Have you ever worked in a place where your supervisor seemed dedicated to making your life miserable? Where public humiliation was considered a legitimate management tactic? Where your shifts could change at a moment's notice? Where frustrated people routinely yell at each other? Welcome to Hamilton Health Sciences!

Working in such a stressful atmosphere is not fun. Research has shown that it can lead to serious illness for the workers. For patients, the poisoned atmosphere can only lead to worse service. For the public, it means health care that is not as good as it should be.

HHS has a human relations problem. The union has tried to address the issue through correspondence. Our union's National Office offers a comprehensive program on harassment in the workplace and how to deal with it. We offered to work with management to develop a joint anti-harassment strategy to make HHS a better place to work. It was our idea to use our own union's anti-harassment program but adapt it to the special conditions in Hamilton's hospitals, or see if our own model could fit with management's vision.

We quickly learned that management was not interested in a joint approach to workplace harassment. No thanks, they said, we have our own policy.

For all we can see, their policy must be one of deliberate harassment of our members. Upper management are acting like Tory dinosaurs in their confrontational approach to the workplace. In these days of scarce health care resources, we believe a co-operative approach is better.