University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1988 Employer Abuse, Worker Resistance, and the Tort of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Regina Austin University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Labor and Employment Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal History Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Torts Commons, and the Work, Economy and Organizations Commons Repository Citation Austin, Regina, "Employer Abuse, Worker Resistance, and the Tort of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress" (1988). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 1311. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1311 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Fnl.;,-' ~ _ _plo · v} er; , _[L\ _,._ hl'j :.A ,.;: u ,'lne ~ ~~A J1 Vnrl ;. -~"' Pf·- ~ - ; pJ!._ ""- p"- ~ ~.!. s. t ance. ~ and th e T ort of In tentional Infliction o f iG'Lmonona · • ""n· J·LlS · t ress T he conventional Wis dom is that, in the workplace, abuse can be a legitima te instrument of worker comrol and an ap propriate form of dis cipline .1 By "abuse" I mean treatment tha;: is intentionally emotionally p<~inful, offensive, or insulting. Rebukes and reprimands are the very sort of "behavior that one would expect from a superior who is dissatis fied wi th his subordinate's p erformance.