Image shows a white male in a black hoodie, who looks unhappy
A recent article found that 80% of British workers report experiencing violence or abuse in the workplace.
Eighty. Percent. Eight out of ten people are made to feel some level of non-task-related concern for their personal safety when they think about showing up for work.
I wonder if that might have any connection with the "endemic state" of "people claiming they're too mentally unwell to work" that the UK government keeps throwing shade about? Might the "failure to cope with normal human experience" that snide, comfortably-financed, well-protected MPs snarl about and threaten to reduce people to absolute poverty for "not just getting over" actually be a much more understandable cognitive block around putting oneself in a situation where you are at risk when you did not expect that kind of risk?
Employers nope out on dealing with workplace aggression, whether from colleagues or customers/clients by shrugging that "You get paid to deal with this sort of thing." No. People get paid for the known and stated risks of their actual job - for working at heights, for working with open flames, for long hours of driving, for working with unpredictable animals, for working in natural-hazard conditions. For knowingly risking death or serious injury as part of their job (eg, soldiers, police, combat-zone medics.)
A paycheque is not compensation for abusive behaviour.
"Oh, but abuse is so difficult to define...everyone thinks they're being 'abused', these days, because TikTok!"
Eighty. Percent. Eight out of ten people are made to feel some level of non-task-related concern for their personal safety when they think about showing up for work.
I wonder if that might have any connection with the "endemic state" of "people claiming they're too mentally unwell to work" that the UK government keeps throwing shade about? Might the "failure to cope with normal human experience" that snide, comfortably-financed, well-protected MPs snarl about and threaten to reduce people to absolute poverty for "not just getting over" actually be a much more understandable cognitive block around putting oneself in a situation where you are at risk when you did not expect that kind of risk?
Employers nope out on dealing with workplace aggression, whether from colleagues or customers/clients by shrugging that "You get paid to deal with this sort of thing." No. People get paid for the known and stated risks of their actual job - for working at heights, for working with open flames, for long hours of driving, for working with unpredictable animals, for working in natural-hazard conditions. For knowingly risking death or serious injury as part of their job (eg, soldiers, police, combat-zone medics.)
A paycheque is not compensation for abusive behaviour.
"Oh, but abuse is so difficult to define...everyone thinks they're being 'abused', these days, because TikTok!"
Jog all the way on. Abuse is easy to define.
Abuse is avoidable harm, deliberately caused, in full knowledge that the behaviour would result in injury or distress.
If I'm playfighting with my wife, and she was happy to start playfighting, and I hit her a little too hard - that is an accident. I still need to apologise, I still need to stop playfighting, I still need to check her over, maybe get her medical attention, but it is an accident. I did not deliberately hit her that hard.
In contrast, if I slap my wife when she's just going about her day? That's abuse. I didn't have to do that - I could have avoided doing it. I deliberately chose to raise my hand, to strike her. Even if she's "not hurt that much!" - I have still caused distress. Yes, slaps are unlikely to result in injury, but a slap from someone who claims to love you when you have not consented to playfighting, or any kind of mutual messing about, is upsetting. That is something that we absolutely know, as humans, from literally three years old - proven by the fact that any toddler who is smacked will set up an outraged howl about it.
"But people need to let off steam sometimes! Are you telling me you've never felt frustrated at someone doing their job badly?" That's why I carry on incorporating kickboxing into my workouts, even though I'll never be part of competitive kickboxing again. It's why the notebook I keep for my freelance contracts has pages just labelled "Venting". It's why, in a call centre job I did at 18, we were encouraged to have a "scruff" notepad, which went home with us at the end of the day, and was exempt from audit or oversight.
It's why gyms have punchbags.
It's why there's no limits on how far or fast people can run, beyond their own bodies.
I've definitely wanted to get in people's faces - usually, for me, people I work with, rather than people I'm engaging with as a customer. But I don't do that. I've had to process that, being a stocky, six-feet-tall man, even showing frustration on my face, or in my voice, things like standing too close to someone, making sarcastic quips, can come across as threatening to others - that often leaves me feeling frustrated about "not being allowed to be annoyed", especially if female colleagues are constantly getting at me for things, or a female staff member is being rude and seemingly deliberately incompetent. But it would never cross my mind that there is any justification for me yelling at someone, or physically lashing out at them.
I've been physically assaulted at work.
.Grabbed by my throat and thrown into a wall of metal racking. (A customer, in a retail environment. I was 17.)
.Pushed and yelled at. (Customer. Retail environment. I was 18.)
.Multiple occasions of female customers smacking me on the arse to "get your attention, since you're off in your own world" (retail. I was shelf stacking. The oldest I was was 20; the youngest woman was probably in her 40s.)
.Rubbish bins and chairs thrown at me whilst being called slurs (A manager. Finance. I was 21.)
I've been verbally abused at work
.A customer threatening to "find out where you live, m*rder you, set your house on fire, and r*pe your family" (A call centre. I was 18. I'd had the absolute nerve to call her to schedule a delivery. Of 9k worth of furniture she'd ordered. She also told me to "shove the f-king furniture up your gay arse"...but cis women are never the problem...)
If I'm playfighting with my wife, and she was happy to start playfighting, and I hit her a little too hard - that is an accident. I still need to apologise, I still need to stop playfighting, I still need to check her over, maybe get her medical attention, but it is an accident. I did not deliberately hit her that hard.
In contrast, if I slap my wife when she's just going about her day? That's abuse. I didn't have to do that - I could have avoided doing it. I deliberately chose to raise my hand, to strike her. Even if she's "not hurt that much!" - I have still caused distress. Yes, slaps are unlikely to result in injury, but a slap from someone who claims to love you when you have not consented to playfighting, or any kind of mutual messing about, is upsetting. That is something that we absolutely know, as humans, from literally three years old - proven by the fact that any toddler who is smacked will set up an outraged howl about it.
"But people need to let off steam sometimes! Are you telling me you've never felt frustrated at someone doing their job badly?" That's why I carry on incorporating kickboxing into my workouts, even though I'll never be part of competitive kickboxing again. It's why the notebook I keep for my freelance contracts has pages just labelled "Venting". It's why, in a call centre job I did at 18, we were encouraged to have a "scruff" notepad, which went home with us at the end of the day, and was exempt from audit or oversight.
It's why gyms have punchbags.
It's why there's no limits on how far or fast people can run, beyond their own bodies.
I've definitely wanted to get in people's faces - usually, for me, people I work with, rather than people I'm engaging with as a customer. But I don't do that. I've had to process that, being a stocky, six-feet-tall man, even showing frustration on my face, or in my voice, things like standing too close to someone, making sarcastic quips, can come across as threatening to others - that often leaves me feeling frustrated about "not being allowed to be annoyed", especially if female colleagues are constantly getting at me for things, or a female staff member is being rude and seemingly deliberately incompetent. But it would never cross my mind that there is any justification for me yelling at someone, or physically lashing out at them.
I've been physically assaulted at work.
.Grabbed by my throat and thrown into a wall of metal racking. (A customer, in a retail environment. I was 17.)
.Pushed and yelled at. (Customer. Retail environment. I was 18.)
.Multiple occasions of female customers smacking me on the arse to "get your attention, since you're off in your own world" (retail. I was shelf stacking. The oldest I was was 20; the youngest woman was probably in her 40s.)
.Rubbish bins and chairs thrown at me whilst being called slurs (A manager. Finance. I was 21.)
I've been verbally abused at work
.A customer threatening to "find out where you live, m*rder you, set your house on fire, and r*pe your family" (A call centre. I was 18. I'd had the absolute nerve to call her to schedule a delivery. Of 9k worth of furniture she'd ordered. She also told me to "shove the f-king furniture up your gay arse"...but cis women are never the problem...)
.Being called slurs (the finance manager I mentioned, a different manager in a different finance job when I was 23, two different managers in a healthcare setting when I was 36)
.Being aggressively yelled at in a meeting (healthcare, 36, senior manager doing the yelling.)
People aren't "claiming that expressions of frustration are abuse", much as the media and the government like to insist that's what's happening when they want to engage in low-level systemic bullying.
People are going into workplaces where a level of violence, aggression, and intimidation that should be criminal is treated as "something you get paid to put up with."
Most of my experiences happened in the early 2000s. (The healthcare experiences were in 2023, but everything else was a lot longer ago.) It was bad then, and it's only got worse, across all levels of society, since the pandemic. It's almost as though people came out of that with an attitude of genuinely delusional entitlement - "I was made to do things I didn't like! Well, now I'm just going to behave however I want, and I have to be allowed to get away with that behaviour, because I'm owed!"
.Being aggressively yelled at in a meeting (healthcare, 36, senior manager doing the yelling.)
People aren't "claiming that expressions of frustration are abuse", much as the media and the government like to insist that's what's happening when they want to engage in low-level systemic bullying.
People are going into workplaces where a level of violence, aggression, and intimidation that should be criminal is treated as "something you get paid to put up with."
Most of my experiences happened in the early 2000s. (The healthcare experiences were in 2023, but everything else was a lot longer ago.) It was bad then, and it's only got worse, across all levels of society, since the pandemic. It's almost as though people came out of that with an attitude of genuinely delusional entitlement - "I was made to do things I didn't like! Well, now I'm just going to behave however I want, and I have to be allowed to get away with that behaviour, because I'm owed!"
Bullsh*t.
I was a shielding household, with a medically vulnerable spouse. No car, no income, no comfy furlough or fraudulently claimed "Covid loans." No ability to set up a cushy little business that went to full time earnings in two months. (I actually lost a business I'd set up six months before, which was just starting to come onto the early track of plausible profitability.)
I was a shielding household, with a medically vulnerable spouse. No car, no income, no comfy furlough or fraudulently claimed "Covid loans." No ability to set up a cushy little business that went to full time earnings in two months. (I actually lost a business I'd set up six months before, which was just starting to come onto the early track of plausible profitability.)
If I can come out of the pandemic without a sense of grievance that I feel justified taking out on any random I come across, the rest of you can get it together and behave like grown adults.
The height of the pandemic, the height of the "inconvenience" most people experienced, was over half a decade ago. We're in the middle of a new crisis now. (At least one. More like 3 or 4, simultaneously.)
Did the government behave badly during the pandemic? Yes. Was the pandemic mismanaged, on a national response level? Very probably. Are the same mistakes going to be repeated with the current crises? Almost certainly.
But that should make you determined to be better humans. To show up the government incompetence, the systemic failings. Your behaviour, your attitudes, should be so flawless that the government can't avoid looking grubby and frayed in contrast to them.
Abuse at work, whether by colleagues or customers/clients, happens because of systemic failings.
. Parents are allowed to maintain a belief that hitting their child/ren, shouting at their child/ren, smashing things which belong to their child/ren, is all completely fine, because "I'm only not allowed to use something other than my own hand to hit them!" Because "they need to be told!"
When you create a delusion that "telling" your child/ren, "getting them to get with the programme", creating a situation where they do what you need them to do, means hitting them, shouting at them, pushing them, breaking their things, you do not typically let go of that delusion when you're in the wider world - because it is a delusion (you can ask firmly, you can enact non-aggressive consequences...there is no need for violence to a child), it behaves like a delusion, causing you to perceive anyone who is either actually younger than you, or "junior in life position" as your child. And if your child doesn't do what you want? If your child annoys you? You can hit them. You can scream in their face. You can start breaking things.
. Schools treat bullying as "not worth bothering about" because "they'll grow out of it, and anyway, the kids being bullied need to learn resilience."
I could write a book on how much I hate the current concept of "resilience", and how bastardised the term has become.
As we see, school bullies do not "grow out of it" - they become adult bullies. The managers who make people dread going into work every morning. The colleague people try desperately to avoid. The person who berates retail staff. The people who sneer at hospitality workers about "this is why you get a decent education!"
School bullies need to be sent to residential education settings during everyone else's school holidays. They need to be kicked out of the lessons they enjoy. Their parents need to be fined, and mandated to attend parenting classes, and forcibly sterilised. (In reversible ways - tubal ligation, vasectomy; once those parents have proved they are capable of raising emotionally intelligent children, who respect the rights of other people, those procedures can be reversed, and they can go about their lives and have as many children as they are able to afford to support.)
. The misquoting of Harry Selfridge has a lot to answer for.
What he actually said was "the customer is always right in matters of taste" - which means if the customer wants to buy something that looks ugly on them, you tell them how well it suits them, and you do not try and talk them out of buying it.
Reducing it to "the customer is always right" has reduced customer-facing staff, in the minds of certain types of people, to essentially automatons who are just there to do exactly what you want, exactly how and when you want it done, and who, additionally, have the ability to ensure everything you want to see in a particular setting is there, at the price and in the condition you want to see it, and that anything that isn't relevant to you personally is removed ahead of your (unscheduled) visit.
When we have people who live in a delusion that, because their children are "lesser" than them, anyone they perceive as "lesser than them" can be treated the way they treat their children, when school bullies not only receive no consequences, but are often rewarded by being put forward for participation in activities which get them out of school, are actually fun, by having more support, by being given more spaces within and around school, we're going to end up with a systemic problem where people who view other human beings as "responsible" for managing their "experience" of the world, as "responsible" for handling their emotional regulation, feel completely justified in behaving with violence and hostility when those others do not just behave like AI servants, creating a flawlessly pleasing experience.
. Britishness has a lot to answer for.
British "good manners" has essentially made setting boundaries and enacting consequences "rudeness" - I've lost track of the number of times I've been punished more harshly for telling someone I won't accept them talking to me a certain way than the person throwing slurs around has been.
I got sent home in disgrace when I tried to fight off the customer who had me by my throat - that customer, I found out when I came back to work, had been given a 25% discount, and very much soothed and placated about "his experience" (of...grabbing a 17 year old by the throat, and throwing them into lumps of metal, whilst yelling at them...)
Being British used to mean calling out "cads and bounders", and quietly informing someone who had violated another person's safety that "my gun is in the third drawer on the left hand side of my desk. I keep it loaded", before leaving the room. It used to mean engaging in duels to defend honour.
Now? "Britishness" is just...pretending the slur, the punch, the shove, the beating of a small child by a grown adult, the screaming...isn't happening. Move along, keep quiet, let them sort it out.
We need systemic, reliably enforced measures to make it clear that aggression, violence, and abuse is never acceptable, in any situation.
Because no one is going to go into a space where they feel at risk - not a school, not a workplace.
The government has no way of compelling everyone to get back to work; if everyone who experiences violence and abuse in their workplace just quit - didn't claim welfare, just...stopped showing up, having prepared for months without any kind of income, society would break down, as far as the government was concerned, in a matter of weeks.
If you feel threatened at work, and you have the ability to live with, and be supported by, someone who feels safe in their work, and is safe for you to be with? Quit your job. Cut your discretionary spending to the bone so you can live responsibly with that other person, without making a claim for State benefits.
If you don't have that option - look for another job. Start now. Make it obvious. Drop everything except the minimum requirements of your contract. You'll probably get sacked - immediately go and sign on. (You'll quickly realise no one is getting "thousands of pounds a month at the taxpayers' expense") Make sure to tell the Jobcentre that you lost your last job because of the impact of workplace violence/hostility/abuse. The government starts to care about addressing problems once those problems cost them money, either directly, through welfare payments, or indirectly, through lost tax revenues.
Employers: when you observe some "tension" between team members, all parties should be mandated to take an emotional intelligence course. No excuses. Managers will almost certainly insist they're "too busy" - redistribute their workload. If someone calls in sick, or takes annual leave? They're scheduled for the next available course on their return.
Reciprocal mentoring and reflective practice - both of which The Productive Pessimist is available to facilitate - should be routine parts of every company's work focus.
If the problem is customers/clients; those customers/clients should not be allowed near your business. They should be blacklisted across your sector/industry. They should be publicly identified. It doesn't matter how much money they spend - the cost of losing staff who walk out because they refuse to be someone else's frontal cortex or punching bag is going to far exceed any sales you may have made off an abusive customer or client.
School bullies need to be sent to residential education settings during everyone else's school holidays. They need to be kicked out of the lessons they enjoy. Their parents need to be fined, and mandated to attend parenting classes, and forcibly sterilised. (In reversible ways - tubal ligation, vasectomy; once those parents have proved they are capable of raising emotionally intelligent children, who respect the rights of other people, those procedures can be reversed, and they can go about their lives and have as many children as they are able to afford to support.)
. The misquoting of Harry Selfridge has a lot to answer for.
What he actually said was "the customer is always right in matters of taste" - which means if the customer wants to buy something that looks ugly on them, you tell them how well it suits them, and you do not try and talk them out of buying it.
Reducing it to "the customer is always right" has reduced customer-facing staff, in the minds of certain types of people, to essentially automatons who are just there to do exactly what you want, exactly how and when you want it done, and who, additionally, have the ability to ensure everything you want to see in a particular setting is there, at the price and in the condition you want to see it, and that anything that isn't relevant to you personally is removed ahead of your (unscheduled) visit.
When we have people who live in a delusion that, because their children are "lesser" than them, anyone they perceive as "lesser than them" can be treated the way they treat their children, when school bullies not only receive no consequences, but are often rewarded by being put forward for participation in activities which get them out of school, are actually fun, by having more support, by being given more spaces within and around school, we're going to end up with a systemic problem where people who view other human beings as "responsible" for managing their "experience" of the world, as "responsible" for handling their emotional regulation, feel completely justified in behaving with violence and hostility when those others do not just behave like AI servants, creating a flawlessly pleasing experience.
. Britishness has a lot to answer for.
British "good manners" has essentially made setting boundaries and enacting consequences "rudeness" - I've lost track of the number of times I've been punished more harshly for telling someone I won't accept them talking to me a certain way than the person throwing slurs around has been.
I got sent home in disgrace when I tried to fight off the customer who had me by my throat - that customer, I found out when I came back to work, had been given a 25% discount, and very much soothed and placated about "his experience" (of...grabbing a 17 year old by the throat, and throwing them into lumps of metal, whilst yelling at them...)
Being British used to mean calling out "cads and bounders", and quietly informing someone who had violated another person's safety that "my gun is in the third drawer on the left hand side of my desk. I keep it loaded", before leaving the room. It used to mean engaging in duels to defend honour.
Now? "Britishness" is just...pretending the slur, the punch, the shove, the beating of a small child by a grown adult, the screaming...isn't happening. Move along, keep quiet, let them sort it out.
We need systemic, reliably enforced measures to make it clear that aggression, violence, and abuse is never acceptable, in any situation.
Because no one is going to go into a space where they feel at risk - not a school, not a workplace.
The government has no way of compelling everyone to get back to work; if everyone who experiences violence and abuse in their workplace just quit - didn't claim welfare, just...stopped showing up, having prepared for months without any kind of income, society would break down, as far as the government was concerned, in a matter of weeks.
If you feel threatened at work, and you have the ability to live with, and be supported by, someone who feels safe in their work, and is safe for you to be with? Quit your job. Cut your discretionary spending to the bone so you can live responsibly with that other person, without making a claim for State benefits.
If you don't have that option - look for another job. Start now. Make it obvious. Drop everything except the minimum requirements of your contract. You'll probably get sacked - immediately go and sign on. (You'll quickly realise no one is getting "thousands of pounds a month at the taxpayers' expense") Make sure to tell the Jobcentre that you lost your last job because of the impact of workplace violence/hostility/abuse. The government starts to care about addressing problems once those problems cost them money, either directly, through welfare payments, or indirectly, through lost tax revenues.
Employers: when you observe some "tension" between team members, all parties should be mandated to take an emotional intelligence course. No excuses. Managers will almost certainly insist they're "too busy" - redistribute their workload. If someone calls in sick, or takes annual leave? They're scheduled for the next available course on their return.
Reciprocal mentoring and reflective practice - both of which The Productive Pessimist is available to facilitate - should be routine parts of every company's work focus.
If the problem is customers/clients; those customers/clients should not be allowed near your business. They should be blacklisted across your sector/industry. They should be publicly identified. It doesn't matter how much money they spend - the cost of losing staff who walk out because they refuse to be someone else's frontal cortex or punching bag is going to far exceed any sales you may have made off an abusive customer or client.
We need to bring back real, high-impact, non-violent consequences for both engaging in and allowing poor behaviour from others.
Once the negative consequences of "You do not behave like that!" are fully experienced, then you can move to the emotional intelligence support of "Here's how to handle the feelings that previously made you behave in X way in a more effective and appropriate way."
We also need to be a lot better at publicly praising, and meaningfully rewarding, positive behaviours, rather than just ignoring the "good" kids, the "decent" colleagues, the "respectful" customers and clients - because, sometimes, the reality is people don't know how to behave because they've never seen good behaviour rewarded.
Once the negative consequences of "You do not behave like that!" are fully experienced, then you can move to the emotional intelligence support of "Here's how to handle the feelings that previously made you behave in X way in a more effective and appropriate way."
We also need to be a lot better at publicly praising, and meaningfully rewarding, positive behaviours, rather than just ignoring the "good" kids, the "decent" colleagues, the "respectful" customers and clients - because, sometimes, the reality is people don't know how to behave because they've never seen good behaviour rewarded.
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