https://www.humanrights.gov.au/workplace-bullying-violence-harassment-and-bullying-fact-sheet
What does bullying in the workplace look like?
- repeated hurtful remarks or attacks, or making fun of your work or you as a person (including your family, sex, sexuality, gender identity, race or culture, education or economic background)
- sexual harassment, particularly stuff like unwelcome touching and sexually explicit comments and requests that make you uncomfortable
- excluding you or stopping you from working with people or taking part in activities that relates to your work
- playing mind games, ganging up on you, or other types of psychological harassment
- intimidation (making you feel less important and undervalued)
- giving you pointless tasks that have nothing to do with your job
- giving you impossible jobs that can't be done in the given time or with the resources provided
- deliberately changing your work hours or schedule to make it difficult for you
- deliberately holding back information you need for getting your work done properly
- pushing, shoving, tripping, grabbing you in the workplace
- attacking or threatening with equipment, knives, guns, clubs or any other type of object that can be turned into a weapon
- initiation or hazing - where you are made to do humiliating or inappropriate things in order to be accepted as part of the team.
It would be pretty easy to mount a case that the bolded points above have occurred to Jake from bulldogs management over the past 6 weeks. Hence jakes reluctance to return to the bulldogs.
What is not workplace bullying
Some practices in the workplace may not seem fair but are not bullying.
Your employer is allowed to transfer, demote, discipline, counsel, retrench or sack you (as long as they are acting reasonably).
Telling a player you are trading him, “to put a rocket up him” and then not actually trading him, does not fit in the examples listed above. And it is without a doubt workplace bullying.
The hours and money Jake has had to invest looking for a new club not to mention the stress and uncertainty about his future he has gone through are unjustifiable if the bulldogs were never serious about trading him.
If they at any stage told stringer point blank that they were trading him (which judging from the immediate fallout out from stringers exit interview is precisely what they did), well then they simply must trade him, because if not then they have undoubtedly been playing mind games and psychologically harassing stringer, and he would have no trouble in proving that their conduct has been unreasonable.