“My practice is really focused on employment law, industrial relations, regulatory law, focused on those areas of law. So, for example, regulatory schemes like wage theft or labour high licensing, where those fit into employment law. Coming to the bar, I always really loved employment law and I used to say before I came to the bar that I wanted to collect the set and work in every kind of sector that I could related to industrial relations,” she said.

“So, I started off at a firm and then I went to an employer association and then I worked in government industrial relations and then I had an in-house role that was focused on employment law. And throughout that time, I was teaching employment law and doing my PhD. And so that was really a very natural progression for me to go to the bar, to have the practise that I have now, which is focused on employment law, industrial law.”

The employment industrial relations spaces are particularly special for Stojanova, who did her honours thesis on workplace bullying, following a particularly challenging case at the time – whereby a café worker committed suicide after ongoing bullying from her co-workers.

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“In Australia, we have a law that's called Brodie's Law, and it’s a law that sits within the stalking provisions of the Crimes Act. And that law was introduced after the tragic death of a lovely young woman called Brodie Panlock in Victoria. And at that time, after Brodie’s death, it was seen that there was a dramatic need for law reform in relation to workplace bullying, and that led to the creation of Brodie’s law, among other things,” Stojanova said.

“And while Brodie’s Law, is really important, and while Brodie’s Law, serves to deal with some really extreme examples of workplace bullying, at the time, when I was a university student and I was listening to the news reports and the outcomes that we were seeing from Bodie’s death and the bodies, all related law reform developments, I began to think, as others were thinking at the time, that that was filling one gap.

“But there were still so many gaps, in particular, gaps in the regulatory scheme that we have in Australia for less extreme examples of workplace bullying, which may not lead to the suicide of the victim in question, or the death of the victim in question, but which still have a really dramatic impact on people’s lives.”

For Stojanova, this case was the “trigger” and the catalyst for her to pursue her career in employment law and a key academic focus on workplace bullying.

“Practitioners in Australia practise in all sorts of different areas of law. And some areas of law don’t have that kind of significant emotional component that other areas of law do, and practitioners that are in those spaces where they can have the vicarious trauma through the contact that they’re having with their clients. It’s a really important aspect of practice for those practitioners to be conscious of that and to be taking care of themselves,” she said.

“It can also feel empowering to be able to have cases where your knowledge of this safety issue is able to feed into the remedy that your client achieves or the advice that you’re able to give your client. And sometimes, for example, if you’re advising an employer client and you’re able to use that knowledge to guide them to an outcome that may very well be in their best interest, but is an outcome that takes into account factors such as the mental health and wellbeing of an employee or former employee, that can feel like quite an empowering process as well.”

Stojanova’s thesis is around law reform and regulatory options to reduce the rates of workplace bullying across professional services and in terms of the state of workplace bullying in Australia, there are a few key laws to consider.

“My thesis looks at occupational health and safety regimes, the anti-bullying provisions in the Fair Work Act. It looks at statutory workers compensation regimes. It looks at section 21 A Crimes Act in Victoria, which we call Brodie’s law. It also looks at the tort of negligence. The problem that we have is that many of those laws were introduced before we were even thinking or talking about workplace bullying. So, they weren’t tailored to the issue of workplace bullying. And then some of those laws were very much introduced with workplace bullying in mind,” she said.

“But the issue is that when we look at the phenomenon of workplace bullying and we look at all the different factors to workplace bullying in a workplace, what are those factors that are likely to lead to workplace bullying or predictive of workplace bullying? When we look at all those different factors, we look at why workplace bullying occurs and we compare that to the laws that we have in Australia. What we see is that we have this regulatory gap.

“We have these different laws and we say, well, to the extent that a victim feels like the remedies are helpful, the victim is able to access these remedies. These various regulatory approaches are there. We’ve got this patchwork system that’s built up over time. There are some options there, but none of those options deal comprehensively with all of the different precursor factors that predict the occurrence of workplace bullying. And that’s the issue that my thesis is looking to address.”

But especially as workplaces continue to evolve post-pandemic, Stojanova said the laws need to also continually evolve to keep up with new trends.

“Humans have the ability to bully each other in all sorts of different environments, which is unfortunate, of course, people also have the ability to be really good and kind to each other in different environments as well. As a society, we continue to evolve, our workplaces continue to evolve. The changes that we’ve seen from the COVID-19 pandemic are part of what we’re seeing in Australia at the moment, and in other countries, of course,” she said.

“And all of that feeds into this concept that we have this patchwork system of laws. We have some laws that are very old, that have been around for a very long time, that, for example, were introduced to deal with physical hazards, not psychosocial hazards, and all of that contributes to these regulatory gaps that we see.”

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The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Dr Nadia Stojanova, click below: