The Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Workplace Harassment was promulgated on the 18th of March 2022 as a very welcome and long overdue development calculated at eliminating workplace harassment. This important milestone was, however, reached without much excitement from Labour, notwithstanding its potential to protect South African workers from this scourge.
This was rather surprising, given the fact that in 2010 the World Health Organisation conducted a global study on the cost of workplace violence which found that 78% of workers sampled in South Africa had suffered one or the other form of abuse/ violence in the workplace, leading to WHO labelling the situation in South Africa as abnormally severe.
The fact that the promulgation of the Code only happened 12 years later, makes it more likely that the situation is even worse than it was when the WHO study was conducted in 2010, subjecting workers to untold harm without the necessary legal protection. As individual organisations and even the justice system floundered in trying to deal with cases of workplace bullying without the necessary legal guidance, workplace bullies were getting brazen, creating bully-prone workplaces.
Protecting employees
The harmful acts meted against defenceless employees, often led to secondary trauma when targets of bullying in the workplace attempted to challenge bully behaviours, resulting in financial, emotional, and even psychological devastation, while workplace bullies were afforded protection by the very organisations that are supposed to be responsible for creating harassment/ bully-free work environments.
The first limitation of the Code is that it does not define workplace harassment and the Code appears to use the concepts “workplace harassment” and “workplace bullying” interchangeably. Nevertheless, the Code construes harassment in the workplace as constituting a barrier to equity, and equality in the workplace, and the Code is unequivocal that harassment needs to be eliminated, in its entirety.
The Code recognises that there is a multitude of ways in which employees can be bullied and the Code highlights categories of harassment based on racial, ethnic and social origins harassment. This affords all workers in South African workplaces protection from bullying including physical, psychological and emotional abuse, physical abuse. The Code also replaces the Code of Good Practice on the elimination of sexual harassment, by including sexual harassment under this Code. This, therefore, suggests a need for organisations to incorporate their sexual harassment policies into overall workplace anti-harassment policies.
Being compliant pays
Given the generally low levels of compliance with South African labour legislation, it is reasonable to expect that as employers scramble to comply with the legislation, at least the level of awareness of workplace bullying/ harassment will increase, leading to higher vulnerability of employers to legal challenges. Most organisations need to go back to the drawing board and update their anti-harassment policies to accommodate all manifestations of bullying and how to deal with them.
The promulgation of the Code is likely to bolster interest in research on trends in workplace bullying, which is currently lagging if baseline data is collected now against which future trends can be tracked, to provide clear evidence of the impact of the Code on reducing this scourge which causes immeasurable harm. The bystanders to episodes of workplace bullying are also not left unscathed, particularly bystanders who are altruistic and believe in egalitarian values. The multiple bullying entry points and the many negative effects on the individual targets the bystanders, the bullies themselves as well as the organisations they serve, call for the delivery of comprehensive services calculated at preventing and eliminating all forms of harassment in South African workplaces. among various HR portfolios, notably HRD, IR/ER/ Employee Health and Wellness and getting these portfolios working together is critical to ensuring that the problem is tackled from all angles.
The benefit of the collaborative approach includes disseminating information widely to ensure that the workforce at large is informed about the manifestation of harassment/ bullying, including empowering bystanders to intervene constructively, and handling and investigating complaints without fear of favour!
The establishment of harassment and bully-free work environments is a business imperative that organisations should embrace as more than a mere compliance exercise!