Abstract
With the generalization of office work all through the second half of the 20th century, harassment in the workplace has become a critical issue. In France, for example, according to an Ipsos study, 30% of workers claim that they have been subject to moral harassment while 37% claim they have witnessed a colleague being subjected to moral harassment. With the rise of occurrences of workplace harassment, in France but also in the United States and on a worldwide scale, employment law in various jurisdictions has naturally evolved in order to respond to the importance of this phenomenon, which often bears devastating consequences on the mental and physical health of the victims.
In France, the law has created the legal category of "moral harassment", whose equivalent under US federal law might be regarded as the concept of "hostile work environment harassment". However, these two concepts do not overlap perfectly, and the particular legal and historical evolutions of France and of the United States partly explain the differences between moral harassment and hostile work environment harassment. These two notions differ in their scope but also in the burden of proof associated to each of them. Similarly, each of the two notions creates particularities when it comes to litigation.
