Workers Who Fight Firing with Fire

By Anastasia Toufexis

America has been hard at work in the past 10 days, and here is what happened: a Federal Express pilot took a claw hammer and attacked three others in the cockpit, forcing one of them to put the fully loaded DC-10 cargo plane through a series of violent rolls and nose dives in a melee that brought the whole crew back bleeding. A purchasing manager in suburban Chicago stabbed his boss to death because, police say, they couldn't agree on how to handle some paperwork. And a technician who quit because he had trouble working for a woman sneaked back inside his fiber-optics laboratory, pulled out a 9-mm Glock semiautomatic pistol and started firing at workers, who ducked or fled or curled up in closets and file cabinets. By the time he finished the job, two were dead, two were injured; he walked upstairs to an office and shot himself in the head.

Even Americans who see a potential for violence almost everywhere -- who aren't surprised anymore to hear of toddlers taking bullets while holding their mother's hand -- like to suppose there are a few sanctuaries left. One is a desk, or a spot behind the counter, or a place on the assembly line.

But murder has become the No. 1 cause of death for women in the workplace; for men it is the third, after machine-related mishaps and driving accidents. And while most workplace murders occur during stickups in taxis or convenience stores, the picture of on-the-job mayhem in recent months has included a dainty Connecticut flower nursery, the homey pizza parlor of a Denver suburb and just, last Wednesday the high-tech interior of a Japanese company in North Carolina's lake-dotted Research Triangle Park.

It was there, 45 minutes after the start of last Wednesday's 7 a.m. shift at the Sumitomo Electric Fiber Optics Corp., that Ladislav Antalik, 38, from the former Czechoslovakia, turned his bile into a bloody mess. Antalik's behavior was not a complete surprise to those who knew him. He was a loner and, some say, not very good at his job; he had chafed under a female supervisor. A few days after quitting, he had returned to Sumitomo and tried to go back to work, only to be escorted off the property by sheriff's deputies.

The case of Auburn R. Calloway, on the other hand, who attacked three of his fellow Federal Express pilots while flying as a jump-seat passenger, is mystifying. The crime-conscious Calloway had organized a Neighborhood Watch program. As an ex-Navy pilot, he knew to respect the cockpit code of solidarity that says you leave your differences on the ground. His possible motive: he was scheduled to appear the next day before a disciplinary hearing at Federal Express to face charges that he lied about his military and work experience.

A decade ago, such tragedies were bizarre and rare, the stuff of amateurish television scripts. But not a month goes by these days without a grotesque outburst of violence in the workplace. In March alone, a worker who was let go entered a Santa Fe Springs, California, electronics factory and shot three + people to death before killing himself. In Boonville, Missouri, a drunken ex- convict walked into a military school's cafeteria in search of his estranged wife; he didn't find her, but fatally shot her boss and a co-worker.

Today more than 1,000 Americans are murdered on the job every year, 32% more than the annual average in the '80s. Increasingly, too, they die not at the hands of strangers but because their spouses or jilted lovers pursue their quarry to the work site, or because disgruntled co-workers or customers want to settle a score.

"Violence directed against employers or former employers is the fastest- growing category of workplace violence," says Joseph Kinney, executive director of the National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago. And deaths are only the worst outcome of the problem: a 1993 survey by Northwestern National Life Insurance suggests that more than 2 million employees suffer physical attacks on the job each year and more than 6 million are threatened in some way. "They run the gamut from anonymous love letters on secretaries' desks to feces smeared on men's room walls to death threats sent to CEOs' homes to workers talking of mass murder and specifying which guns they'll use on which supervisors," says forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, head of the Threat Assessment Group in Newport Beach, California.

The obvious reasons for this are the ones often invoked to explain the problem of violence in society as a whole -- more guns, and more glory for using them. But experts also blame increasingly harsh work environments and a continual wave of layoffs in the past decade, which have made workers feel dispensable. Says psychologist Bruce Blythe, of Atlanta-based Crisis Management International: "People get awfully upset when there are no raises, then there are layoffs, and the CEO gets a $500,000 bonus. This growing disparity plays into it." Making workers even more desperate, says Dennis Johnson, a clinical psychologist at Behavior Analysts and Consultants in Stuart, Florida, is the prospect of finding "positions with lower pay, fewer benefits and little job satisfaction. You're taking away a very critical anchor, especially for men."

A TIME/CNN poll this month reports that 37% of Americans see workplace violence as a growing problem. Some 18% have witnessed assaults at work; another 18% worry about becoming victims themselves. Those fears help explain why two-thirds of emergency-room nurses turn their name tags upside down to deter patients from learning their identities, why some supervisors have taken to wearing bulletproof vests, and why the owner of a McDonald's in central St. Louis forbids his 120 employees to wear red or blue, the colors of the local Crips and Bloods gangs.

Companies meanwhile are being driven to take action, spurred as much by legal considerations and government pressure as by safety concerns. Last September the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health issued recommendations designed to prevent workplace violence. In California three bills have been introduced into the state legislature that will monitor employer safety measures more closely. But a big impetus for action is the increasing number of claims filed against companies for failure to protect workers. The family of a sales clerk murdered by an employee at a Gap store in New York City two years ago is suing a security firm, an alarm company, an armored-car service and two contractors that the Gap employed. They are seeking $100 million in damages.

Companies face other suits for negligence in hiring, retaining and promoting violent workers. "The defense that employers used to have, that a violent employee acted out of the scope of his responsibilities, has been eroded," observes Karen Kienbaum of Varnum, Riddering, Schmidt and Howlett, a Michigan law firm. When an off-duty store manager chased a child who had urinated on the side of the building and attacked his four-year-old companion, the parents sued the company and won. "The jury said, 'Forget it. The man had a history of violence, and you made him store manager. Then he went nuts.' "

While companies cannot always anticipate their legal exposure, they can take precautions to shield themselves from violent intrusion. As a result, they are investing more than ever in hiring guards and installing high-tech gizmos like tilt-and-zoom closed-circuit cameras or magnetic-card access systems. The current outlay is more than $22 billion each year, up 16% from 1990, according to Leading Edge Reports, a research firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. The figure is well in excess of the amount spent on the nation's police departments. By 1996 the expenditure is expected to soar another 35%, to nearly $31 billion.

An increasing number of consultants -- from psychiatrists to former FBI agents to lawyers and insurers -- are telling companies, in the words of lawyer Kienbaum, that they "should prepare for workplace violence like they prepare for product changes." The San Francisco law firm of Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff, Tichy & Mathiason boasts of its 20 lawyers who work full time on workplace-violence cases; it provides its FORTUNE 500 clients with a training video that identifies warning signs and lists seven ways to prevent such incidents. The Kemper insurance companies in Long Grove, Illinois, offer one-day workshops (price: $250) twice a year and are preparing a video on how to drill so that, as one executive puts it, "even if people can't save the first victim, perhaps they can save three other people."

As with many new advice industries, this one has its amateurs. One "expert" suggested that employees learn aikido; another persuaded a client to arm every employee with a can of Mace. Another told workers to keep their doors open at a 45 degrees angle so as to deflect bullets. In one case an investigator hired by a company to follow an employee ended up attaching a tracking bug to the person's car, and in another case security consultants simply broke the law by checking a worker's arrest record in a state that allows employers to verify only convictions.

Of course, the basic premise of this consulting industry is that violence in the workplace is predictable and preventable -- that workers never snap suddenly out of control but leave a trail of signals behind them. San Francisco lawyer Garry Mathiason once received a call from an embarrassed executive at a local company asking him to check up on a clerk who was reported to have a large collection of weapons at home. "He knew the kid was fine, and it appeared there was no problem," says Mathiason. "But when we began asking questions, we found out that he had enough weapons to take out half the city, and that he had threatened to kill all of the gays in the office. Then we did a background check and found out that he had been in an armed robbery." With Mathiason's involvement, the firm tightened security and recommended that the clerk receive counseling.

Stricter screening of job applicants is the most obvious way to keep violence out of the workplace. The U.S. Postal Service, which in recent years has become the locus of several on-the-job massacres (34 employees gunned down since 1986), did not spot a special designation on the military discharge of Thomas McIlvane, a former clerk who killed four workers at a Royal Oak, Michigan, facility three years ago. If followed up, it would have disclosed that in a fit of anger he had run over a noncommissioned officer's car with a tank.

Some experts advocate conducting psychological exams as a way to predict an employee's behavior. But many argue that such inquiries can't possibly be useful without a context. "Let's say business goes well for a long time and then years later you have large-scale layoffs," poses Jess Kraus, a UCLA epidemiologist who served on a federal panel on workplace violence. "You want to tell me that some consulting group can tell you what someone will do 20 years in advance?"

The value of a generic profile as a way to detect potentially dangerous employees is also controversial. According to some experts, violent employees tend to be male, white, 35 years of age or older, with few interests outside of work, an affinity for guns, a history of family problems, a tendency to hold grudges and extremist opinions, and maybe a habit of abusing drugs and alcohol. But others, like psychiatrist Dietz, argue that past workplace rampages show they are committed by men and women of all races and all ages. Moreover, he says, in most cases alcohol and drugs are not involved; nor is there any record of earlier violence. "Relying on profiles carries a twofold risk: that people will be wrongly tagged as dangerous simply because they match the list and others will be mistakenly disregarded because they don't." More accurate predictors, he says, would be a worker acting paranoid, depressed or suicidal, and continually filing unreasonable grievances and lawsuits.

Partly with this in mind, some companies have instituted telephone hot lines for employees concerned about their co-workers. But already some contend they are being abused by overanxious employees. "Now you can have a bad day at work and be reported for getting upset," says Omar Gonzalez, head of the American Postal Workers Union in Los Angeles.

Still, the experience of the U.S. Postal Service in the past five years is instructive. Last year investigators devoted more than 100,000 hours to investigating incidents and threats, double the time spent in 1992. As part of their training, all managers take courses on spotting and handling dangerous situations. Officials have also established an annual opinion survey that allows employees to rate their bosses, much like college students assess professors; the responses figure in supervisors' promotions and raises. The changes are clearly working. Reported assaults at post office facilities have , been dropping steadily: in 1990, 424 were recorded; last year, 214.

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Lawrence Mondi/New York and Leslie Whitaker/Chicago