The staffer, whom the Herald has agreed not to name, described the Hamilton West MP as “controlling” and believed Sharma was trying to isolate his staff from other Labor parliamentary staff in Hamilton.
Asked for his answer today, Sharma did not address the specific allegations made by the staffer who spoke to the Herald.
However, he said he had refused to renew the contract of one of his former staffers because he was not satisfied with their work.
He said his team manager had forwarded complaints about that employee to Parliament’s service but they were never investigated “despite repeated requests”. He said he had repeated that request yesterday “where the parliamentary service refused to investigate these matters and just wanted to move on”.
The employee said they felt compelled to speak out after reading a column by Sharma in the Herald in which he claimed he had been the victim of bullying himself.
After the column was published, Labor’s whip Duncan Webb and the Parliamentary Service said they had worked with Sharma on “employment issues”.
Webb said on Friday that the Labor whip’s office “was aware of issues between Gaurav and some of his associates a year ago”.
He said the hiring of new staff in Sharma’s office had been “paused … with the intention of providing further assistance before hiring more staff in his office”.
Webb said the whips were still coming into contact with Sharma, including as late as Thursday, the day he made the claims public.
On Friday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Sharma is still “appreciated” in Labour.
“While we have disputed the allegations he has made, Gaurav is a valued member of the team and we want to make sure he gets the support he needs,” she said. Ardern did not comment on the specific allegations.
“Managing staff can be difficult, so our focus with Gaurav from the start has been to take a constructive approach that we hope would position him as a long-term Member of Parliament, and provide coaching and mentoring and other support to ensure to make sure that was the case,” Ardern said.
The employee claimed that by the time they got to Sharma’s office, he had already had a bad relationship with the staff. They said they tried to stop almost immediately, but he persuaded them to stay.
The staffer said they were tearful to tears within weeks of starting work, and eventually the parliamentary service was able to provide counseling for them after they began to feel depressed and considered self-harm.
“I’ve never cried at work before, but this guy had me in tears – he couldn’t handle my emotion and didn’t want to deal with it. He kind of told me ‘you have to get tough to handle this'” the employee claimed.
The employee said they were tasked with getting the right sizes for ads in a community newsletter.
Instead of consulting the internal guide to advertising, they called the newsletter staff directly.
Sharma, who should have been in the virtual parliament, is said to have “went up” to the staff member and told them not to speak directly to “stakeholders”.
“I try to give him the answer as soon as possible,” said the staffer. “I felt like I was constantly being watched and constantly tested,” they said.
The employee claimed that Sharma would sit on the staff’s backs about the condition of their desks, whether the windows were closed, and that an employee left a fan on the desk. The employee said they would turn off the desk fan for the other employee to prevent Sharma from getting frustrated.
They claimed Sharma would be disappointed if employees put fridge magnets in the wrong box.
“It was like walking on eggshells,” they said.
Finally, the staff member was put in touch with the parliamentary service.
The Parliament Service has “relationship managers” – people with whom MPs can talk about their work without having to talk to the MP themselves.
Sharma arranged for the staffer to meet with a manager to discuss the issues.
But the employee claimed that Sharma would not allow them to communicate privately with their relationship manager.
“We were told not to contact our relationship manager without permission,” they said.
The employee said they “leave everything out” when speaking to their manager.
“I told her everything I had experienced in the office,” the staffer said, adding that the parliamentary service and the Labor Party had handled the incident well.
“I had to go to a consultation office.
“I’ve never been depressed or wanted to hurt myself. I’m a happy person who has always been positive. I never knew about mental health,” said the staffer.
“I thought about ways I could kill myself. I didn’t want to go back to work. I would rather kill myself than go back to work,” they said.
The employee said they were more confident at work and able to speak their mind during meetings.
“I lost my confidence. I’m still recovering from it.”
The staffer claimed that Sharma isolated his staff from other parts of the Labor Party in Hamilton, ostensibly out of what they believe was his jealousy of the other Labor MPs in the area, such as Jamie Strange, and because he allegedly held a grudge against other parts of the party. who he said had been working against his attempts to be elected as a Member of Parliament.
“We were in Hamilton and there are a few other Labor MPs in Hamilton and we had no relationship with their offices,” they said.
“You’re on Gaurav’s team. It’s Gaurav’s team or nobody’s team. You stay with him and what he does,” they said.
The employee said they believed Sharma had unrealistic expectations from the staff.
An example was when a colleague had to pick up a key to a community location where Sharma was to hold a meeting.
The colleague could not get the key to the meeting room because she had come in with Covid-19 and was in isolation.
The colleague had not arranged the key early enough and Sharma had to pick up the key.
The employee claimed that Sharma was “angry” that he had to pick up the key himself.
The employee claimed that while Sharma never yelled at them, he did yell at other employees.
“He was yelling at other staff members. I didn’t get the full load of it,” they said.
Sharma wrote in his Herald column that he felt gaslit in Parliament. The staffer accused Sharma of gaslighting staffers themselves.
After he left, the staffer contacted Sharma to try to “clear the air” and move on.
Sharma is said to have told the staffer there was “nothing else to say”, but said he and another staffer had recovered from everything he had done to his staff.
“He told me that [he] and the senior MP’s support was restored from all I had done to them.
“He did not admit that he was also guilty,” the staffer said.