With homicides now the second leading cause of death on the job, Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich today announced the first national guidelines to prevent assaults on workers. The Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration focused its first guidelines on the health care and social services industries because their nearly 8 million workers experience a dramatically higher risk of fatal assault than other workers in private industry and nearly two-thirds of all nonfatal assaults. A set of guidelines to protect workers in the night retail industry will follow. Health care and social service workers often face aggressive patients, visit clients' homes in dangerous neighborhoods, encounter violent situations in hospital emergency rooms or face other dangerous situations. But deaths and injuries are not inevitable.
Employers can reduce the risks to their workers with some common-sense strategies.
The guidelines offer both policy recommendations and practical ideas employers can use to deter violence in the workplace, without jeopardizing compassionate care for clients and patients. Joining Reich in announcing the guidelines were four victims of job-related violence who came to Washington to tell their stories. But OSHA is changing with the times to provide employers the tools they need to protect their workers and prepare them to face the realities of the workplace. The realities, according to the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, are that between 1987 and 1992, approximately one million persons were assaulted each year at work. This includes more than 600,000 simple assaults, more than 250,000 aggravated assaults, nearly 80,000 robberies and more than 13,000 rapes.