I worked on a production where the two production execs bullied a production secretary for being overweight. No one intervened because it was the senior management who were initiating the behaviour. They would comment when he ate and generally act unpleasantly towards him. The production secretary was eventually let go with a weeks’ notice and replaced by another runner.
The atmosphere of the production was terrible. The two production executive’s moods were so changeable and everyone was constantly on eggshells.
On one occasion, a cake was brought out for a researcher's birthday. Midway through the office singing happy birthday one of the production execs stood up and shouted for it to stop for no reason. The atmosphere of fear they created meant no one was able to raise issues within the production, such as the working days for the runners or the driver’s days being too long at 18 or 20 hours.
There were at least two accidents, one relatively serious. The girl involved wasn't given any medical help as she was too afraid to ask and ended up with some quite serious whiplash. It took someone external raising the issue about minimum wage not being met for the long hours to stop. If the atmosphere on this production had been better this would never have happened. Many of the fantastic, hardworking, diverse runners and drivers left the industry after this.
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