COLUMN ONE : The War on Workplace Violence : Fear has pushed employees and bosses to protect themselves. Hospital workers disguise their name tags. Unions demand tighter security. Firms hire consultants to show them how to fire people.

Nobody just barges into lawyer Michelle Scully’s office in downtown San Francisco. She keeps her door locked and peeks through a peephole to size up visitors before letting anyone pass.

Scully, 28, has plenty of reason to be security-conscious while on the job. Last July, she was wounded and her husband was killed in one of the nation’s worst outbreaks of workplace violence--a shooting spree that left nine people dead at a high-rise in San Francisco’s financial district.

A preoccupation with crime has swept into America’s shops, offices and factories. Bloody episodes are prodding workers and employers into action, and are spurring government officials to seek solutions.

Hospital nurses and doctors turn their name tags upside-down, or hide them altogether, to avoid being identified by potentially dangerous patients. Postal workers file reports on colleagues who they fear could fly off the handle. Unions now negotiate with management for tighter security much the same way they push for better wages and benefits.

Employers quietly perform criminal records checks to screen out applicants who have had serious brushes with the law and who appear violence-prone. Other firms give psychological tests to prospective hires--despite ethical questions and uncertainty about the exams’ predictive powers.

To keep tempers from exploding when layoff time comes, more firms help workers find new jobs. And, in some cases, managers who hand out pink slips are reportedly wearing bullet-proof vests.

“You’re vulnerable, you never know as an executive or manager whether an employee will snap and take a shot at you. That’s the scary part of being a boss,” said the owner of one manufacturing company who requested anonymity.

Since the late 1980s, the number of bloody workplace rampages has mounted, snaring front-page news coverage and fraying nerves. “The safety and security of the work environment is being shattered,” said Joseph A. Kinney, executive director of the National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago.

The latest reminder occurred Monday when three employees at a Santa Fe Springs electronics firm were killed by a recently fired worker who later shot himself to death.

Last fall, the U.S. Labor Department, issuing its first major study on the topic, reported that homicides accounted for 1,004 work-related deaths in 1992, including 144 in California. In addition, the report said homicide was by far the leading cause of on-the-job fatalities for women. Including men and women, homicide ranked a close second to highway accidents as the most deadly workplace hazard.

Compared to the toll taken by ordinary street violence, the number of sensational workplace murders by disgruntled former employees remains small. But those high-profile deaths--along with hundreds more involving such job-related incidents as taxi holdups and police officers slain in the line of duty--have begun to catch the eye of government officials.

Experts blame the trend on the same social problems blamed for murders in society as a whole, especially the widespread availability of guns. They also point to rising workplace tensions fueled by massive layoffs.

Three bills are pending in the state Legislature aimed at stemming workplace violence, including one calling on regulators to scrutinize what all employers are doing to protect workers. Until recently, “when an act of violence occurred in the workplace, it was considered a police matter,” said John Howard, chief of Cal/OSHA.

But recent statistics, Howard said, have given safety experts “a lot of concern. It’s a brand-new ballgame now.”

Likewise, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is drawing up a strategy of its own to curb workplace violence.

Employers, safety specialists and workers are severely hampered in what they can do. Tightly limiting access might make workplaces safer, but it usually is impractical: Stores must be open to the public, factories must receive shipments and police must patrol dangerous neighborhoods. “No workplace is totally safe,” Howard said. “You can always have an employee who goes berserk.”

The Santa Fe Springs plant was protected by special door locks that could be opened only by punching in a secret five-digit code. That’s how the gunman, who had been fired 2 1/2 weeks earlier, was able to enter the facility.

Even Scully concedes there are limits to the precautions that can be taken. “I’ve played the ‘what if’ game 100,000 times in my head, wondering if there was something we could have done to make the outcome different,” she said of the San Francisco law firm shootings.

Yet, the assailant--who later killed himself--looked like “a normal businessman,” said Scully, who is on leave from her job as a lawyer to head the San Francisco chapter of the advocacy group Handgun Control Inc.

Businesses generally won’t talk about their violence-prevention efforts for fear of drawing unwanted attention. However, a small army of psychologists and other management consultants claiming expertise in the field have emerged to counsel worried employers.

Some employers have begun comprehensive programs to prevent violence. Take, for example, Semiconductor Systems Inc. of Fremont, a 135-employee company that makes equipment for computer chip manufacturers.

The firm champions its policy of “zero tolerance” for violence. “The first time somebody shoves or pushes around someone else, they get suspended,” said Douglas K. Amis, vice president for administration.

And when Semiconductor Systems fires someone, the company handles it as delicately as possible--to try to avoid inflaming a discharged worker who may be violence-prone. All firings are handled by Amis, a licensed therapist with a doctorate in education psychology and counseling.

“We make sure that every person who is terminated, whatever the cause, can leave with dignity and gets help in their job search,” Amis said. “There’s no reason (in the firing process) to make someone feel like they are some lower form of life or a failure.”

Soon the company will augment its program by training its supervisors to look out for employees acting oddly, making threats or showing other types of bizarre behavior. The idea is to recognize and defuse tense situations before they turn violent.

“It’s not in the nature of the crime for someone to just come back and shoot” without first giving out warning signals, said Garry Mathiason, a San Francisco lawyer who specializes in workplace violence and who is advising Semiconductor Systems.

The specter of violence is especially threatening in tense work environments such as hospitals, particularly emergency rooms. A 1991 Pennsylvania State University study of 1,209 emergency-room registered nurses found that nearly one in four had been confronted by people with weapons. And nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they were physically assaulted at least once, including 36.3% in the previous year.

“When you talk to the general public, they’re totally aghast by the numbers. But if you talk to people who are in the profession, they’re not at all surprised,” said Beverly Saxton Mahoney, the Penn State assistant professor who conducted the study and is a former emergency room nurse herself. She suspects the problem is even worse today.

For Mahoney, the most revealing finding was that 60% of those surveyed reported turning their name tags upside-down at least once to prevent patients from determining their names. “It’s out of fear,” she said.

Jeanne Marie Prisbylla, an intensive-care nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital in Manchester, N.H., said she cuts her hair short and stuffs her stethoscope in her pocket so she can’t be easily grabbed when she faces a potentially violent patient. “It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens enough that you worry about it,” she said.

Sometimes the verbal abuse is worse than the physical threats, nurses say. “Someone throwing a swing at you is one thing, but it’s not nearly as intimidating as someone looking at me straight in the eye and saying he’s going to hurt me,” Prisbylla said. “You can tie a patient down, but you can’t as easily shut someone up.”

When it comes to deadly violence, workplace murders by disgruntled current or former employees--or jilted lovers--have garnered the biggest headlines. But gangs and street violence are a bigger concern to many people who do construction, utility and delivery work.

Ron Kennedy, executive-secretary of the Los Angeles-Orange County Building Trades Council, which represents 120,000 to 130,000 Southland construction workers, said he has never heard any of his unions’ members voice concerns about violence perpetrated by disgruntled co-workers.

But, he said, many construction workers avoid taking jobs in certain areas of the city.

Some personnel specialists insist that fear of violence isn’t a serious issue for their employees. “It’s not the kind of thing I hear a lot about,” said Karen Leibold, director of work-family programs at Stride Rite Corp., a big shoe-retailing company.

Early last year, as part of the company’s ongoing “wellness” program, Stride Rite offered a three-hour workshop on personal safety, including such topics as how to avoid being mugged.

That program was attended by about 20 staffers, but when the company offered it again, the workshop was canceled for lack of interest; only three or four people signed up from among the 500 employees at Stride Rite’s urban headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

“And that’s compared to the 25 people who signed up for today’s low-fat cooking class,” Leibold said. “I’m not convinced it (workplace violence) is in the forefront of people’s minds.”

But don’t tell that to Ken Buzzell, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City. Buzzell says there still are far more applicants for firefighter jobs than there are openings, but that the threat of violence has played a role in prompting the retirement of some of his union’s members.

To protect firefighters, the union pushed the city to provide bullet-proof vests and to cover the cabs and tiller buckets they ride in. For the union, the need for extra protection was dramatized during the 1992 riots when a city firefighter was seriously wounded by gunfire.

“It used to be that people recognized we were there to help. . . . It’s becoming scary that people are attacking us when we’re trying to help them,” Buzzell said.

Among U.S. postal offices, where some of the most sensational workplace murder sprees have occurred, tensions often run particularly high. In August--nearly four months after deadly shootings occurred at post offices in Dana Point and Dearborn, Mich., on the same day--the Postal Service named a background-checking firm to screen job candidates for criminal backgrounds.

Omar Gonzalez, head of the American Postal Workers Union for the Los Angeles area, said workers have taken to filing reports against each other when there is only the slightest hint of trouble. “It’s out-and-out paranoia,” he said.

“If someone says I’m tired of this stuff, and I’m tired of that stuff, and that’s why things happened in Oklahoma and Detroit, someone immediately writes it up as a threat instead of asking about what the problem is,” Gonzalez said.

Yet, workplace violence expert Mathiason says it’s a sign of progress that workers and companies are beginning to watch out for signs of potential trouble.

“If anything good has happened over the past year, it’s that the issue has been focused on,” he said.

How to Curb Workplace Violence

Some common suggestions from experts:

* Train supervisors to recognize worrisome behavior by employees. Psychologists say employers should watch out for extroverts who suddenly become withdrawn, introverts who suddenly become unusually boisterous or anyone who appears to be developing a worrisome obsession.

* Provide counseling programs for workers who make threats or who show other kinds of bizarre behavior.

* Take all threats of violence seriously. People rarely resort to violence without giving off warning signals.

* Don’t make counter-threats. That can escalate tensions and box potentially violent employees into a corner. Instead, try to find a way to let the employee save face.

* Beef up security. Among other things, get a court order to restrain a problem ex-employee from returning to work. That might not deter an irrational worker, but the police can take action if the person comes near your property. Also consider installing alarm buttons, metal detectors and special door locks to restrict access.

* Handle layoffs and individual dismissals sensitively. Some firms help workers they dismiss find new jobs.

* Develop crisis-management procedures for responding to a violent incident. Set up a chain of command inside the company. Determine which authorities outside the company need to be contacted.

Source: California Employer Advisor, EnterChange and the law firm Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff, Tichy & Mathiason.