Human Rights & Social Sustainability
Bullying (mobbing)
Repeated, harmful mistreatment of workers — individually or by a group ("mobbing") — recognised under ILO Convention 190 as violence and harassment in the world of work.
Expert review openNo editor-accepted expert review yetDefinition
Repeated and persistent negative acts toward one or more workers that create a risk to health and safety — including verbal abuse, humiliation, isolation and sabotage of work. "Mobbing" denotes the collective form, where a group systematically targets an individual. It falls within the ILO definition of violence and harassment in the world of work codified in Convention No. 190 (2019).
References
ILO definitions of workplace violence and harassment; mobbing as psychological violence; ILO Convention 190; under-reporting evidence.
Overview
What it means
Workplace bullying is a social-sustainability issue on three levels: a human-rights and occupational-health harm in its own right; a driver of attrition, absenteeism and lost productivity; and a marker of organisational culture that ESG "S" assessments, human-capital disclosure and due-diligence processes increasingly probe.
ILO Convention 190 — the first international treaty recognising the right to a world of work free from violence and harassment — gives the issue a formal legal anchor; severe under-reporting is documented across sectors.
How it is used
Grievance mechanisms, speak-up policies and psychosocial-risk assessments address bullying; CSRD/ESRS social disclosures cover workforce incidents; investor human-capital frameworks treat harassment indicators as risk signals.
Why it matters
Decent work is a sustainability pillar, not a courtesy: tolerating bullying corrodes the social foundation of an organisation and signals governance failure to regulators and investors alike.
Review
Public comments appear only after editor acceptance. Draft comments stay in the review queue.
Reviewers choose the definition or an overview paragraph, leave a comment or replacement, and attach evidence or a source link.
Editors compare reviewer cards side by side. AI may help find agreement, conflicts, unsupported claims and possible source issues.
Only an editor-accepted synthesis changes the public page. Reviewer identities are shown only with consent and verification.
Submitted reviews stay private until accepted.
Loading verified endorsements… Endorsements are not votes and never determine publication.
Endorse this definition
Endorse the exact version shown here. This is not a vote, and publication remains an editorial decision.
Review board
Comment on a specific line. Each reviewer stays separate until an editor accepts a merged draft.
Each person comments on the definition or overview in their own draft card, with role, evidence and suggested wording kept together.
AI can compare comments against the current text, flag conflicting claims, surface missing evidence and identify where reviewers agree.
An editor merges compatible suggestions into a draft change, checks sources, records disagreements and decides what can be published.