MACHETE

Steven Cesare, Ph.D.

A startled business owner from the fallen state of California called me the other day to share a potentially disastrous story about two of her field employees. Apparently, during a large-scale landscape construction project involving significant hardscape installation, two well-seasoned field employees disagreed on how the concrete formation process should be conducted. What began as a mere procedural disagreement, quickly escalated into an emotional war of words, followed by intentional violent actions.

After a lengthy and heated verbal exchange, one employee finally had heard enough and went from verbal mode to behavioral mode. He picked up a shovel and lunged forward toward the other employee, resembling a medieval jousting event, who was miraculously unharmed by the attack. That employee then went to his vehicle and grabbed a machete, used to cut sections of sod to be placed on soil, returned to the tempest and said “Let’s end this here and now!”

A machete!

I guess the crossbow was out being repaired at the time.

Fortunately, at that point in time, the onlooking employees finally realized the entertainment had now become perilous, and proceeded to physically overwhelm both antagonists before any blood was shed, ultimately defusing the situation. In the old days, this heated exchange could have been dismissed in terms of two passionate employees getting temporarily out of control. Let me be clear: This is not the old days; this is not passion! It is workplace violence and must be treated seriously, lest a passive precedent be implicitly established by which subsequent action could lead to a permanent injury or a fatality in the future.

While innately bureaucratic and excessive, the state of California has recently established mandatory Workplace Violence Prevention Training. Given California’s insidious, deleterious history of infecting other states’ laws across myriad issues (e.g., employment, environmental, vehicular), I am simply conveying this story to you as possible preparation for what may be coming to your state capital soon.

Beyond my editorial comments, a basic take-away from this event is that California has defined workplace violence as: “Any act of violence or threat of violence that occurs in a place of employment and includes, but is not limited to: (a) the threat or use of physical force against an employee that results in, or has a high likelihood of resulting in, injury, psychological trauma, or stress, regardless of whether the employee sustains an injury, or (b) an incident involving a threat or use of a firearm or other dangerous weapon, including the use of common objects as weapons, regardless of whether the employee sustains an injury.”

The mandatory annual training for all employees contains the following legally-prescribed content areas: purpose, application, definitions, employee responsibilities, employee engagement in workplace violence prevention, workplace violence implementation with other employers, reporting workplace violence incidents, compliance with the workplace violence plan, communication, workplace violence response procedures, training, identifying workplace violence hazards, correcting workplace violence hazards, post-incident response and investigation, recordkeeping, and plan review.

While I am certainly not advocating that your company replicate this program, I certainly am suggesting that you consider it as you develop your own company-specific workplace violence prevention program. At a minimum, your company should draft a workplace violence prevention policy, include it in your employee handbook, ensure that it is part of your company’s New Employee Orientation Program, and be shared with your EPLI carrier and workers’ compensation vendor. And most importantly, document and hold employees accountable to the content of that policy as part of your company’s performance management system.

By the way, I recommended that both employees be terminated. That said, the business owner over-ruled my recommendation, and assigned both employees a week-long unpaid suspension and required them to attend an Anger Management class. True to form, despite my disagreement, I supported her decision.

I just hope the Anger Management class presented content on the many inappropriate uses of a machete while at work.

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