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Bullying, harassment and discrimination
One element of the Code is the requirement that APS employees, when acting in the course of APS employment, must treat everyone with respect and courtesy and without harassment.47 This requirement is closely linked to valuing and encouraging diversity in the workplace, which needs to be based on respect for differences between employees. It operates in tandem with protections for employees under federal anti-discrimination legislation, and relevant State legislation, where federal anti-discrimination legislation does not apply.
A detailed analysis of discrimination48 and bullying and harassment49 was undertaken in the State of the Service Report 2003–04, which found that employees were more likely to report that they had experienced bullying or harassment than discrimination. The 2005 employee survey did not ask about discrimination but did ask if employees had experienced bullying or harassment during the last 12 months. This year, 17% of employees reported that they had been subjected to bullying or harassment in the workplace, while 3% were not sure. This represents a slight increase on last year’s result (15%). The slight increase observed this year may be partially affected by not including a question on the related issue of discrimination in the 2005 employee survey.
It may be that this year some employees, in considering their responses to bullying and harassment, included behaviour that may have been reported as discrimination last year. These results continue to be unsatisfactory, even though they are lower than the results for some State jurisdictions.
Comparable information is available from Victoria, SA and WA. Twenty-three per cent of public servants who responded to the Victorian Commissioner for Public Employment’s People Matter Survey 2004 said that they had personally experienced harassment or bullying within their organisation within the 12 months prior to the survey.50 In SA, 26% of public servants who responded to a 2004 survey by the SA Office for the Commissioner of Public Employment said that they had personally experienced bullying and harassment in the workplace in the previous 12 months.51 In WA, 26% of public servants from the health and education sectors who responded to a 2004–05 public sector climate survey said that they had been subjected to bullying or harassment in the last 12 months.52 Differences in the questions asked in these surveys and variations in methodology mean that comparisons between these figures should be treated with caution, but the results suggest that concern about APS employee behaviour needs to be tempered. In addition, research conducted internationally by the Beyond Bullying Association53 indicates that between 25% and 50% of employees will experience bullying at some time in their working lives, and that 4% to 20% of people will have been bullied in the past six to 12 months.
The experience of bullying or harassment appears to be much higher among certain groups—women (20%) were more likely to experience bullying or harassment than men (14%). Indigenous employees (34%), people with a disability (22%), and people from NESB1 (21%), compared to people not from these groups (17%), although the result for people with a disability was not significant.
Women, Indigenous employees and people from NESB1, were significantly more likely to state that they had been subjected to bullying or harassment than were people with a disability compared to other employees. These results differ from last year’s results which found that employees with a disability were significantly more likely to believe they had experienced bullying or harassment than other employees (24% compared to 15%), and that there were no statistically significant differences on the basis of the other groups.54
Classification level continued to be relevant to the likelihood of reporting bullying or harassment in 2004–05. This year there were statistically significant differences between SES (8%) and non-SES (32%) employees, with higher rates of bullying or harassment reported by APS 1–6 (18%) and EL (14%) employees. It would appear that the higher the classification the less likely it is that an employee will feel that they are being subjected to bullying or harassment (see Figure 9.16).
Figure 9.16: Proportion of employees reporting bullying or harassment, by classification, 2003–04 and 2004–05
Source: Employee survey
47 The Act, s. 13(3).
48 For the purpose of the employee survey, discrimination was defined as any distinction, exclusion or preference made on the basis of race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction, social origin or other attributes that removes equality of opportunity of treatment in employment. It does not include any distinction, exclusion or preference in respect of a particular job based on the inherent requirements of the job or any distinction, exclusion or preference which is a special measure to eliminate employment related disadvantage of a particular group.
49 For the purpose of the employee survey workplace harassment was defined as entailing offensive, belittling or threatening behaviour directed at an individual or group of APS employees. The behaviour was described as unwelcome, unsolicited, usually unreciprocated and usually (but not always) repeated. While the survey noted that there is no standard definition of workplace bullying it stated that it is generally used to describe repeated workplace behaviour that could reasonably be considered to be humiliating, intimidating, threatening or demeaning to an individual or group of individuals. It also stated that it can be covert or overt.
50 Office for the Commissioner for Public Employment, Vic, People Matter Survey 2004.
51 Office for the Commission of Public Employment, SA Workplace Perspectives Survey 2004.
52 Office of the Public Sector Standards Commissioner, Western Australia, Public Sector Climate Survey, 2004–05.
53 Information from the Beyond Bullying Association Inc website, under the heading ‘How many experience it?’ <http://www.connectedqld.org.au>
54 In this context the results were not statistically significant at the 95% Confidence Interval (see Appendix 2 for more information on confidence intervals).
