Dominique Gantt, a guard for Security USA Inc., was
assigned to the New Carrollton federal building in Maryland. Gantt had recently
broken up with an ex-boyfriend, Gary Sheppard, and had obtained a protective
order prohibiting Sheppard from contacting her anywhere, including at her job.
Gantt told her supervisors about the conflict and gave them a copy of the
protective order.
The company's Project Manager instructed all Security
USA supervisors, including Gantt's supervisor, Sergeant Angela Claggett, to
assign Gantt to an "inside" post while at work in order to protect
Gantt from Sheppard should he ever violate the protective order. [i]
Challenging
safety and violence risks, including those involving protective orders, threats
of violence, and propensity for employee violence that goes undisciplined,
cause extreme stress and disruption to a work environment. These situations must be handled with extreme
caution and strategy to avoid harm, chaos, and legal liability. How do we design a program that effectively
anticipates dangerous violent situations, prevents violent incidents, educates
employees and contractors on safety policies, and effectively manages threats
and actual incidents of workplace violence?
Employer
representatives, for years, have searched for effective guidance on preventing
and intervening in potential workplace violence. Our requests finally have been answered…
Two
important publications released in 2011 provide long sought guidance for risk
control and management of workplace violence.
ASIS
International (formerly the American
Society for Industrial Security)
and the Society for
Human Resource Management (SHRM) co-published the American National Standard for
Workplace Violence Prevention and Intervention (“National Standard” or
“Standard”).[ii]
This new “WVPI” Standard provides an overview of policies, processes, and
protocols that organizations of any size can adopt to help identify and prevent
threatening behavior and violence affecting the workplace, and to better
address and resolve threats and violence that have actually occurred.
Additionally, OSHA issued its first compliance directive on the
investigation and inspection of workplace violence incidents (“Directive”).[iii] The OSHA Directive
is primarily intended for use by OSHA Compliance Safety and Health Officers
(CSHOs) who conduct inspections of businesses or respond to an incident, yet it
also provides a useful guideline for employers to fulfill their responsibility
under the General Duty Clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970
to provide safe work and safe workplace. The instruction
highlights the steps that should be taken in reviewing incidents of workplace
violence when considering whether to initiate an inspection in industries that
OSHA has identified as susceptible to this hazard. Additionally,
if applicable to your business, OSHA offers guidelines for preventing workplace violence for
health care and social service workers, recommendations for workplace violence
prevention programs in late-night retail establishments, and a fact sheet for
preventing violence against taxi and for-hire drivers.[iv]
According to Michael
Nossaman, in his article New Standards For Workplace Violence Prevention And
Incident Investigations[v], “Together,
these two documents are a good resource for establishing or improving a WVPI
program to protect employees. They also signal that a formal and
comprehensive WVPI is not something that can be ignored or that just a minimum
effort will suffice, especially in terms of downstream liability in the
aftermath of an incident.” While
employers have no legal obligation to use or follow these guidelines, they are
considered current consensus on “best practice” and used as a comparative tool
to assess an employer’s efforts to prevent violence as well as the adequacy of
any crisis response.[vi]
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[i] http://www.lawroom.com/Print_S.aspx?STID=975
and http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/031033.P.pdf.
[ii] Workplace Violence Prevention and
Intervention, An American Standard, Approved September 2, 2011, by the
American National Standards Institute, Inc.
[iii] U. S. Department of Labor,
Occupational Safety & Health Administration, DIRECTIVE
NUMBER: CPL 02-01-052 EFFECTIVE DATE:
September 8, 2011, SUBJECT: Enforcement
Procedures for Investigating or Inspecting Workplace Violence Incidents.
[vi]
According to the National Standard, “In many ways, the Standard
will help organizations to discharge important legal responsibilities related
to their need to maintain a safe workplace; it is not intended, though, to set
or define new legal obligation.” Ibid. at Section 1: Scope of the Standard, p.
1.
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