Apparently frustrated by his employer’s intent to withhold part of his wages and pay them to the IRS, Michael Morgan McDermott allegedly killed seven of his co-workers at Edgewater Technology in Massachusetts. Those who lifted their heads up from a holiday fog to follow the news recoiled in horror at the lives lost – a new mother, an efficient office manager, a widower and father of four, and other human resource and accounting employees. As horrified as we are, though, we have to acknowledge the vise that workplace violence has on our lives.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, homicide is the second leading cause of fatal occupational injury in the United States. In 1998, 1.5 million people were assaulted in the workplace, and 709 were killed. Most of those killed were retail sales workers, police officers and taxi drivers, but Tuesday’s rampage isn’t the first time that a disgruntled employee took his frustrations to the workplace, with fatal results. Just nine months ago, a fired Irving, Texas car wash employee killed five people. A year ago, a disgruntled co-worker killed five Tampa, Florida hotel workers. An Atlanta day trader killed nine people at Atlanta brokerage offices eighteen months ago, in July 1999.

It’s not just the killing – last year almost 2 million people were threatened in the workplace, told that their lives, or their peace of mind, were in jeopardy. Sometimes these threats come for honest workplace disagreements. Sometimes they are a function of outside frustration. However they come, they change the tone and tenor of the workplace and make it more difficult for people to work together. And, workplace threats are a productivity drain in any work environment.
But the "new economy", it seems to me, has sometimes facilitated workplace chaos, violence, and threats. The new economy is fast-paced and real time, almost immediately responsive to a company’s daily needs. You need a webmaster? Go find one. Their qualifications? Don’t make too many phone calls or ask too many questions, we need a warm body in that slot. The employee manual, the rules of the road, the terms and conditions of work? Excuse me, but we haven’t had a chance to develop that, yet. Road rules, if you will. Especially when the pace is fast.

Contrast that to an old economy company when the time between an interview and an offer may stretch into weeks. There are references to be checked, procedures to be followed, psychological tests to be administered, and the not so competent to be weeded out. This certainly isn’t to suggest that the sly, slick and wicked are all screened out by old economy employers, to focus on new economy opportunities. After all, for awhile, it seemed that all the workplace shooters were postal workers. Still, the urgency with which some new economy employers have added workers, combined with the ways they have short-changed their human resource departments, may lead to situations much like the one that took place this week.

This workplace rage thing has become so significant that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has developed a set of materials to combat workplace violence. Organizations, such as the Palm Beach, California based Workplace Violence Research Institute, have been developed to deal with the issue of workplace violence. Consultants have developed materials to help people handle the effects of workplace violence, including trauma crisis counseling and employee assistance to aid victims. But when violent incidents erupt they have a harrowing and unforeseeable impact. And they shatter the way we work.

Monday morning quarterbackers will say that they knew that Michael McDermott was a little weird. They’ll dissect his email messages and wonder why they didn’t ask him about the duffel bag of weapons that he brought to work. After the fact, it is easy to put together a set of plausible explanations for explosions of violence – the lateness, the frustration, the impact of an IRS garnishment. And no one, no matter how prescient they are, could possibly have predicted that Mr. McDermott’s rage would have bombarded into seven deaths.

Still, we know this much. Workplace homicide is such a significant problem that in the 1990’s it emerged as the second cause of workplace death. Many of the homicides are "in the line of work", with clerks in late night stores, police officer shot in the line of duty, taxi drivers being robbed. But some of the deaths are the unpredictable deaths that come when people are in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong energy. Some of these deaths might be prevented if small and medium size workplaces had better human resource screens for new employees. Some companies scrimp on human resource costs because they don’t have the time or money. But productivity suffers, one way or another, when companies fail to do the appropriate workplace screening.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX ON BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS
DECEMBER 28, 2000

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