I have felt abused by more than one supervisor in my years as an employee. And I am certain that the behavior I have experienced would have given me grounds for lawsuits, had the perpetrator acted based on a protected class. Recently I was abused based on a protected class, but prior to that, I had been treated in just as poor terms by a different manager, and there was a point where I wanted to sue for defamation, since the "supervisor" felt he had to twist and distort my actions in order to have grounds for reprimands and write ups.

The last place where I worked, I remember that at least 90% of the employees acknowledged at one time or another that they were being treated like garbage. In about 9 months that I worked there, there were probably 15-20 people who quit based on the abusive treatment they received by management. Yet, management was so incredibly immersed in their culture of maintaining certain "standards" and on punishing the staff to reach their goal, that they could not care less if we thought they were unfair. They were well aware of the amount of people thinking it was a nightmare to work there, but somehow their culture indicated to them that they were doing the right thing by maintaining their standards and treating employees poorly enough so that they'd realize that what matters is job performance, not human treatment. They made that so clear, and only the less educated, more needy people lasted there for years.

This has become a cultural trait at so many workplace settings. And this is so mainly because the law allows it. There is no punishment for abuse; only for abuse done against a protected class, so if the abuse is disguised, it is LEGAL. I know it would be incredibly hard to prove abuse and it is in the eye of the beholder, but I would hope that there should be at least some way to prove when something is really going beyond the limits of human treatment. I wonder if there will be a day where this will be actionable and punishable.

Meantime, a lot of innocent people will suffer from trauma, job loss, and a host of other things based on legal , cultural abuse at the workplace. Quite a horrible thing, if you ask me.

 

[Ramoth]

"It is indeed a reality that there is an incredible amount of mistreatment and unfairness in a great percentage of workplace settings"

Girl, I need to disagree with you. I have worked for a truly cr@ppy company (as cbg and beth3 can attest to - they've heard me vent). But even there, the majority of the time the majority of the people enjoyed working there. You've just left a horrible work experience, and the only people who post questions on boards like this are having a bad time at work, so the impression you have is that the working world sucks.

Most employers do their best to follow the myriad and confusing laws they're subject to, try to pay a competative wage, offer decent benefits (without bankrupting the company), and be fair to their employees. You will always have jerks, whiners, and slugs in every workplace, and at every level of the company. But it's not fair to say that most companies go out of their way to make life miserable for their employees.

 

[cbg]

Yes, there are certainly some places where employee are abused. There are also some places where the employee only thinks they are being abused. I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case with any of the posters here, but let me tell you a couple of real life situations where I had an employee complaining of abuse. In one of them, the "abuse" was that the manager expected the employee to come to work on time. The employee herself made it clear that she wasn't complaining about the way the manager made the request; it was that she made it at all. It wasn't reasonable of the company to expect her to get to work on time every day. And no, she did not have small children that she had to get off to school and she did not have an unreasonably long commute. She just didn't like to get up in the morning. Another one thought she was being "abused" because I refused to file an obviously bogus workers comp claim. Normally I file any complaint made at all and let the w/c carrier deny it if it's fake, but this one was so bogus I wasn't even going to do that. In the interests of good taste I'm not going to go into detail, but there is no POSSIBLE way this claim was for real unless she was involved in some activity at work that would get her (and a friend) both fired. A third employee had a temper tantrum all over the main lobby because she was "so sick of her manager's abuse". The manager's crime? She had tossed a folder (from two feet away) onto the employee's desk and it had knocked into her empty Coke can. BTW, when that particular employee was fired the next day as a direct result of that tantrum, I had another employee tell me for the first time that she had been afraid to come to work on the days when the "tantruming" employee was working (both were part time). Evidently the tantrum was only the end of a long series of inappropriate behavior, which the second employee had been too scared to report.

I'm not saying that all, or even most, of the cases of abuse you hear of are false. But how do you make a law that will make this kind of distinction? The three cases I've cited were very real to the employees in question. They honestly thought they were being abused. Where does the line get drawn? Who's to say what is and is not abusive? Who was abused, my employee who had the tantrum or the one who was on the receiving end? Where does the other side of the picture come into play?

I'm not saying that it's all right for employees to be abused. I'm saying considering how much perception comes into play, it would be incredibly difficult to draft a law that would be fair to both sides of the issue.

 

[frani810]

Thank you both for your replies. They are most acknowledging and comforting. CBG, I would love to get out, but there is really nothing out there - trust me, I have made several tries. I'm in a predicament where my field is diminished due to automation. I cannot settle for temp work and no benefits with the hope that I may get hired if the employer "likes" me. I'm middle-aged and employers can tell that from my work history. My salary right now is more competitive than what anybody would offer me even on the interviews that I have been. I am stuck here as I am self-supporting, hanging on to what I got. I keep trying periodically, that's a fact. No bites at all out there. I presume that if my application is being viewed or read, that my experience, age, and salary requirements are working against me due to the nature of my field. The concept of starting over what with schooling and entering a new field really is not workable for me right now.

Life is a mess. I'm just looking for some justice. My hope is that someday somebody will see what's going on. Or maybe I'll get a job break eventually. Coping and looking for sanction is going to be my only out until the tide turns.

Thank you all.

 

[rondall]

harassment

THANKS TO EVERYONE RESPONDING TO MY POST. i HAVE LEARNED A GREAT DEAL READING THROUGH YOUR REPLIES
i AM COMMITTED TO CONTINUE WTIH THE JOB i LOVE. mY
PATIENTS COME FIRST. hOWEVER i PLAN ON PURSUING
LEGAL ACTION AGAINST MANAGEMENT. iN ONE POLICY AND PORCEDURE ALONE THEY BROKE IT 3 DIFFERENT TIMES.
pOLICY STATES INVESTIGARION SHOULD TAKE PALCE, NONE HAD TAKEN PLACE, 2ND VIOLATION ,STATES VERBAL WARNING FOR FIRST MINOR OFFENSE THIS WAS MY FIRST OFFENSE WRITTEN WARNING FOR 2ND OFFENSE WHAT HAPPENED TO MY VERBAL WARNING AND THIRDLY THAT ANY WARNINGS SHOULD NOT BE DISCUSSED WITH THIRD PARTY WITHOUTWRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE EMPLOYEE PRIOR TO THE INFORMATION RELEASED. mY DOCTOR WAS TOLD ABOUT THIS , INEVER GAVE WRITTEN PERMISSION. MANAGEMENT BROKE POLICY 3 DIFFERENT TIMES. iF ISET BACK AND ACT LIKE NOTHING HAS GONE WRONG THEN I AM DOING NO JUSTICE TO MYSELF OR MY COWORKER'S. WE WERE
ALL ONE BIG FAMILY TILL THIS ONE PERSON CAME IN AND IS
TRYING TO BREAK US UP BY DISTORTING AND TWISTING THINGS AROUND TO BENEFIT HER. hOWEVER i DO APPRECIATE EVERYONE'S COMMENTS AND IDEA'S. gOOD LUCK TO ALL OF YOU. i MAY POST AGAIN

 

[DMUN]

Then a new employee started and on his third day asked me what (the manager) had against me. My resume went out the next day.

My point is that you are expecting someone else to fix your problem for you; preferably the law, but certainly HR if not. You can sit back and wait for someone else to see that you're being mistreated, or you can make your own luck. Find another job where you'll be appreciated! Start a job search! Don't endure it any longer!

Thank you for that post! It is so true.
I posted a question and was told it was not legal discrimination. So I accepted it and decided to do the best I could since I had been there a while and liked my job.
The new boss then started having staff come over from her other building to fill in for our part-timers. Just like you cbg, they asked us why things were not the same at our building-unfair things.
Since my original post, things have only gotten worse. So I've applied at a hospital that I've always admired and have an interview next week. If I get it there will be a longer comute for me, but it will be well worth it to be happy.
Keep trying fran, I hope that something will come along and be just what you were looking for. *crossing fingers for you*

This site has been great, I've learned a lot reading through it.
Thanks!