Chapter 04 · People & supply chainsHuman Rights & Social Sustainability
Bullying (mobbing)
Definition
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.