Now fighting for her life, Pugh-Perry is again a rising star, now as a woman representing the plight of thousands of Americans struggling to survive extremist persecution including forced unemployment by covert, organized, mainly government agency or government funded agency workplace mobbers.
This covert workplace violence has increased since the signing of the
Patriot Act that seemingly gave government agencies and select employees the right to persecute targets with immunity and impunity.
Research into the workplace mobbing phenomenon was pioneered as early as the 1980s by
German-born
Swedish scientist
Heinz Leyman who borrowed the term from animal behavior due to it describing perfectly how a group can attack an individual based only on the negative covert communications from the group.
Ongoing retaliatory harassment including deprivati
Pugh Perry may have been
at the Mercy of the Mob but now, this modern day “David” is up against the “Goliath” known as the City of New York Human Resources Administration (HRA) with a staff of over 16,000.
An employee of the government agency’s IT arm, Management Information Systems (MIS), Pugh-Perry is the survivor of a long-term and ongoing campaign of retaliatory harassment rooted in ongoing corruption, deep-seated racism where there is no viable mechanism for oversight she says.
Pugh-Perry’s explains that her plight began in 1994 and has everything to do with being a black woman and affiliated with the David Dinkins administration.
"HRA’s Management Information Systems is, and has always been a bastion of white privilege and entitlement in the historically and predominantly white and male computer industry," states Pugh-Perry.
In a series of firsts, 1990 brought New York City’s first black mayor, first black female commissioner of HRA, the first black head of MIS, and Pugh-Perry as first black female IT liaison to any commissioner.
A rising star up to that point, Pugh-Perry’s career was effectively over after Dinkins and his appointees stepped down in 1993.
Pugh-Perry was subsequently appointed to Director of MIS Inventory Systems.
After reporting massive problems with the inventory, in what has become an all too common response in such cases, MIS management stripped Pugh-Perry of her position.
After Pugh-Perry filed an internal EEO complaint, she was blackballed from employment while MIS management misrepresented the true status of the agency’s multimillion dollar inventory on each audit since 1996.
Suppression of agency damning evidence
Managers at the City of New York Human Resources have worked with political partners, including the EEOC and District Council 37, to suppress the damning evidence found in Pugh-Perry’s EEO complaints, including her 2006 EEOC complaint which was initiated in part because Pugh-Perry was brought under investigation for alleged acts of official misconduct.
She was subsequently denied a written explanation and final disposition of the charges against her.
The error laden right-to-sue letter Pugh-Perry received from the EEOC in 2007 upon the dismissal of her 2006 complaint led to the recent June 2009 dismissal of her EDNY court case.
Pugh-Perry has a case pending in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and awaits a response from her September 2009 letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder requesting: 1) a new right-to-sue letter based on the EEOC mishandling of her 2006 complaint, and 2) the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the many civil rights and civil liberties violations she has endured to date.
Pugh-Perry was dropped from payroll on April 2, 2009, the same day she was to have undergone reconstructive ankle surgery. She is now without income and prescription benefits.
DC 37, the administrator of her prescription benefits plan, refuses to file a grievance on her behalf, also typical in workplace mobbing cases.
Targeted individuals typically workplace mobbed out of career
Workplace mobbing is increasing across the globe, particularly in government departments or government funded agencies, (eg health,education and social welfare occupations), according to Dr. Linda Shallcross, director of
Workplace Mobbing Australia.
Shallcross offers support for mobbing targets and provides an
online survey to expedite help.
Unlike Australia and European countries, awareness is slowly growing in the U.S. and Canada about the darker side of work and the devastating effects mobbing and bullying have on self, health, organizations and society.
With new
surveillance technology including government databases in the hands of mobbers, once a target is mobbed, typically this target is blackballed from all work in their field.
Since 2001, three conferences on workplace mobbing have been organized in California, Massachusetts and Iowa.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality established the first anti-mobbing policy in the U.S. Efforts to add new anti-mobbing legislation are under way in California, other states, and in Canada. Several new Internet self-help and advice groups and websites address specific professional groups or aspects of incivility at work.
Pro-action in the filed of workplace mobbing around the world includes a 2002 major international conference held in Australia. In January 2002, France enacted an anti-mobbing law. Quebec province in Canada adopted anti-harassment/mobbing legislation. Columbia enacted
anti-harassment legislation in February 2006.
"In the aftermath of the Columbine and other school shooting tragedies, the media has increasingly discussed bullying in the schools, thus also raising awareness of adult bullying/mobbing in the workplace," states the mobbing research pioneer,
Dr. Heinz Leymann, an industrial psychologist and medical scientist with an M.D. in psychiatry.
UK Anti-bully pioneers
Andrea Adams and
Tim Field used the expression
workplace bullying instead of what Leymann called "mobbing" although workplace bullying nearly always involves mobbing in its other meaning of group bullying.
Who are most typical targets of workplace mobbing?
According to Shallcross, workplace mobbing targets are typically:
- Change agents
- High achievers (sometimes with public recognition)
- Enthusiastic (eg those who volunteer)
- Those with integrity
- Whistleblowers
- Known for their commitment to human rights
