Darker Side: A ‘Mean Girls’ remake in the workplace
Remember the 2003 film “Mean Girls,” about the horrors of high-school bullying? Those kids had nothing on this Canadian bureaucrat.
Shirish Chotalia worked as the chairperson of Canada’s Human Rights Tribunal from 2009 to 2012.
During her time on the job, Chotalia apparently acted as a sort of alpha bully toward her employees, “creating a dysfunctional workplace for employees.”
That’s according to a report released last week from Canada’s Integrity Commission.
Our favorite example: Chotalia ordered her employees to stay inside a building during an earthquake in Ottowa in 2010 to attend a swearing-in ceremony she organized for herself.
Bullying to the extreme
The Globe and Mail quoted extensively from the report, noting that employees had complained about Chotalia for:
- “repeatedly harassing employees at all levels by referring to them in derogatory terms, questioning their competencies in the presence of their colleagues and by spreading misinformation about them in the workplace.
- “frequently raising individuals’ personal health issues
- “subjecting certain employees to aggressive interrogations.
- “frequently yelling insults and directing defamatory comments” at a colleague
- “ordering staff to spy on an employee while at work and to report that employee’s movements and actions to her
- “maintaining a secret file on an employee” who’d never been disciplined before, and
- “regularly calling and e-mailing some employees late at night, early in the morning and on the weekend on non-essential and questionable matters.”
Employees filed numerous complaints about Chotalia with the Department of Justice and the Privy Council Office in 2010, according to the report.
When those didn’t go addressed, they filed a whistleblower’s disclosure with the Integrity Commission.
Chotalia resigned last November, and claimed that unions were responsible for her “removal,” according to the report.
Now employees can go back to their jobs, which — ironically — involve enforcing anti-bias measures.
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