A Safe Place for All: Social dialogue and workplace harassment

This chapter explores the potential for social dialogue to create and sustain safe and inclusive workplaces for all. It focuses on harassment associated with a social group or status characteristic such as sex and race and argues for the need for this to be addressed for not just legal and business reasons but also for moral ones. These moral reasons are grounded in the need to understand harassment as a social and collective problem, rather than an individual one. Positioning harassment in a social, rather than just interpersonal context, the chapter explores the potential and limits of bipartite social dialogue for setting and enforcing standards around harassment. There is a particular focus on the implications of privatizing and personalizing problems through the use of private mechanisms such as workplace mediation.