They Preached Solidarity. I Asked for It. Silence Followed - September 2022

“Woe to those who build their houses by unrighteousness, and their upper rooms by injustice; who make their neighbours work for nothing, and do not give them their wages.”

Jeremiah 22:13 

It’s painful to be asking an institution to live by principles it already publicly professes.

In September 2022, I was writing to people and institutions that spoke explicitly about human dignity, justice, fair work, solidarity with workers, and the responsibility to act when people are being exploited or treated unfairly.

I was asking them to apply those principles to what was happening to me.

And I was asking because, by then, I was desperate to be heard.

——

The teaching was already there

The Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney published material on Catholic Social Teaching on Work that could hardly have been clearer.

Its starting point was the dignity of the human person:

“PERSON FIRST: Employees are people first therefore they cannot be defined or treated as only units of labour to be put to use for economic ends.”

It cited the Australian Catholic Bishops’ formulation that:

“work exists for the person, not the person for work”.

The same resource described safe working conditions as a right, emphasised the particular importance of protecting vulnerable workers, supported workers’ ability to organise and protect their rights, and explained that business and economic interests must be shaped by moral concerns rather than placed above the human person.

This wasn’t an incidental message buried somewhere in Church teaching. The Justice and Peace Office’s separate page on Fair and Dignified Working Conditions went further and moved from principle to action.

Among its suggestions was:

“Stand in solidarity with the unemployed, underemployed and those in difficult and unfair working conditions.”

It added:

“This will sometimes include advocacy to government and the public service”.

And the page invited people seeking support to contact the Justice and Peace Office to learn more about how the Church “stands in solidarity with workers and the dignity of fair work”.

Most strikingly for me, the page displayed the words of Jeremiah 22:13:

“Woe to those who build their houses by unrighteousness, and their upper rooms by injustice; who make their neighbours work for nothing, and do not give them their wages.”

I read those words while living through what was the profound contradiction between Catholic social teaching and the treatment I was experiencing.

So I wrote. 

——

“I’m hoping you’ll put in action what you say regarding social justice”

On 5 September 2022, I emailed the Justice and Peace Office.

The subject was:

“Fwd: We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces”

I specifically directed the Office to its own Fair and Dignified Working Conditions webpage and to Jeremiah 22:13.

I wasn’t simply sending them information. I was asking for help.

I told them that I had reported serious misconduct elsewhere and that I was contacting them in case there was something they could do in relation to Australian Catholic University and Catholic Church Insurance.

I wrote:

“I’m hoping you’ll put in action what you say regarding social justice.”

I was pointing to the gap between social justice as a stated value and social justice as something a person should be able to experience when they’re vulnerable and asking a Catholic institution for help.

I explained how deeply the experience had affected me:

“the greatest trauma for me is the shock that so many people can choose to be unconscionable and hypocritical in our society. Where’s the integrity?”

I spoke explicitly about reparation and restitution. I invoked the commandments against stealing and bearing false witness and connected those principles with what needed to happen: repairing the harm, complying with laws and regulations, and preventing further harm.

And I asked the question that had become impossible for me to reconcile:

“It’s what the Catholic Church teaches, and I aligned to ACU’s mission, values, Catholic ethos and positive community engagement initiatives. Then why am I the one being persecuted?”

I also raised what had happened to my family and that their privacy had been violated and that they had been unfairly drawn into what began as my request for a safe workplace.

——

“Everyone has a right to respect and dignity”

My email became increasingly direct because this was no longer an abstract discussion about workplace values.

I wrote about the health and financial consequences that were continuing while people with responsibility remained silent:

“It’s the complacency, the ‘doing nothing’, the silence, that’s causing more damage to health and finances each day.”

And then:

“Everyone has a right to respect and dignity. I wasn’t there to be exploited nor was I slave labour with no human rights.”

Those words were raw because the circumstances were raw.

I was describing my experience of bullying, mobbing, harassment, discrimination, isolation and the exploitation of family trauma. I was also trying to understand how that could be occurring in a period in which organisations were increasingly talking about mental health and mentally healthy workplaces.

The email ended with a plea to the Justice and Peace Office itself:

“Surely as a Justice and Peace office of the Catholic Church and Diocese of Sydney, you can do something.”

And then the question that captured where I was psychologically by that point:

“How much longer will I be saying, ‘Stop the abuse, I can’t take it anymore’, and hear nothing but silence from the Catholic Church institutions?” 

The message forwarded my email of 4 September 2022 to ACU governance, copied to Deputy Vice-Chancellor Ethics Professor Hayden Ramsay, titled “We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces.”

So the Justice and Peace Office was being shown that I was simultaneously trying to reach the governance structures inside my workplace.

——

18 September 2022: I wrote again

Thirteen days later, on 18 September 2022, I contacted the Justice and Peace Office again.

This time I forwarded material concerning my complaint to the NTEU.

My message to the Justice and Peace Office was short, but its meaning was unmistakable:

“I’ll continue to share my pleas to have my voice heard with your office.”

I told them that I, too, was passionate about social justice issues.

Then I asked:

“Please do something to stop the injustice and exploitation of employees in Catholic Church Institutions now.”

I tried to explain the contradiction through an analogy:

“It’s like taking action for human rights in the community, but turning a blind eye to human rights violations and abuse happening behind closed doors within your own family, if you don’t take action.” 

That’s at the heart of why this part of my records remains so significant to me.

Catholic social teaching cannot meaningfully distinguish between the dignity of the worker outside a Catholic institution and the dignity of the worker inside one.

Human dignity doesn’t stop at the institution’s front door.

——

19 September 2022: determination and perseverance

The following day, 19 September 2022, my correspondence records how distressed I remained.

I forwarded another document describing the latest traumatic incident. The language I used was angry and distressed.

But another email sent just nineteen minutes later captures something else.

I was an information professional. I started compiling the documentation from the moment that library associate director fobbed off her responsibilities (and me) to HR. Research, documentation, evidence and information management were part of the skills I had spent years developing. Under extraordinary circumstances, those skills became one of the ways I tried to preserve what was happening.

I wrote:

“I’m … still going until truth, justice, mercy and peace triumph in the name of the Lord.”

Then I reflected on something my family had known about me all my life:

“My family call it stubbornness, … other people call it determination, God calls it perseverance.” 

Perseverance is probably the word that matters most.

——

What does solidarity mean when somebody actually asks for it?

The Justice and Peace Office’s published material doesn’t merely describe Catholic social teaching historically.

It calls for action.

Its material says workers are people first. It says safe working conditions are a right. It says the vulnerable deserve particular attention. It affirms unions as a means through which workers can protect their rights. However, the nationally registered, publicly funded Catholic university employer in question intercepted my emails to union reps and forced the union to collude in this institutional abuse. See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/07/prohibited-workplace-surveillance.html!

And when people experience difficult and unfair working conditions, it expressly calls upon Catholics to stand in solidarity with them, including, where appropriate, through advocacy. 

That creates an important question.

What does solidarity mean when a person actually comes to the door?

What happens when somebody doesn’t merely discuss injustice theoretically, but sends the documents?

What happens when she identifies herself, describes the harm, explains that she’s frightened and traumatised, points directly to the institution’s own social teaching, and repeatedly asks for somebody to act?

For me, that’s where Catholic social teaching has to become more than words on a webpage.

Solidarity cannot only be something Catholic institutions advocate for elsewhere.

Dignity cannot only belong to people whose suffering is safely outside the institution.

Justice cannot only be preached when providing it carries no institutional cost.

And a commitment to fair and dignified working conditions has to mean something when the worker asking for those conditions is standing directly in front of you.

——

The contradiction I was trying to expose

I wasn’t asking the Justice and Peace Office to invent a new moral framework for my circumstances.

I was asking it to apply the one it already published.

Person first.

Human dignity.

Safe and fair working conditions.

Solidarity with vulnerable workers.

Advocacy where necessary.

The common good.

Those principles were already there.

So was Jeremiah 22:13.

And in September 2022, so was I, repeatedly asking to be heard.

That’s what makes these documents so difficult to revisit.

They preserve more than correspondence. They preserve the moment when I was trying to hold Catholic institutions to the values they themselves had taught me mattered.

I was asking for dignity while reading about dignity.

I was asking for justice while reading about justice.

I was asking for solidarity from an office that publicly called people to solidarity with workers experiencing unfair conditions.

And I was asking for action.

The question I was raising then remains the question these records raise now:

When an institution publicly teaches justice, dignity and solidarity, what responsibility does it have when someone within its own institutional community asks it to put those principles into practice?

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 470, 479-480.

The relevant webpages:

https://justiceandpeace.org.au/fair-and-dignified-working-conditions/

https://justiceandpeace.org.au/catholic-social-teaching-on-work/

We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces - Start with Governance - September 2022

4 September 2022

On 4 September 2022, Father’s Day, I wrote again to the University leaders and governance of my workplace.

The subject line of my email was:

“We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces.”

It was September, a month in which mental health awareness was being promoted. For me, this wasn’t an abstract subject.

I had already experienced the devastating loss of my dad to suicide. My family had also been through deeply personal circumstances that belonged to us - not to my employer.

Those circumstances will not be explained publicly now, just as they should not have been violated, discussed, gossiped about and turned into something else completely immoral, to be used against me in my workplace, then.

——

The privacy of my family was part of what I was trying to protect.

Yet, as I explained in my email of 4 September 2022, boundaries around my private family life had been crossed and that intensely personal information had become entangled with the workplace response after I raised concerns about my psychosocial safety.

The intrusion into those boundaries was itself profoundly distressing.

And by September 2022, I was asking a fundamental question: how could an institution speak about mental health, wellbeing and human dignity while I was experiencing its response as further traumatising?

What does a trauma-informed workplace actually look like?

With my email, I included the Harvard Business Review article We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces.

I wanted the leaders of my workplace to read it because I couldn’t reconcile the principles being publicly discussed about trauma, mental health and workplace wellbeing with what I had experienced.

By 4 September 2022, I wasn’t describing one uncomfortable interaction or an isolated workplace disagreement.

I had been raising serious concerns for years about conduct involving management, HR, employment relations, WHS and wellbeing functions. I had repeatedly documented and reported conduct that involved harassment, failures to protect my psychosocial and psychological safety, interference with my privacy, problems with workers compensation processes and my employment entitlements, and failures to support my recovery and safe return to work.

Whether an organisation is genuinely trauma-informed is surely tested at precisely these moments: when somebody is already vulnerable, raises concerns about safety, and needs those with greater institutional power to respond carefully, respectfully and ethically.

——

I had asked for the problem to be resolved locally

There’s important context to what happened next.

The senior Library manager I was dealing with was an Associate Director within the Library directorate and my manager’s manager.

I had raised concerns about my manager’s behaviour and explained that I felt emotionally unsafe at work. I understood that the matter was to be addressed at the local management level, with responsibility for my workplace safety and wellbeing.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, the matter was handed to HR by this associate director without consultation with me.

That was precisely the escalation I had feared. I knew how toxic the organisation had become at that level. I’d say the toxic culture was at at a dangerous level. I’ve now proven that danger. 

I had approached management seeking help with a workplace safety problem. What followed was not a resolution of the problem I had reported. What came next was an increasingly adversarial process, accompanied by further concerns about my psychosocial safety, psychological safety, workplace rights and wellbeing.

I had wanted the workplace problem addressed.

Instead, I was pushed into entering an entirely different “process” - one in which the original reason I had spoken up seemed to be disappearing.

——

“We have been informed you have family issues affecting your work”

Then came a telephone conversation that has remained deeply troubling to me.

On 3 January 2020, the Associate Director said:

“We have been informed you have family issues affecting your work.”

Members of my family were present and heard the conversation.

Those words disturbed all of us profoundly.

I had raised a concern about workplace behaviour and psychosocial safety. Yet I was now hearing that unidentified people had apparently been discussing private matters concerning my family.

• Who were “we”?

• Who had provided this information?

• What information had been shared?

• Where had it come from?

• And what did any of my family’s private circumstances have to do with the workplace safety concern I had raised?

I will not explain those private circumstances here.

That is precisely the point.

They belonged to my family.

They were not something I wanted circulated, scrutinised or brought into a management response to my request for a psychosocially and psychologically safe workplace.

The violation of those boundaries became another source of trauma.

I had sought help because I felt emotionally unsafe at work. What I needed was for the workplace issue I had reported to be addressed appropriately and safely.

I didn’t need or expected that my family’s private life would be drawn into it.

More than two and a half years later, on 4 September 2022, I was still asking the university’s leaders and governance why this had happened and why my original concerns hadn’t been safely resolved. My email records both the 3 January 2020 conversation and the questions I was still asking about what had happened.

——

The dignity of the human person

There was another contradiction I couldn’t ignore.

This was a Catholic university.

Its mission spoke about the dignity of the human person and the common good. Staff were expected to behave ethically and comply with the Staff Code of Conduct.

So, in my email, I asked:

“How does this display ACU’s community engagement initiatives and mission that includes commitment to the dignity of the human person and common good?”

And then came perhaps the simplest question in the entire email:

“Why?”

• Why was I still struggling to be heard respectfully?

• Why had my complaint not resulted in the protection I had been asking for?

• Why, after such an extensive paper trail, was I still having to explain the harm?

• And why had my family ever been drawn into it?

——

I was more than the complaint in front of them

There was something else I wanted governance to remember.

I wrote:

“I’m a qualified and skilled information manager, researcher and educator with a strong work ethic that my community at ACU know very well through my work with them, academic and professional staff, researchers and students.”

I had devoted approximately two decades of my working life to the university.

There was an extensive record of that contribution.

There was also an extensive paper trail documenting what happened after I finally spoke up and told Library executives that I felt emotionally unsafe because of the behaviour I was experiencing from my manager.

My professional identity mattered.

My contribution mattered.

My health mattered.

My privacy mattered.

And the privacy and dignity of my family mattered too.

——

My dad knew

Father’s Day made this correspondence particularly painful.

My dad had observed some of the workplace dynamics while he was alive. In my email, I recalled that he had worried that my manager would benefit from my work while I would ultimately suffer the consequences.

On 4 September 2022, I wrote:

“In respectful memory of my dad, I won’t give up until governance starts to do what they’re meant to do…”

My dad was gone.

I couldn’t have another conversation with him. Yet on Father’s Day I found myself writing to workplace leaders about circumstances that connected painfully with concerns he had expressed while he was alive.

I was asking governance to intervene.

I was also making clear what I continued to seek: restoration of what had been taken from me, including my accumulated entitlements; restoration of my health; my HEW 8 role at Strathfield Campus Library; appropriate training to update my skills; and the opportunity to recover safely in my job.

I didn’t want my working life to be written off.

I was asking for the harm to stop and for what had happened to be addressed.

——

Trauma-informed cannot simply be a slogan

This is why the article I sent that day mattered.

A trauma-informed workplace can’t exist only in wellbeing campaigns, awareness months, staff communications or carefully chosen institutional language.

Its principles have to become visible when somebody is actually traumatised.

They matter when an employee is grieving.

They matter when private family circumstances exist that are NOT the workplace’s business beyond what an employee chooses, or legitimately needs, to disclose.

They matter when somebody says they feel psychologically unsafe.

They matter when there’s an imbalance of power.

They matter when an employee raises a problem locally and reasonably expects those responsible for their safety and wellbeing to help resolve it.

They matter when that person is struggling to communicate because the very people and processes they are required to engage with have themselves become associated with fear, distress and danger.

And perhaps most importantly, they matter when properly listening to that person might be uncomfortable for the institution.

A traumatised person shouldn’t have to establish that they deserve humane treatment.

Nor should somebody have to become increasingly distressed, increasingly persistent and increasingly public before those in positions of responsibility listen.

——

Father’s Day — 4 September 2022

I ended my email:

“Happy Father’s Day and mental health awareness month.”

There’s something deeply sad about those words when I read them.

It was Father’s Day.

I should have been able to remember my dad privately.

Instead, grief, family privacy, workplace psychological and psychosocial safety and institutional accountability had become painfully intertwined.

And that’s one reason I’m drawing a boundary around some of those details.

——

My family is not the story.

The story is that I went to senior management because I felt emotionally unsafe in my workplace.

The story is what happened after I asked for help.

The story is why private matters concerning my family entered that response at all.

And the story is why, more than two and a half years later, I was still asking those responsible for governance to listen.

On 4 September 2022, behind all the processes, departments, policies, job titles and correspondence was a person.

A person grieving her father.

A person trying to protect her family.

A person trying to protect her own health.

A person who wanted to recover safely in the work she had performed honourably for approximately two decades.

And a person asking those responsible for governance to finally listen.

That’s why I sent them an article about trauma-informed workplaces.

By then, I didn’t need another statement about wellbeing.

I needed my workplace to practise it.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 469.

Reference

Brower, T. (2022, 4 March). We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/03/we-need-trauma-informed-workplaces