Be not silenced in the face of injustice

I suffered ill-treatment in the workplace. Instead of dealing with the issues the employer invited me to an confidential without prejudice conversation with the intention to pay me an amount of money to leave the job and not talk about what had happened. In other words, the employer wanted me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I refused.

The conduct I experienced made the workplace unsafe for mental health reasons. Bullying and mobbing happened, I was defamed in the workplace. The employer tried to change reality and try to force me to accept a falsehood that went to the core of my being. I could not stand for that to happen to me or anybody else.

I took the employer to an employment tribunal but the sad thing was that the Judgment caused me to be defamed publicly. The Judgement is available online. The fact is that the Judgment used a statement that was made by a party who was unqualified to comment on my capabilities, because her opinion was based on hear-say. The Judgment simply tells the story that the employer wanted it to believe “we are good, and she is bad”. The employer even went to far as to raise a cost application because they won the case. They wanted £ 20,000 from me because my claims had no prospects and that I had lied and lied again. The cheek!

Luckily I had an opinion of an advocate in my pocket which showed something fishy had been going on in the Library. The employment tribunal disagreed that I lied and lied again and attributed the reason that I lost my case to the fact that I was a litigant in person, unrepresented.

It is a multi-layered story. The tools used to unpack this story are the evidence. I did not sign a non-disclosure agreement and I am therefore free to publish my story, an alternative story, of what happened to me in the Library.

Ill-treatment is happening in the workplace. In 2015 an ACAS policy paper stated that workplace bullying is a serious problem in Britain’s workplaces. Non-disclosure agreements hide the true picture of what is happening in workplaces in Scotland and across the UK.

I invite all of you who suffered ill-treatment at work to post your side of the story. Post your story anonymously but post it! We have to show the prevalence of ill-treatment at work and start pushing against the gaslighting.

05 April 2021 @ 22:39