Waging War In The Workplace

Americans are used to seeing a stream of funerals for victims of violent crime. But consider 10 particular July funerals, each for someone who was killed, in the space of one week, in a place that seemed the least likely to be visited by violent death. Each was killed at work.

Maria Escobedo, 26, was shot at Meridian Oil Inc. in Houston, where she was a secretary. Bruce Flippin, 49, was killed at the John Dewar meatpacking company in Boston, where he was plant manager. Lawyer John Scully, 28, and seven other people were killed at the offices of Pettit & Martin in San Francisco; Scully died shielding another wounded lawyer, his wife. The San Francisco murderer was Gian Luigi Ferri, a failed businessman who blamed lawyers, among others, for his problems, and took two 9-mm semiautomatic pistols up to the 34th floor of a downtown skyscraper to prove his point.

While the San Francisco killings made national headlines, news of the others blended into the usual busy flow of crime reports. But these deaths mark the invasion of violence into another seemingly safe place in the social landscape. Crimes of the workplace manifest themselves in different ways. Ferri was a former client of Pettit & Martin, and he believed they gave him bad advice. Escobedo was killed by an estranged boyfriend after a domestic dispute spilled over at work. But for many killers, the workplace itself is the target. The U.S. Postal Service, where 38 employees have died violently since 1986, is studying ways to give workers more voice in their work lives. The Department of Energy is evaluating potential threats at nuclear and other facilities. Private employers are installing hot fines to pick up tips on employees most likely to explode when a layoff is announced.

Since 1980, at least 750 people a year have been murdered at work, making it the third leading cause of occupational death, and the first cause of death for women at work, says the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a government agency. The number of managers killed by employees doubled, to 24 a year from 12, says James Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. First Security Services in Boston now fields eight times the number of queries it did a year ago from executives threatened with violence. Last fall NIOSH issued a report declaring workplace homicide a "significant" public-health problem, and recently asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin tracking these homicides separately. Deaths themselves are just the "tip of the iceberg," says Joseph A. Kinney, executive director of the National Safe Workplace Institute. Garry Mathiason, a San Francisco lawyer, estimates that there are at least 30,000 violent incidents a year.

Such statistics paint a picture of the problem, but hardly answer the hard questions:

Why is this happening now?