Thanks for sharing your story. Terrible.

I do wonder, however, why the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress is not available as a remedy. I agree with you that harassment causing severe emotional distress should be actionable and I believe it already is. My concern is that the courts have grappled with, and crafted the law about, what type of "bullying" conduct is actionable across all public and private domains for the past 50 or so years. If bullying laws dilute the requirements for bringing litigation for emotional damage, I think we're walking down a path that will further burden the workplace for everyone without significantly improving workplace conditions for workers.

Thanks for explaining the "economic" harassment piece of this for me. I believe the "emotional distress" causes of action also include remedies for economic harm accompanying the bullying itself. Demotions and firings motivated by a supervisor's malicious intent should also be covered by the torts of interference with contract and prospective economic damage.

I do believe that limiting legal remedies to protected classes of people has caused divisiveness among protected and unprotected classes which harms our social interactions on all levels - workplace, community, politics and culture. When people with justifiable grievances are forced to contort their claims to "fit" existing discrimination causes of action, the entire legal enterprise of protecting employees' interests in continued, harassment-free work, begins to appear frivolous.

I'd support something like a Uniform Employment Code for the American workplace similar to the Uniform Commercial Code that sets standards for the relationships between and among commercial enterprises.

It's a big problem requiring a systemic solution. I'm afraid that adding more legal remedies to churn into the inefficient adversarial system is not the systemic remedy we require as we move further into the 21st Century.