CASUALTIES OF WORKPLACE VIOLENCE
Fearing that he is about to be fired, a part-time letter carrier barges into the back room of his local post office and starts shooting wildly. He guns down 14 people and then kills himself. (Rugala, 2004)
A military reservist with a top secret clearance who was working for a defense contractor is waved through the checkpoint of a Navy base. Concealing a sawed- off shotgun, he walks around firing at unsuspecting people, slaying twelve and wounding four others for
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an hour and a half until the police kill him. A review by the Department of Defense concludes that his employer overlooked red flags in his troubled history indicating mental instability, and that the Navy was too focused on keeping a secure perimeter against outside threats and not concerned enough about the dangers posed by insiders granted clearance to enter military installations. (Cooper, 2014)
Shocking massacres like these serve as vivid reminders that workers can become injured or murdered while doing their jobs under conditions determined by their employers. In the wake of a spate of mass shootings during the 1980s and 1990s similar to the cases described above, the phrase going postal entered everyday conversations (see Ames, 2005). (However, a U.S. Postal Commis- sion study concluded in 2000 that the derogatory expression was misleading and unfair because post office employees actually were less likely to be assaulted or killed on the job than other workers [see Rugala, 2004].)
Disgruntled or emotionally disturbed employ- ees have attacked bosses or coworkers for many years, but the problem was not monitored or ana- lyzed until its rediscovery in 1989, when the term workplace violence was coined. The U.S. Occupa- tional Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) describes its scope as including any act or even any threat of harassment, intimidation, or physical assault or other disruptive behavior that takes place at a work site. According to OSHA’s broad defini- tion, even noncriminal matters (like verbal abuse) count, and the potential victims are not limited to employees but can also include customers, clients, and even visitors. Although this government agency warned that workplace violence can strike “any- where, anytime, and no one is immune,” it identi- fied a number of risk factors: working in a position where handling cash is part of the duties; interacting with volatile and unstable people (as in a mental hospital); being employed in places where alcohol is served; performing tasks alone (such as cab dri- vers) or in isolated areas; and working late at night (as in convenience stores), especially in high-crime neighborhoods (OSHA, 2014).
On-the-job injuries and deaths certainly are not new: Recall images of pirates killing sailors when boarding ships on the high seas, and robbers shooting stagecoach drivers and crews on steam locomotives in the Old West. Now that monitor- ing systems are in place, it is possible for crimin- ologists and victimologists to determine whether an upsurge in attacks and multiple slayings truly is taking place at job sites or whether more atten- tion is being paid to scattered tragedies. The evidence-based answer is that the shootings that attract sensational media coverage are relatively rare events. The most common on-the-job threats that cause business owners, administrators, and supervisors concern about their employees’ ability to focus on the tasks at hand are crimes that are quite mundane—robberies, assaults, stalk- ings, and acts of intimidation, plus potentially disruptive noncriminal matters such as abusive bullying relationships and sexual harassment (Rugala, 2004).
During the 1990s, the rate of workplace violence declined just as the rate of violent crime did both before and after work across the country. Incidents at work on average made up about 18 percent of the violent crimes committed each year from 1993 to 1999, according to the NCVS. The survey identified the characteristics of typical vic- tims. It discovered that nonfatal violence harmed males more often than females, and younger workers (20–34 years old) more often than older workers—patterns that were the same as for similar crimes outside of work. But whites suffered a higher rate of assault than blacks (13 compared to 10 victims per 1,000 workers per year), which was the opposite of the pattern for nonworkplace vio- lence. People employed by the government were harmed at about the same rate as employees in the private sector (Duhart, 2001).