Professional harassing

The professional harassing is a topic with the crossing of several fields: medical, social, legal, the work world, the policy. It regularly does the one of many newspapers: " harassing with the travail" , " stress of the cadres" , " the burn out" …
Le delivers Marie-France Hirigoyen " The moral Harassing " was sold to thousands of specimens and was translated into a score of languages.

Violence with work is an alarming phenomenon everywhere in the world and in strong progression. The companies and the public authorities were led to take measures to prevent it and try to reduce it. In the companies, one more and more often calls upon the services of Psychologue S, Psychiatre S, of structures of psychological support, débriefing… after having created in years 70,80, the Directions of Human Resources (famous DRH) which replaced the personnel departments of. Since a certain number of years, violence with work and its effects on health are the subject of studies undertaken by the company doctors and the doctors Psychiatre S. They testify to new pathologies which touch today all the categories of paid: of the employee or the workman, with the executives. It is a new phenomenon: the Souffrance with work relates to all the hierarchy.

An assessment of violence to work

A report/ratio of the ILO (International office of work) in connection with an investigation into 15 states of the European Union in 1996 (15800 interviews).

Physical violence 6 million either 4% of the workers
Sexual harassment 3 million or 2%
Intimidations, brimades: 12 million is 8%

In France:

Physical violence: men: 11,2%, women: 8,9%
Sexual harassment against the women: 19,8%

Violence and work always cohabited but if work were formerly the source of a physical violence, today it is associated more and more with a psychological violence. This violence mainly finds its origin in the new forms of organization of work and of management appeared there is about thirty years which led to a degradation of the social relations, the precarisation of work and the Chômage.

When cases of violence are evoked, it is necessary to pay attention to good to name it so that each one includes/understands well what it acts. A difficulty which should be integrated: according to professional environments or social, the levels of admissibility of violence are not the same ones.

Definitions

Origin of the word work

It is pointed out that the word work originates in Latin: Trepallium which is an instrument of torture.

Violence

It is " an abuse force" , a brute force used to subject somebody. It is a constraint exerted by the force. One passed from the concept of constraint physical to the concept of moral constraint.

The mobbing

Described by a psychologist of German work in 1993, Heinz Leymann, it is about a process of harassing of a victim by one or more persecutors following a banal conflict. It is about a process self-sustained and repeated over one long period which appears in particular by behaviors, words, gestures, unilateral writings, likely to attack the personality, to the dignity or the physical integrity or psychic of the other. It has a destroying effect on psychic balance of the individual and its social integration. It almost always leads to an exclusion of paid the victim but also to serious mental health disorders or physics. Definition of M.Drida: " Suffering inflicted on work place in the durable, repetitive and or systematic way by one or of the people to another person by any means relating to the relations, the organization, the contents or the work conditions by diverting them of their finality, thus expressing an intention conscious or unconscious of even harming of détruire." Violence with work according to Christophe Dejours, it is the physical constraint exerted on the victim. The causes of the noted sufferings are the domination and the injustice. One distinguishes two types of violence to work:

an external violence: the injury is caused by a person external with the company
an internal violence: exerted by a person or a group of people of the company. Under the internal term of violence, one will gather as well the mobbing as moral and sexual harassing.

External violence

It concerns all the individuals who occupy of the trades in the service companies, which have a social role: banks, trade, basic transport, station, police force, social security, urban transport… the aggressions generate psychic and/or physical traumatisms. Many work led to the recognition of the concept of victim and creation still very recent in France, of a diploma of victimology.

Internal violence

One is not here any more in a violent and single traumatism, occurring brutally, but vis-a-vis repeated and durable aggressions, which have a finality. One distinguishes:

the institutional Harassing which takes part of a strategy of management of the whole of the personnel: violence does not concern a problem episodical or individual but quite structural and strategic.
the professional Harassing organized against one or several employees precisely designated, intended to circumvent the legal procedures of dismissal.
the individual Harassing practiced with a free aim of destruction of others and valorization of its own capacity.
the moral Harcèlement is a technique of destruction and is not a clinical syndrome.

Techniques of mobbing concerning an individual " the victime" comprise intrigues aiming to:

to prevent It from expressing
to criticize work
threats verbal, written or telephone
to be unaware of its presence, to refuse the contact
to insulate It
to prohibit to the colleagues to address the word
to him to discredit it near the colleagues
scandalmongerings, calumnies (it (it) is insane (insane),…) attacks against its convictions, invasions of privacy
to discredit it in its work: work useless or humiliating, tasks higher than competences
to compromise its health: physical aggression

Psychic mechanisms concerned

The Psychopathologie of work studies people with work, on the real work place. It makes it possible to include/understand how the workers manage to avoid the mental disease. Christophe Dejours particularly studied the new forms of organization of work and the mental health. In its work " Suffering in France" , he wonders about the reasons which lead the employees to take part in generating situations of their own suffering or that their colleagues. Work is source of satisfaction and social recognition. The problems cause frustrations which in the long run can resound on the body. Conscious and unconscious psychic mechanisms come into play to tolerate the violence installation to which the individuals resign themselves.

The majority of the individuals save their health at the prices of efforts described under the term of individual but so collective strategies of defense. When a situation of work conceals a threat for the physical integrity or psychic, the capacities of action of the employees are exceeded. It is necessary to make with the fear which is incompatible with the continuation of work. One fights against the fear: in fact the practices of reinsurance, of bravado put in scene the capacity to face the risk.

For Christophe Dejours " The collective strategies of defenses contribute in a decisive way to cohesion of the collective of work, because to work is not only to have one activity is also to live: to live the report/ratio with the constraint, to live together, face resistance to reality, to build together the direction of the work, the situation and the souffrance."

A collective control on the expression of the subjectivity of each individual contributes to exclude any word on the fear or any expression of fear or allusion to the apprehension vis-a-vis an insufficiently controlled danger. The strategies of defense against the suffering appear by the marginalisation and the exclusion of those which do not conform to it.

Example: contests at the executives still called " cow boys" , putting in scene cynicism, the capacity to still better do in term of Collective redundancy (" dégraissage" in jargon), to hold the announced objectives… They show their capacity to be made salts it work and leave grown by admiration their colleagues.
La virility plays an important role in the zeal to make the dirty job. One belongs to the elites of the company.

The vulgarizing of the evil

It is initiated by the political handling of the threat of precarisation and social exclusion. The communication distortion maintains the belief which we live in an economic logic of war.

According to Christophe Dejours, it occurs the splitting of the ego: two operations in the individual who puts this one in the incapacity to think of the misfortune of others. It refers for example to the personality of Adolf Eichmann, the normopathe, and with work of Hannah Arendt: the individual puts blinkers. That is easier for that which is not with the direct contact with the suffering of others, which are not in the vicinity immediate and daily spectacle of work (example: a chairman). The employees are in a remote world. This individual carries on an activity for example in the offices of a company, an administration (guaranteed employment) or a branch of industry which is not touched by the threat. It is also that which knows the injustice only by the means of others.

The victims of the processes of exclusion are those which for a reason or another are not able to contribute to the collective refusal which makes it possible to hold with the work. They are very often in a more authentic report/ratio with work and therefore they are rejected or that they cannot reinstate work.

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