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Archived News Release--Caution:
information may be out of date.
For more information call: (202) 219-8151
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.
"It is a sad fact of life that workers who are dedicated
to saving lives, too often find their own lives endangered," Reich said.
"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.
They included:
- Marcia Stulbaum, a Long Island social worker who described a brutal
attack by her patient 14 years ago that left her disabled;
- Matthew Schultz, a worker at a facility for the mentally retarded
who organized a city-wide assault network in Rochester, N.Y., after being
stalked and assaulted by a patient;
- Merida Rodriguez, a hospital aide who experienced a miscarriage
after a violent patient attacked her; and
- Donna Edwards, the president of a Baltimore union, who spoke for a
member who was murdered by a client turned down for food stamps.
"We recognize that employers cannot prevent every possible
violent act, but they can reduce the risk of death or injury to their employees
by modifying the workplace and instituting appropriate administrative
controls," Assistant Secretary of Labor Joseph A. Dear, who heads OSHA, said.
"When OSHA was created 25 years ago, no one imagined that
violent individuals would pose the greatest safety and health threat to working
women or the second highest risk to men on the job," Dear said. "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.
The OSHA guidelines help employers who want to develop
effective workplace violence prevention programs identify and prevent
situations and settings with the potential for violence. A workplace violence
prevention program should include the elements of any good safety and health
program: management commitment and employee involvement, worksite analysis,
hazard prevention and control and training and education. Each prevention
program also should include recordkeeping and evaluation.
The final violence prevention guidelines were developed
with the assistance of many stakeholders, state agencies and the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The guidelines were developed by
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at the request of the
Inter-Union Workplace Physical Assault Coalition.
The guidelines include five appendices with a workplace
violence checklist, sample incident report forms, an employee survey form and a
sample policy for assisting assaulted employees. The guidelines also offer a
listing of OSHA resources and addresses and an extensive bibliography and
reference list.
Failure to implement the guidelines is not in itself a
violation of the general duty clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act
of 1970. However, employers can be cited under that clause if violence is a
recognized hazard in their establishments and they do nothing to prevent it.
Employers may seek help in developing a workplace violence
prevention program from OSHA-sponsored free consultation services available in
each state.
OSHA's "Guidelines for Workplace Violence Prevention
Programs for Health Care and Social Service Workers" are available on the
Internet at http://www.osha.gov under "What's New." This information also will
be placed on an upcoming issue of the OSHA CD-ROM. Single printed copies are
available by mail to requestors who send a self-addressed label to OSHA
Publications, P.O. Box 37535, Washington, D.C. 20013-7535.
Archived News Release--Caution:
information may be out of date.
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