To everyone who is abused by their manager or boss at work: that is very annoying.
Arsehole! Or Asshole as folk say in the USA.
But, we need to be smart and know the actual cause of that. It’s normally not just because they are an unpleasant person, but because the structure of the company gives them power over you. Which they easily abuse because the system is itself based on abuse and encourages abuse. That’s the actual, basic, cause of the trouble. For men, women, for people in your country and in distant countries - everyone.
We can moan and bitch about the boss with our friends down the pub, or with our family back home, but that is only a temporary relief. The next day we are back in the bad situation. The real solution is to fundamentally change the structure of companies, change how they are organised (and the power imbalance in society in general).
The main cause of such abuse at work is the heirarchical structure of companies in capitalism. People take their frustrations out on someone lower than them in the power ladder. In what I call a BESS (Better Economic and Social System) there would be a horizontal power structure, where all staff are the same (roughly), each has the power to give their say in how the company is organised and gets their fair share of benefit from what the companies does.
In that BESS such power abuse would be much less. Of course there would still be mean people, folk having a bad day, personal dislikes etc... there would still be trouble we have to deal with. But, the point is it would be far less than now because the main cause would be reduced. In a BESS all staff would be equal, there would be no boss or manager. Not in the way we have them now. There may be ‘working group leader X’, or someone in Y department with a lot of knowledge who teaches the new staff, etc. But their power would be temporary or focused on that task — they would not be in a fixed power position over you. The system would simply not be that way. In a BESS all the staff have equal rights and power and say — REALLY. Not like the situation now, in which we have pretend rights and power now. A situation which is often, in reality, very disempowering for most staff.
And we would be able to do something about abusive behaviour, deal with it better. In the current bad economic system there is often no union rep to complain too, as many companies have been stripped of unions over the last 30 years. Sometimes the person they are supposed to report abuse to is the actual person being abusive! Other times you are seen as a ‘troublemaker’ if you report nasty behaviour or bad conditions, and may even be sacked. For example an undercover Channel 4 News investigation in the UK:
“...has revealed a litany of harsh practices at the vast JD Sports warehouse in Rochdale, including punitive disciplinary procedures, intense surveillance and security, heightened job insecurity amongst agency workers and intimidation.”
But in a BESS there would be regular meetings, in which ALL staff have the right to attend and everyone has the right to have their say, to discuss how the work is going. In such meetings bad behaviour would come to light very quickly, often the same day. Any member of staff that was being abusive to others, for whatever reason and form, would soon find themselves being criticised for it. They would be guided to change that, and if they did not they would have to leave. And no boss would protect them and punish you for reporting the problem - there would be no bosses.
Of course if you say that then any people will say 'that's just a dream', 'its not realistic' etc. But that is them being narrow and blindly following the mainstream system thinking now. Actually we CAN have a better system, it’s within our power to do it, in realistic ways.
Nothing else but a fundamental change to how we organise our working places will solve abuse in the long run.