Labor Law
Abuse in the Workplace
Written by: Adv. Kobi Hatan
On 21 February 2021, the judgment of the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court (the Honourable Senior Judge Kamel Abu Qaoud) was handed down, in which the court issued an order requiring the defendant, the Jerusalem Municipality, to immediately cease sidelining the plaintiff — the deputy legal adviser for planning and construction at the municipality — from the activity of the legal advice department in the field of planning and construction, and awarded the plaintiff a payment of NIS 150,000 for abusive employment and workplace abuse [LC (Jerusalem) 67012-07-18 Adv. Ilanit Michaeli v. Jerusalem Municipality, 21.2.2021].
In the judgment, the court analysed the cause of action of workplace abuse, the cases that constitute workplace abuse, and the appropriate compensation to be awarded to an employee once it is found that they were employed in an abusive and harmful manner.
I therefore thought it appropriate to write this article and to try to explain, within it, the subject of workplace abuse briefly.
Many employees approach my office claiming that their employer abused them, and therefore wish to file a claim against them on this cause of action. Many times, after hearing the story, I am obliged to tell those employees that their prospects of succeeding in a claim revolving entirely around an allegation of abuse are not high, since not every case in which an employer raises their voice or behaves disrespectfully towards an employee amounts to workplace abuse as it has been defined in the case law.
At the very outset it should be noted that Israeli law contains no explicit statute prohibiting workplace abuse.
In 2015 a bill for the prevention of workplace abuse passed a preliminary reading only in the Knesset and was not advanced. In 2019 a further bill was submitted but did not come to fruition. Nonetheless, the bill serves the labor courts as an interpretive tool for applying the prohibition on abuse, in an indirect manner.
According to the case law as it stands at the time of writing this article, the prohibition on workplace abuse derives from the provisions of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, the heightened duty of good faith in labor law, and the employer’s duty to provide the employee with a fair and safe work environment.
On this basis, the regional labor courts hear the tort of workplace abuse and have awarded compensation for distress or for breach of the duty to act in good faith.
What is workplace abuse?
According to the case law, workplace abuse is non-physical conduct, recurring within the framework of the work, that is harassing, humiliating and harmful. For example: shouting and cursing at the employee; ostentatiously ignoring the employee and causing their isolation or ostracism at the workplace; humiliating and harmful prohibitions on the employee or humiliating tasks; excessive criticism of the employee and the expression of constant dissatisfaction; false accusations and the spreading of harmful rumours about the employee; harming the employee’s ability to succeed in their role; stripping the employee of authority; excessive intrusion into the employee’s privacy, and more.
The bill, which — as noted — serves as an interpretive tool for the courts, also defined behaviours that may be regarded as workplace abuse, in its language:
“Abuse in the framework of employment is repeated conduct towards a person, in a number of separate incidents, that is capable of creating for them a hostile environment in the framework of employment, including one or more of the following behaviours:
(1) A degrading, humiliating or harmful reference towards a person, including by way of shouting, cursing, false accusations, or the spreading of harmful rumours;
(2) Disrupting a person’s ability to perform their role, including by setting unreasonable demands or creating unreasonable conditions for its performance that are not necessary for performing the role and are not for legitimate reasons — such as captious fault-finding with their actions, presenting demands or changing them in a way that cannot be coped with, unreasonably tight control over their activity in the framework of employment, or curtailing, in practice or potentially, their powers or areas of responsibility as derived from their role, for illegitimate reasons and where performing the work does not require this;
(3) Imposing on the person tasks whose purpose is to meet another’s personal needs and that are unrelated to the scope of their role;
(4) Subjecting a person to an atmosphere of fear and threats;
(5) Attributing a person’s work, achievements and successes to another, or attributing to a person failures not their own, while concealing facts or presenting them in a distorted manner;
(6) Taking actions capable of leading to the professional or social isolation of the person;
(7) Taking actions capable of unreasonably harming the person’s privacy;”
It should be noted that the bill proposed imposing, for each case of abuse, compensation of up to NIS 120,000 without proof of damage.
I would further note that the bill seeks to require an employer to appoint a person responsible for the matter of workplace abuse, similar to the arrangement existing in the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Law.
It is important to clarify that, both under the case law and under the bill, an exceptional, one-off incident does not constitute workplace abuse; rather, a number of separate, recurring incidents are required.
Workplace abuse can be perpetrated by the employer itself, by fellow employees, or by another person who is not employed at the workplace but has a working relationship with the employee (for example, contractor employees).
The subject of workplace abuse is receiving genuine attention in the courts. Thus, in remarks delivered by the President of the National Labor Court, the Honourable Judge Varda Virt-Livne, at the Bar Association conference in 2018, she noted that workplace abuse had become a real phenomenon rather than isolated cases, and stated that legislation against abuse should be enacted. In her words: “Workplace abuse causes harm to human dignity. The fact is that workplace abuse can already be regarded as a phenomenon and not as isolated cases… A person exposed to workplace abuse is liable to suffer serious harm to their quality of life and that of their family…”
The President expressed support for enacting legislation on the subject and noted that “in the case of the Sexual Harassment Law too, there were those who argued that it was overly extreme legislation, but this law is important. Before the Sexual Harassment Law, the subject was addressed only within the framework of equal opportunity in employment. What that law did was to establish explicitly that sexual harassment is a violation of human dignity, and thus there is an independent cause of action on which one can sue.”
In sum, the case law of the labor courts is indeed increasingly recognising the tort of workplace abuse. One cannot fail to mention the judgments handed down in the cases of the Prime Minister’s Residence employees, Mr. Meni Naftali and Mr. Guy Eliyahu, in which significant compensation was awarded for workplace abuse.
The judgment with which this article opened continues along this path and even increases the compensation for abuse, and in my view — this is the direction of the courts with regard to this cause of action.
This article, like all the articles on the site, is intended for information only and does not constitute or replace concrete legal advice.
