6.3 Violence
Workplace violence is any act in which a person is abused, threatened, intimidated, or assaulted in his or her employment. It can include physical attack, threats of physical attack, threatening language or behaviour (e.g., shaking a fist), or physically aggressive behaviour. The data around the prevalence of workplace violence is mixed. If judged by workers’ compensation claims, workplace violence is quite rare: only 2.5% of all Canadian lost-time injury claims in 2012 were related to incidents of violence (about 6000 incidents).[1] That said, Statistics Canada reports that 17% of all acts of criminal violence (violence illegal under the Criminal Code) occurred at a workplace. They calculate that this amounts to more than 350,000 acts of workplace violence in Canada.[2] The discrepancy is partially explained by the fact that many of those criminal acts did not result in the acute injury of a worker and, therefore, no workers’ compensation claim was filed. This discrepancy reinforces the limited value of workers’ compensation claim data as an indicator of hazardousness in the workplace.
Whether more or less prevalent, workplace violence can extract a significant toll on workers, leading to injury and psychological ill health (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder). Health-care workers are most likely to experience workplace violence, followed by social workers and workers in retail or food service. It is notable that these occupations tend to be female-dominated. Customers, clients, and patients are the most common perpetrators of workplace violence, although violence from co-workers or supervisors remains prevalent.
Story: The myth of the disgruntled employee?
In February 2014, Jayme Pasieka, an employee at the Loblaw’s Distribution Centre in northwest Edmonton, Alberta, burst into his workplace and attacked several workers with a knife, fatally stabbing two people and injuring four others.[3] The incident sparked extensive media coverage, much of it focused on Pasieka’s history of mental illness and erratic behaviour. Many commentators speculated that he was a “disgruntled employee.”
Such horrific incidents are, thankfully, rare. When they do occur, these types of incidents tend to receive a lot of media coverage, most of which focuses on the mental state of the perpetrator. The notion of the “disgruntled employee” returning to their place of work to exact revenge for some perceived grievance is well embedded in public mindset. Consider the popularity of the term “going postal”—coined after a postal worker shot a number of co-workers in the United States.
Our familiarity with the disgruntled-employee frame means journalists and employers often use it to quickly explain what caused a workplace incident. In a commentary on a raft of workplace shootings in the United States in 2010, Richard Denenberg and Tia Schneider Denenberg make this observation:
- In sum, the Missouri and Georgia cases exemplify a media tendency to reach for facile explanations—notably the vague concept of disgruntlement—obscuring the complexities that may lie behind an outbreak of workplace violence. Such generic assumptions often conflict with the specific facts, once they are revealed in second-day and third-day accounts. The notion that an aggressor feels aggrieved is essentially a tautology, yielding little insight, unless the reasons for the extreme behavior are adequately explored.
Attention should focus not only on the person but also on any defects in policies, procedures, or judgment that may have allowed rage to fester and ultimately explode.
Examining the characteristics of the workplace may enhance our ability to prevent violence as much as probing the character, personality, and belief systems of the offender.[4]
In short, newspaper reporters’ use of the disgruntled-worker frame simplifies the (likely complex) circumstances that led to the violence. This can obscure root causes of the incident by hiding the effect of employer behaviour or inaction. As we saw in Chapter 1, the social construction of an incident can result in a misdiagnosis of the cause and, consequently, inappropriate recommendations for future prevention.
A variety of factors can increase the risk of violence in the workplace. Common concerns are the presence of money, drugs, and alcohol (which make workplaces targets for theft and robbery). Late operating hours and extensive access to the public are also factors that heighten the risk of violence. One of the reasons health-care workers are at greatest risk is their close proximity to people under physical or mental stress. The workplace environment can also play a role leading to violence. Stressful work situations, insecure and precarious employment arrangements, work overload, and unhealthy interpersonal dynamics can also increase the risk of violence.
While acts of violence are unpredictable, an employer can take steps to develop a violence-prevention plan to minimize both the risk of a violent act and the harm caused by the act. Violence prevention should be a part of the overall HRAC process. Particular actions to consider include workplace design to restrict access, increasing visibility and communication, and creating escape routes for workers. Administrative policies and work practices can reduce some of the common risks: these might include reducing the use of cash, eliminating the use of working alone, and implementing a buddy system. A prevention program should also incorporate training for managers to spot warning signs of violence, and steps to reduce stress levels in the workplace. Governments can also take action by expanding the definition of violence as a workplace hazard.
Family Violence as Safety Hazard
In November 2015, the Alberta Family Violence Death Review Committee, a government committee mandated to investigate deaths due to family violence, reported on its investigation into the 2011 murder of a woman by her spouse at her workplace. The husband had called and visited her repeatedly at work, threatening violence. The employer, co-workers, and security guards at the site were aware of the threats but did little. The woman did not press charges at any time, in part due to cultural pressures. No one attempted to prevent the husband from accessing the workplace on the day he killed her.[5]
In its report the Committee made the following recommendation:
- The Alberta Government amends the Occupational Health and Safety Act and Code to recognize and include family violence as a workplace hazard. Family violence is to be defined as it is in the Protection Against Family Violence Act and must include: direct family violence (where the family violence is at the workplace) and indirect family violence (where the family violence is outside of the workplace) and it directly affects the workplace through employee’s performance or by creating an unsafe work environment.[6]
Recommending that violence as a safety hazard be defined to include violence that may take place outside the workplace (but has workplace consequences) is a significant shift from traditional approaches to violence as a safety issue, which tend to focus only on workplace-based violence.
The government accepted the recommendations of the report and promises to implement changes to the OHS Act (as of time of writing, they had not yet been introduced). An interesting follow-on question is whether injuries occurring at work that stem from family violence will now be deemed compensable injuries by the Workers’ Compensation Board. At present, such injuries are not considered to arise from the course of work and are thus non-compensable.
- AWCBC. (2014). National Work Injury, Disease and Fatality Statistics 2010–2012. Toronto: Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada. ↵
- Statistics Canada. (2008). National Yearbook 2008. Ottawa: Government of Canada. ↵
- Klingbeil, C., Wittmeier, B., Dawson, T., & Pruden, J. (2014, March 1). ‘It was a really scary moment’; Knife attacks at Loblaw centre leave two dead, four injured. Edmonton Journal, p. A3. ↵
- Denenberg, R., & Schneider-Denenberg, T. (2012). Workplace violence and the media: The myth of the disgruntled employee. Work, 42(1), 5–7. ↵
- Sinnema, J. (2015, November 3). Family violence ‘a workplace hazard’; Death review committee calls for better protection for employees. Edmonton Journal, p. A4. ↵
- Alberta Family Violence Death Review Committee (2015). Case Review Public Report, November 2, p. 3. ↵
Any act in which a person is abused, threatened, intimidated, or assaulted in his or her employment.
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