To get ideas about what everyone can do to celebrate Freedom Week, go here.

For individuals bullied at work, learn the predictable stages of the workplace bullying experience.

Our books – for bullied targets and their families, and for employers wanting to tackle, not ignore, workplace bullying.

One of the core principles driving the highly-principled bullied targets we have met through the years — from our original hotline, plaintiffs in legal cases with which I was/am involved, on-site in the workplaces that abused them, and more recently in our online supportive community – SafeHarbor — is the overwhelming sense of injustice done to them.

The injustice derives from feeling betrayed by their employer (and too often also by coworkers). All of the injustices experienced rely on a fundamental belief that the world is fair.

Fairness seems like an antiquated reality in the cutthroat world of the contemporary workplace. Workers are pitted against each other creating needless destructive  competition when collaboration and empathy would make a workplace healthier and sustainable over the long run. But the short-term greediness of doing anything for profit infects the work culture, encouraging people to feast on one another with impunity. Employers replicate the competitiveness of the marketplace as an internal value.

And there is nothing fair about the way bullied individuals are treated after they are senselessly targeted for no reason of their own. The fact that employers ignore and deny their role in the psychological assault is inexcusable.

The reality — bullying is an UNIGNORABLE crisis both for the targeted person and the organization. If only employers could be made to understand. The fact that they choose to remain ignorant and do nothing (not a neutral act) is one of the cruelest decisions imaginable.

To bullied targets, the unfairness they feel is real and not merely imagination. Moral people sense unfairness. When institutions betray people, the unfairness rises to the level of an intentional infliction of a moral injury.