Nasty bosses and mean co-workers can make work a living hell, and working moms are often targets. Working Mother shows what employees and companies need to know about bullying—and how to fight it.

It’s tough out there. Millions of us already feel uncertain about our jobs, our finances, even our futures. But for 54 million people — or 35 percent of all adult workers — there’s even been more trouble out there: the workplace bully.

According to the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI), more than one third of us have directly experienced bullying at work — and women more so than men. Working Mother readers recently backed up that stat, telling us that 55 percent of them have been on the receiving end of a bully’s tactics.

In our new investigative story, Workplace Bullies, writer Annie Finnigan finds that a tight economy and tough job market are only fueling this problem, as supervisors become frantic and stressed about making their numbers and workers shy away from speaking out against abuse for fear of job loss.

Writes Annie: “Bullies can be bosses, yes, but so too can co-workers or even direct reports. What distinguishes them is their pattern of repeated personal attacks, from verbal abuse and yelling to work sabotage (see Bullying Defined. For those who experience it, workplace bullying can be worse than sexual harassment—a kind of “stealth” abuse that’s just as damaging to its victims but rarely addressed in corporate policy. What’s more, except in extreme cases, workplace bullying is perfectly legal.” (Find out why here.)

Bullies aren’t just individuals with a behavior problem, says Gary Namie, PhD, co-founder of WBI. “The workplace culture is the most important precipitating factor in bullying. Decades of research show an individual’s free will is easily trumped by circumstances engineered by others. We react and respond to situations—but we forget how much they elicit our behavior. The work environment, with its rewards or negative sanctions, informs the way people act more often than staff personalities do.”

Have you ever been caught in a cycle of bullying? Are you there now? Learn some strategies for fighting back here. And I invite you to join Dr. Namie, Working Mother Deputy Editor Barbara Turvett and myself for an important Tweet Chat on workplace bullying, to be held Tuesday, December 13, at 9 p.m. EST. You can follow the #WMworkbullying Tweet Chat via Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/@_workingmother_ For more information on the Tweet Chat, click here.

Jennifer Owens is editorial director of Working Mother magazine and director of the Working Mother Research Institute.