Filing a psychological harassment complaint in the workplace: a difficult history/Porter plainte pour harcelement psychologique au travail: un recit difficile/Presentar queja por hostigamiento sicologico en el trabajo: un relato dificil.

Summary

Following in the wake of several European countries, Quebec adopted a bill in December 2002 to modify the Labour Code and other legislative measures by the introduction of measures pertaining to psychological harassment (art. 81.18 to 81.20). These standards, which are accompanied by

specific means of legal recourse (art. 123.6 to 123.16) and fall under the responsibility of the Commission des normes du travail (CNT), came into effect on June 1, 2004 (Lippel, 2005). This article presents an overview of the written complaints filed with the Commission des normes du travail (CNT) between June 1, 2004 and April 30, 2005.

At the present time, most of the studies on psychological harassment, moral harassment or other forms of violence in the workplace use a survey with worker populations (Brun and Plante, 2004; Byrne, 1997; Hirigoyen, 1998, 2001; Hoel, Rayner and Cooper, 2003; Leymann, 1996a, 1996b; Salin, 2003; Vandekerkhove and Commers, 2003; Wornham, 2003). Although these surveys are very useful, they have the limitation of being centred on identifying the types of events, the forms, or the sources of psychological harassment in the workplace. Scientific studies are rare (Garcia, Hacourt and Bara, 2005; Lapeyriere, 2004; Lewis and Orford, 2005); this type of study focuses on the inside story of cases of psychological harassment, the difficulties of putting into the experience into words, the doubts that the outward expression of facts may raise, and the ambiguities hidden by complex situations.

For this reason, our research study adopted the point of view and the arguments put forward by the main players, that is to say, the men and women filing the complaints, as well as the situations that are being denounced. Out objective was to give an overview of the complaints filed with the Commission des normes du travail over a period of one year. In so doing, we hope to better understand the complexity of the phenomenon of psychological harassment through the situations as experienced and expressed by the complainants.

In total, 236 complaints of psychological harassment at work and more than 1,500 pages written by the complainants made up the corpus for analysis. The research method used includes a first section on socioprofessional and economic factors (e.g., sex, age, profession, employment status, etc.), a second section on the business itself (e.g., sector, number of employees, etc.) and a third section focused on the complaint itself (e.g., causes, frequency, form, witnesses, consequences, etc.).