Canada’s epidemic of workplace abuse is hurting employees and the economy

The high-profile criminal cases of alleged sexual misconduct against prominent Canadian businessmen Peter Nygard and Frank Stronach highlight an epidemic of abuse in the workplace.
Stronach denies the allegations against him, which have not been proven in court. Nygard is appealing his conviction on sexual assault charges.
In a report earlier this year, Statistics Canada found that 47 per cent of women and 31 per cent of men among the 12,138 respondents to its latest survey of workplace conditions reported experiencing harassment or sexual assault at work.
That’s an increase from StatsCan’s 2018 report on harassment in Canadian workplaces, which found 19 per cent of women and 13 per cent of men experienced workplace harassment.
Workers aged 25 to 34 reported the highest rate of workplace harassment or sexual abuse.
What StatsCan calls “inappropriate sexualized behaviour,” ranging from persistent unwanted touching to violent sexual assault, was reported by 57 per cent of women in that age group, and 37 per cent of men.
In our far too many dehumanizing workplaces, both women and men are victims of sexual, verbal and physical abuse that goes unchecked.
A separate report last year by the federal Ministry of Employment and Social Development found 60 per cent of workers canvassed had experienced workplace harassment.
Thirty per cent said they had been subjected to sexual harassment, and 21 per cent reported experiencing workplace violence.
Those studies have also shown an increase in inappropriate behaviour toward people of colour, Indigenous Peoples, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
There is a great deal at stake here, in addition to violations of human rights.
Toxic workplaces contribute to labour shortages as people prematurely quit the workforce or decline to join it because they believe it to be unsafe.
High turnover and employees fearful of harassment and thus distracted at work are a factor in Canada’s laggard rate of productivity growth, a chief measure of standard of living.
By most accounts, workplace stress has increased in recent years. That phenomenon, which degrades workplace efficiency, traces in part to increased harassment in its many forms.
Enlightened employers create employee task forces that periodically identify problems and suggest solutions.
Such grassroots initiatives provide not only an accurate reading of employee morale, but can alert managers to other problems, such as destructive departmental rivalries.
And employers can consult the guidebook on creating and maintaining a safe workplace published by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC).
The OHRC’s 23 basic measures for creating an effective anti-sexual harassment regime cover the essentials and include examples of how to handle varied situations.
The measures include keeping complainants up to date on the status of their cases, which is too seldom done; ensuring complainants are safe from reprisal; and making available a mediation process that empowers victims on the course of actions to be taken.
“Employers have a duty to ensure a poison-free work environment,” says the OHRC.
Which is to say, it is the law that employers protect their employees.
With laws and anti-harassment policies in place at most major employers, what sustains the epidemic of abuse?
The paradox lies with employers’ only casual regard for their anti-harassment policies. And most victims choose not to report harm they have suffered, usually for fear of reprisal.
Most employers’ anti-harassment policies are not sufficiently entrenched in the workplace culture, and that discourages reporting.
A landmark Harvard University report in 2020 found about 40 per cent of the women canvassed at more than 800 U.S. companies had been sexually harassed at work.
Most employer anti-harassment policies fail, wrote report co-authors Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, professors at Harvard and Tel Aviv University, respectively.
In fact, often they are “little more than managerial snake oil,” the authors assert.
They note that most anti-harassment policies, which proliferated in the 1990s and have not changed since, were devised by lawyers not to protect employees but to shield employers from lawsuits by victims.
And so, grievance procedures for victims are adversarial with a high bar for evidence that amounts to requiring a perpetrator’s confession or a witness.
And perpetrators found to have violated employer policy usually remained on the premises, sometimes required to take a sensitivity training course but nothing harsher.
By contrast, victims, the authors found, are often subjected to retaliation in the form of subsequent assault, demotion or firing by the harasser or the harasser’s friends.
“Our current grievance system puts victims at a distinct disadvantage, through unenforceable confidentiality rules, a high evidentiary bar, and punishments that leave the harasser in place,” the authors wrote.
We know how to create the culture of workplace safety essential to the operation of mines, airlines, hospitals and construction sites.
But for now, anti-social behaviour — bullying, sexual harassment, and assault — is a holdout from the more comprehensive workplace safety reform that workers deserve and a well-functioning economy needs.