Andrew Winters – RI Future

October 26, 2016

There are no legal protections against workplace bullying

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On October 23 RI state co-coordinators Emilia DaSilva-Tavarez and I organized a rally in support of the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill S2377, which was introduced last March 2015 by Senator Frank Ciccone.

The rally was held in Roger Williams National Memorial Park on North Main street in glorious weather. There were people standing on North Main holding “STOP WORKPLACE BULLYING” signs and handing flyers thru car windows and to pedestrians while engaging them in conversation to either hear their stories of being bullied in the workplace or educating them on what we and others in every state are trying to accomplish.

One of the people most instrumental in inspiring and showing the ropes to us, Debra Falzoi, a Massachusetts co-coordinator for the Healthy Workplace Bill, came down to join the protest with us.

The younger people in the group made colorful “STOP BULLYING” T-shirts and wore them as they handed out flyers to passersby.

Andrew Winters and his husband Don Smith traveled to be with us to lend us their most important support. Andrew has had his story published in RIFuture. I highly recommend that people read it to see what depths people will go to in the showing of abject unwarranted cruelty of unimaginable levels.

Often people are isolated to be better attacked and threatened by the bully – one cannot simply argue with their boss without fear they’ll be labeled insubordinate and people cannot do their work and, without proper training OR involving HR, confront a hostile coworker. People are forced to go out on medical leave for ulcers, migraines, heart ailments and more to get time to figure out the most feasible action to take. They and their negatively impacted families must do what’s best financially, in terms of a search for the next job, in terms of what will best protect the fragile health they have sunk to and more. It is a tightrope not easily walked. None of them knows how or if they’ll get a next job when they come to realize they may have PTSD from their experience.

Also, once isolated, the target of bullying is often forced to withdraw from a society that is slow to understand what has happened in our work and money driven culture to come to grips with what has happened, sometimes feeling unreasonable shame that this happened to them along with intense fear that they will be further harmed and retaliated against if they say or do anything.

In a lot of ways, workplace bullying mirrors child abuse and domestic violence – they are all forms of bullying. “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.”

Humanity needs to evolve past this barbarity. What can happen to one can eventually and has been proven to happen to all. We must learn to care for one another, not go after each other with bared teeth.

Workplace bullying can take many forms but primarily it is a harsh unwarranted attack on any employee with the intent of inflicting harm thru cruel acts, words, exclusion, gas-lighting (encouraging the employee to believe that they are incompetent), work sabotage, lies, false accusations and more to cause the targeted employee to want to leave their job. Usually the brightest, most talented, high performing employees are targeted because a manager or coworker is threatened by their capabilities and they want to force that employee to quit.

People have actually been physically threatened, accosted and had death threats made against them.

It is never the fault of the targeted employee that they are so treated.

The targeted employee suffers health and emotional harm which can be irreversible depending on the length and type of attack. The work of the employee and therefore of the company suffers. Companies allowing and encouraging this behavior lose their most talented employees and will not be able to get talent to join them as word gets out using such agencies as Glassdoor and even Monster. People are becoming more and more aware of the existence of this problem, but more are needed to be made aware.

Currently there are no protections against this kind of unwarranted, malicious attack.

There are laws against sexual harassment and harassment of employees having protected status but workplace bullying can happen to anyone of any age, either gender, sexual orientation, race and or religious preference. There is currently no protection, workplace policy or legal recourse for anyone suffering this type of abuse.

People do commit suicide after being horrifically bullied and, we believe, engage in workplace violence that is never investigated as to what the violent employee had to endure before they “went postal.” They are only portrayed on the news as either a criminal or mentally ill. We have FOIA requests to help us make that link between workplace bullying and suicide (“bullycide”) and/or workplace violence which often ends in the suicide of the perpetrator.

At the rally, there were many cars honking in support and giving many thumbs up. A couple from Connecticut stopped when they saw our signs, wanting information on how they could help there.

For information on Workplace Bullying and how you can get involved, please go to WorkplaceBullying.org.

Go to the Rhode Island Anti-Bullying Healthy Workplace Advocates Facebook page to get action alerts and much more information and a place to post your own story or get people you know to write their story – anonymously, if needed, take a survey, sign a petition and much more.

For information on the Healthy Workplace Bill, please go to HealthyWorkplaceBill.org.

Get involved! Call your state senator, representative and congressman and urge them to support the Workplace Bullying Bill.

May 8, 2014

Andrew Winters and institutional bullying at URI

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“Midnight Tonight: Students Protest LGBT Campus Safety at University of Rhode Island.” This was the headline on a Campus Pride blog of September 22, 2010, announcing a round-the-clock occupation of the URI library “to ensure the safety and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, faculty and staff.”

When the dust had settled in early 2011, students awarded their adviser, Andrew Winters, a “Certificate of Service and Admirable Citizenship,” honoring him as their advocate.

Within weeks, Andrew, at the time assistant to the VP for student affairs, received a blistering letter of reprimand. It consisted of unsubstantiated accusations and personal insults, and ended with a demand for his silence and the following threat: “If you do not comply with the above expectations […] you will face disciplinary procedure up to and including termination.”

Several weeks later, Andrew went on administrative leave; in June he succumbed to the pressure and left. Ever since, university officials have refused to comment other than stating to the press that he “retired,” and that: “Everyone was in agreement around the terms. He was not forced to retire.”

In fact, Andrew was bullied and coerced into a separation agreement that he signed under duress. Since then, also Joe Santiago, his former assistant, was “let go” from his position at the University without written notice or explanation.

Much of this, and another University of Rhode Island case of bullying has been on the news lately. See the Hummel Reports:

Also see this report in Unfiltered Lens, a student newspaper.

After what university administrators spun as retirement, Andrew has spent most of his time trying to correct these systemic problems with their countless victims of which he is one.

In spite of increasing awareness of the need for corrective action, elected officials and the Board of Education have, as is their pattern, neglected their responsibility. In Andrew’s case, inaction has been justified by: “He should take his case to court and have the separation agreement reversed.” But “liberty and justice for all” too often is an illusion for those who cannot act without the terror of losing their physical, emotional and economic health.

The root cause of the systemic failure at the University is that over the last 50 years state funding has dropped from 60% in the 1960s to a current low of less than 10%. As a consequence, university administrators have become public relations representatives whose main concern is financial rather than academic strength.

In the resulting environment of a privatized, bottom-line driven institution advocates for victims of bigotry, discrimination or sexual assault will be shot as messengers who threaten the “product brand.”

Silence and coverup also affect the public as this corporatized environment allows officials to enter into separation agreements with clauses such as this:

The University will not contest or object to Mr. Winters’ eligibility to collect and receive unemployment benefits or compensation.

As mentioned, Andrew Winters was coerced into this agreement. He would not have been entitled to unemployment compensation, had he retired voluntarily, as the University claims. He lost his job, and was qualified to collect, after he informed Department of Labor officials of the circumstances of his departure.

What excuse does the University have for doling out unemployment benefits and compensation via a ploy that cannot see light of day”

The regular citizen recognizes this for what it is: a conspiracy to defraud the People of Rhode Island. As in the case of 38 Studios, complicit officials leave it to the public to foot the bill for their shady deals.

The Rhode Island Legislature may have begun to address this misappropriation in the submission of House Resolution 2014 H 7669 “Creating a special legislative commission to investigate issues of fairness in the hiring and retention of certain faculty members and employees of the University of Rhode Island.”

Surely it is long past time to restore ethics and transparency to higher education and to public institutions in Rhode Island, and long past time to correct the injustice done to Andrew Winters, Joe Santiago and the People of Rhode Island.

We, the People, shall not rest until we have eradicated misappropriation, bullying, and suppression. We shall not rest until we have established a system of collaboration, transparency and justice for all.

February 10, 2014February 10, 2014

No safety when people are disposable commodities

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One of the events organized at URI last week was a panel discussion on Alternative Strategies for Maintaining a Safe Campus. Here is an updated informal version of the notes I prepared for the occasion.

Outline

Identify the problem: how does one create a safe campus in a society that idolizes violence on all scales?
What can we do about it?

Violence

Societies breed the sociopaths they deserve. The following two are manifestations of the systemic violence:
- the lone-nut on a shooting rampage
- police departments militarized with perpetual-war surplus
The physical abuse we teach in military training and employ abroad in expanding our empire sets the standard for oppression we use at home. This is what happened to non-violent protesters of Disarm Now Plowshares when they resisted our nuclear weapons of mass destruction:
- They —nuns, priests, and a nurse— were arrested, cuffed and hooded with sand bags.
- At the trial the marine in charge testified:
  
  When we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them … so we did it to them.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world
- home of 5% of the world population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated.
- 5% of black men; 2% of Hispanic men; less than 1% of white men are incarcerated.
- Read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or watch this this video. Here is a panel discussion called End Mass Incarceration; it provides the missing links required to find alternative strategies.
With guns as god on our side we have 30,000 gun shot fatalities per year and 70,000 non-fatal shootings. These statistics dwarf the spectacular events that feed and are caused by the corporate media complex.
Pro Publica had an article about the effects of violence: The PTSD Crisis that’s being ignored:
- vicious cycle: neighborhood violence → PTSD → compromised public safety → neighborhood violence
These are the effects on children when they grow up in poverty and violence:
- learning disabilities
- lifelong negative health effects
- intra-uterine growth retardation
Pediatricians refer to this violence to which children are subjected as toxic stress. The solution of the corporate media complex assisted by the United Global Union Busters? Blame teachers for their under-performing students and call in the privatization troops!
Death preventable by effective health care: If we had the French health care system in US, there would be 140,000 fewer such fatalities per year.
The real numbers are a state secret, but a good estimate is that US national “defense” costs $4,000 per person per year. This amounts to a lifetime expenditure of more than $250,000 per person.
Martin Luther King in his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church onApril 4, 1967, a year before his assassination said:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The system we have created is what spiritual death looks like: we are all zombies now! Two atomic bombs worth of fatalities each year, but nobody notices and nobody cares because it produces no gripping pictures on the home page.
This is an abbreviated list with lots of victims of systemic violence, but it’s all peanuts compared to the violence of global inequality, which kills about 25,000,000 people per year. Global climate change, which barely registers in the corporate media, may cause a number of fatalities bigger by one or two orders of magnitude. How can we begin to solve that problem, if we collectively ignore statistics like these?

What can we do?

There is the eternal question: “How do we deal with the danger of increasing crime?”
A famous Dutch criminologist, referring to a newspaper notorious for its sensationalism had a simple answer: “Read a different morning newspaper.”
My reply 30 years later:

Tune out of the stupefying pap served up by the corporate media complex.
Get used to the idea that the brain acts as if it has two parts: (fast forward to the seven minute time mark in the video)
- System one responds to pictures and anecdotes; it can barely count or reason and is easily mislead, but it’s fast and can save us from immediate danger.
- System two can think systematically and critically; it can understand statistics, but it’s lazy, slow and painful to engage.
- The corporate media talk to system one. Tune out and there will be fewer hysteria driven events such as the lock-down at URI last year.
- Engage system one and you’ll realize that there is a war on the poor and people of color in America. The lone-nut shooter in a nice white, affluent neighborhood near you is responsible for only a minute fraction of the total number of victims.
How can an individual help solve problems of global scale? Follow Gandhi when he said: “Be the change you want to see in the world!” Maybe I’ll get to that, for now I’ll follow Martin Luther King with his:

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Once again, for the academic year 2013-2014 URI is in the bottom twenty of LGBT unfriendly schools.
According to government statistics, the most prevalent hate crimes by far on university campuses result from bias involving race and sexual orientation. Drawing attention to their manifestations on campus is encouraged as long as it results in nice photo ops for administrators. As soon as the message become a threat to the corporate brand image, the messenger is disappeared.
It happens all the time and it is what happened to my dear friend Andrew Winters at URI. First people get MLK peacemaker awards, but then something goes wrong and silence at URI sets in. Andrew’s disappearance was covered in
- CCRI’s Unfiltered Lens
- The Brown Daily Herald
- The Providence Journal
- Options, RI’s LGBT community newsmagazine
URI’s Good Five Cent Cigar, the Student Senate, and the Faculty Senate have all deliberately participated in the URI code of silence. Blessed by the Board of Education and the Governor’s office, the tactic of choice remains loyalty to the corporate Think Big brand. As always, the tactic of choice is saying one thing in public, and doing the opposite behind the scenes.

A perfect example took place when URI was featured in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The university’s CEO wrote in his blog of March 9, 2011 under the heading Another Special Moment for URI:

Many of your [sic] have heard me say that one cannot solve problems while trying to hide them, or by pretending they don’t exist.

Sounds good until you find out that the photojournalist working on this article for The Chronicle was ordered off the URI campus.

Violence makes most of its victims one by one; the vast majority remain nameless. The corporate media complex reports only on the spectacular outliers that produce juicy pictures. Is it surprising that this feeds mass hysteria?

Meanwhile, capitalism keeps alive a health care system run by death panels consisting of criminally overpaid CEOs. The system perpetuates violence and oppression in the workplace, in the streets, in the prisons and a global scale. The alternative strategy that we are looking for has been formulated by Camus:

In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

April 2, 2012April 2, 2012

Why Did LGBT Expert Leave URI?

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To announce an event to be held a the LGBTIQQ Symposium, running from April 2 through 6, URI issued a press release in which it announced the symposium while highlighting the following: “The University of Rhode Island will present a panel discussion focusing on the unique workplace experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, queer or questioning individuals as they navigate life after graduation.”

In the context of its discussion of “unique workplace experiences,” the panel should raise the question of why Andrew Winters is no longer at URI, his former workplace. This is a particularly harrowing question, as, since the mid nineties through last spring, Andrew Winters was the primary organizer of this very symposium. Indeed, thus far many questions have been raised, but not a single one has been answered.

Here is a short summary of what has happened:

On April 5 of 2011, a number of concerned members of the URI community wrote a letter to URI President David Dooley. In the letter we stated, with a sense of alarm and profound regret, our objections to the letter of reprimand that Andrew Winters had received from Kathryn Friedman, at the time Interim Associate Vice President in the Office of Community, Equity and Diversity. Ms. Friedman alleged that the LGBT URI community had “without exception” expressed no confidence in Andrew Winters.

The two words “without exception” capture the unprofessional nature of this communication and the atmosphere of intimidation and bullying that characterized Andrew Winters’ “unique workplace experience,” once the university administration decided that his tenure at URI would be terminated. Many also understand that it was precisely Andrew’s unrelenting effort to address bullying and harassment at URI that rendered him unwelcome in eyes of the URI administration.

Our esteemed colleague URI President David M. Dooley, replied: “This issue, however, pertains to a confidential personnel matter and I am not at liberty to meet with you to discuss the situation.”

The trouble with this administrative response was that it applies to any conceivable form of arbitrary and capricious conduct of the administration directed at anyone. By definition, any such abuse of power by administrators could be construed as “a confidential personnel matter.” and, following this reasoning, would therefore be beyond scrutiny, discussion, and accountability. This objection, predictably, drew no response. The same happened to the letter to the Rhode Island Board of Governors of Higher Education. The Board never had the courtesy to acknowledge receipt of our letter, and to date has failed to take appropriate corrective action.

Fast forward to Tuesday, Jan. 24. At that date, The House Commission to Study Public Higher Education Affordability and Accessibility in Rhode Island visited URI for a public hearing to collect expert testimony to improve affordability and accessibility of higher education. At the hearing, I made the following statement and raised the following questions, which are recorded in the minutes of the meeting:

As of August 2011, URI is number 14 on the Princeton Review list of the bottom 20, least LGBT friendly schools. Clearly, URI is not accessible to students for whom the LGBT climate and safety is a concern. URI operates under the cloud of what it has done to Andrew Winters, who, as we know, was bullied out. Your committee should look into several issues:

1. To force Andrew Winters’ departure, how much money was spent on URI’s offer he “could not refuse?” How much on unemployment benefits to which he is entitled?

2. The URI administration has stonewalled every single question by hiding under the cover of confidentiality. How can there be public oversight of URI procedures, governance, and due process?
3. How can there be progress, unless URI is held fully accountable for the injustice done to Andrew Winters?
4. How can Andrew Winters’ successor, Annie Russell, operate effectively in a climate in which messengers of bad news are not tolerated?
5. With all the above questions looming unanswered, how can there ever be adequate support for LGBT students at URI?

The charge of the committee explicitly refers to student support and governance issues. In other words, all the issues raised here are germane to the committee’s charge.

Since its inception, the URI LGBTIQQ Symposium has been conducted in the tradition of promoting cultural sensitivity and advocacy for fair and equitable treatment of LGBTIQQ people. In keeping with this tradition, I respectfully ask that the citizens of Rhode Island demand redress of the injustice done to Andrew Winters and correction of the University governance that made this possible.