Violence in the American Workplace: Challenges to the Public Employer

Abstract

Among the many problems confronted by public as well as private employers are injuries resulting from occupational violent crime (OVC) or workplace violence.(1) OVC injury is defined as intentional battery, rape, or homicide during the course of employment. The available statistics on OVC in the United States reveal that it is a meaningful risk for many workers and that it may be more widespread and in its consequences than these data suggest. To a limited extent, the social-psychological causes of OVC are being explored, but no systematic effort been made to identify risk factors that may be particularly relevant to the public employer. There is reason to believe that the public sector is increasingly threatened by anti-government involving frustrated clients, terrorist groups with political motives, and individuals who are just plain angry at bureaucrats. The 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City serves as the most recent and horrible example of public employees being murdered while at work. Although it is to be hoped that mass murders of government workers will continue to be rare, existing evidence suggests that the more common types of OVC may pose a growing threat to public employees, and the data on homicides reveal that some groups of government employees are at higher risk than the average worker in the United States.(2) The U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that of the nation's nearly one million victims of workplace in 1994, 30 percent were federal, state, or local government employees (U.S. Department of Justice, 1994). Under these conditions, public policy makers and human resources managers cannot afford to ignore the potential for OVC or to assume that it may be treated as an extraordinary event that does not merit investment in its prevention and the mitigation of its consequences. For the most part, public as well as private employers have resisted the idea that they should treat OVC as an organizational problem. Although the risk of criminal assault traditionally been connected with certain jobs, such as law enforcement and private security, it not been associated with many other occupations where, in fact, it does happen with some regularity. For these classes of employees, according to Janice L. Thomas, OVC has not been considered a typical hazard that must be analyzed and acted upon by safety and risk-control professionals. In the past, when a worker was assaulted, it was considered a misfortune and a police matter (Thomas, 1992a; 27). Pressures for change in this posture have been building, largely in response to widely publicized cases of multiple murders in public agencies as well as corporate settings and increasing public concern about in American society, including the workplace. A Growing Awareness of Workplace Violence Multiple homicides in the workplace are headline-grabbing events, and there have been more than enough bloody episodes over the last several years to keep the print and electronic media occupied (Stuart, 1992; 72-84). For sustained media attention, however, the U.S. Postal Service had few rivals. Between August 1983 and May 1993, the Postal Service endured 10 separate episodes of murderous by current or former employees. A total of 29 postal workers were killed, and 16 were wounded (Barringer, 1993; A7). Shaken by these tragic and highly publicized events, the Postal Service and Postmaster General Marvin Runyon sponsored a symposium on workplace on December 16, 1993. The keynote address was given by former Surgeon General M. Joycelyn Elders. In her address, she stated: But we are not just talking about homicide here today. We are talking about a work force under siege from pressures, harassment, and non-fatal violence (Elders, 1993). In October of that year, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) also issued an Alert in which it identified workplace homicide as a serious public health problem that requires our attention (U. …