Is Minnesota prepared for legal assault on bullying bosses?

Your sales director storms into the room and glowers at the trembling sales reps assembled there. He bellows about plummeting profits, blasts the poorest performers and reaches tsunami-level intensity when demanding greater exertions.

After he exits, you and your cohorts count the hairs left on your head. Your boss has some valid points, but was being a jerk when he made them. Should you band together and suggest that he tone it down, ask the human resources department to intervene, or bite your lip and redouble your sales efforts?

There may soon be another option. How about bringing an anti-bullying lawsuit and threatening to take every penny your employer's got?

Never heard of such lawsuits? Advocates are pushing to create sue-the-jerk legal actions across the country, according to the cover story in this month's Bench & Bar, the Minnesota State Bar Association's publication.

This is more than a crackpot, lawyers-full-employment scheme. We know because Minneapolis attorney Sarah Morris, the article's author, reports that the anti-bullying cause is a full-fledged "movement" with a phalanx of "activists" and its own think tank: the Workplace Bullying Institute.

By enlisting terminology like this -- borrowed from the civil rights movement -- anti-bullying proponents presumably expect to make us fall reverently silent.

The anti-bullying movement cites worrisome statistics. "Thirty-seven percent of U.S. workers have been bullied on the job, according to a September 2007 survey," says Morris. Even this hefty number may be conservative. "Other studies have documented higher percentages of affected employees ranging from 59 percent to 90 percent," she says.

I'd put the real figure at closer to 100 percent. Who hasn't had at least one arrogant, blowhard boss?

Civil rights lingo and scary statistics are a plus for any new social crusade. But the anti-bullying movement's real trump in its quest for respectability may be the fact that our elites tend to be Europhiles and that the Continent is apparently falling big-time for anti-bully laws.

The vanguard of enlightened thinking, of course, is France -- the home of the 35-hour workweek, where it's next to impossible to fire an incompetent employee, I'm told.

France's bully law is so porous you could drive a bus through it. The law "targets repeated acts having the intent or effect of degrading the employee's working conditions by impairing the employee's rights and dignity, affecting the employee's physical or mental health, or compromising the employee's future career," according to Morris.

Bosses found guilty of heinous offenses such as "compromising" an employee's "future career" are subject to a 15,000 euro fine and one year in prison, according to Morris.

On this side of the Atlantic, anti-bullying advocates tend to downplay the problems created by the fact that bullying is often in the eye of the beholder. It's hard to deny, after all, that one man's (or woman's) rousing pep talk is another's humiliating nightmare.

Not to fear, anti-bullying advocates say. At trial, expert testimony by one or more of our modern sages -- physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists -- can establish whether a plaintiff has suffered compensable harm.

And that's supposed to be reassuring?

Is every hard-nosed business owner in America destined to be chased into bankruptcy by bullying plaintiffs, lawyers and psychotherapists?

Not yet. Though anti-workplace bullying legislation has been introduced in at least 12 states in the past five years, none has adopted it, according to Morris.

But elsewhere, anti-bully proponents are pushing their ace in hole. They are exhorting judges to flex their legal muscles, go over lawmakers' heads and declare a general workplace harassment cause of action -- a Pandora's box that could overwhelm both courts and businesses.

Will Minnesota judges take the bait?