COLUMN ONE : Stalked by Violence on the Job : Domestic abuse is spilling over into the workplace. Victims’ job performance can suffer, and they may risk being fired. At worst, the outcome can be deadly for them and for co-workers.

To hide from an ex-boyfriend she feared, Yvette Miller used to spend weekends at the homes of friends and relatives. But on Monday mornings, there was no escaping.

By her account, Miller would arrive at her job as a department store security guard in San Francisco, only to find the ex-boyfriend waiting there. Mainly he would taunt and threaten, she says, but sometimes he slapped and choked her.

A stalker knows, Miller said, “if they can’t catch you at home, they can catch you at work.”

Miller’s story illustrates the way domestic violence and romantic disputes are spilling into the workplace. Long before the O.J. Simpson murder case put a spotlight on the issue, employers and employees were coping with the fallout of domestic violence.

When these disputes erupt, “you don’t just declare a free zone or a neutral zone at the workplace,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. John Lane, an expert on stalking cases.

In fact, the workplace often is a vicious battleground. That is particularly true for people who, like Miller, leave their homes and hide with friends or in battered women’s shelters to escape abuse. In those cases, “the one place where the spouse or significant other knows where to find her is at work,” said Assemblywoman Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), former chairwoman of the Legislative Women’s Caucus.

Statistics show that in this form of workplace violence, it’s almost always a case of men attacking women. Boyfriends and husbands, both current and former, commit more than 13,000 acts of violence against women in the workplace every year, according to estimates in a U.S. Justice Department report released two weeks ago. Most of these incidents are non-rape assaults, but the figures also include robberies and rapes.

Some employers deal with the issue simply--and frequently illegally--by firing or suspending the workers dogged by domestic problems. Other firms struggle to craft a fair balance between keeping the company safe for all employees while protecting the rights of the worker who is being stalked.

Partly because of a lack of research and partly because many battered women do not want to acknowledge spousal abuse because of the stigma, the economic toll of domestic violence may be impossible to measure. Experts say, however, that employers face substantial costs in the form of medical bills, legal fees, increased absenteeism and lower productivity linked to workers dealing with domestic abuse.

At their worst, disputes that invade the workplace are deadly. One much-cited tragedy was the murder of seven people at a Sunnyvale defense firm in 1988 when a computer engineer--obsessed with a female employee who had long spurned his advances--went on a shotgun rampage. (The woman was shot but survived.)

Last year in California, there were similar homicides or attempted homicides, including shootings in the Dana Point post office, at an Escondido dental practice and outside a Sacramento office building.

But the vast majority of the crimes are far less sensational. Sometimes an angry husband comes in and strikes a wife working at a fast-food restaurant or factory during the night shift, when fewer guards and supervisors are on duty.

Other times, on-the-job harassment consists mainly of barrages of nasty phone calls, often intended to humiliate the victim in front of bosses or co-workers. One woman, who asked not to be identified, said her ex-boyfriend sends faxes--realizing they will first be seen by her co-workers--accusing her of allowing a male acquaintance to sexually abuse her 6-year-old daughter.

Even when the problem is kept private from co-workers, domestic clashes take a toll on the careers and job performance of the workers suffering the abuse. They sometimes lose out on promotions--or get fired.

Battered women frequently miss work or arrive late. Their appearance and self-esteem can worsen, destroying their ability to gain the confidence of co-workers. They often seem distracted.

“You can’t concentrate. You can’t focus on anything,” said Sheila Hazlett, a job placement specialist from North Hollywood. She speaks from personal experience: Her former husband pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge after she told police that he repeatedly beat her.

Long after the violence ends, Hazlett says, the emotional scars of spousal abuse still may plague an employee’s working life.

For more than one year after leaving her husband, with whom she ran a weekly newspaper, Hazlett paid her bills doing free-lance graphics design and editing. Looking for a full-time job was out of the question.

“I just could not face going out into the work force,” she said. “It takes a long time to get the self-confidence back to even look for a job.”

Hazlett, 55, also avoided returning to the job market because she feared interviewers might pry into why she left the newspaper. “I would feel myself getting frightened they would ask more (questions), and I didn’t feel ready to talk about that with a stranger,” she said.

Today, more than three years since she quit living and working with her ex-husband, Hazlett says she sometimes is “still fearful, constantly looking over my shoulder, feeling very vulnerable.” But with the help of supportive colleagues, Hazlett is working for a nonprofit agency.

But Linda, a secretary and office manager who asked that her last name not be used, says she has been able to perform her job well most days. That, she says, is despite years of beatings and psychological abuse by her husband, whom she is divorcing.

Work, she said, “was my salvation. Being away from him was a pleasure.”

Still, there have been many days when her work suffered. For instance, she said, her husband would sometimes call her five to 10 times in the course of an eight-hour working day to badger and threaten her. On other occasions, Linda said, he would take her keys in the morning so she would arrive late to the office, or he would keep her up all night, leaving her exhausted for work the next day.

Among employers and employees alike, the potential for deadly domestic violence arouses deep fears. Workplace murderers “not only kill the person they’re after, but they may kill many others as well,” said Alpert, the legislator from Coronado.

These tragedies are far less common than nonfatal assaults. In 1992, the most recent year for which data is available, 31 women were slain at work by current or former boyfriends, husbands or other relatives, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Homicides surpassed traffic accidents that year to become the leading killer of women in the workplace, but many more women were murdered by unknown assailants in robberies than by ex-lovers.

In any case, to try to prevent future tragedies, Alpert sponsored a bill that would enable employers to obtain restraining orders to protect employees stalked or threatened on the job. The bill, approved by the Assembly and awaiting a state Senate vote, is designed for employees who will not seek the restraining orders themselves, perhaps out of fear that it would further antagonize their harassers.

Meanwhile, women’s advocates say that many employers do little to protect or counsel victims of domestic abuse.

Karen Nussbaum, director of the U.S. Labor Department’s women’s bureau, urges employers to provide the same type of help for victims of domestic violence that they offer to people with drug and alcohol problems. “These are not just personnel problems you avoid by getting rid of an individual,” she said.

Many workers fail to tell their bosses about their fears of violence at work because “they’re afraid their job may be jeopardized,” said the LAPD’s Lane.

“Most employers are very aware of the problem of workplace violence, and if they feel a real danger is presented, the easiest way to deal with it is to terminate the employee,” Lane added.

As for Miller, the retail security guard, she said she got into trouble at work and wound up quitting because of several incidents involving her ex-boyfriend. One of the worst moments, she said, was when the ex-boyfriend came through her store “ranting and raving” as he looked for her.

She said her supervisors told her, “ ‘You’re a good person. We like you. But we don’t want problems to be brought in here.’ ”

Miller has moved to another retail security job and, in a June court hearing, won a three-year restraining order against her ex-boyfriend.

Workers who are unfairly fired by domestic violence-wary employers can sue for reinstatement or damages under state and federal laws, including statutes barring wrongful discharge and discrimination on the basis of gender or marital status. As a practical matter, though, it’s hard for many women to pursue such cases in court.

“They’ve got a lot of problems in their lives besides this,” said Garry Mathiason, a San Francisco management lawyer who specializes in workplace violence.

On the other hand, employers must weigh the ethical and practical questions involved in keeping workers whose lives--along with the lives of co-workers and customers--are threatened by stalkers. The legal equation, Mathiason said, is: “Do I keep the person employed, let someone get shot and then get sued for negligent retention (of an employee)? Or do I let the person go and get sued for wrongful dismissal?”

Mathiason says that, on two or three occasions, he has advised clients to suspend employees whose lives appear to be in danger on the job as a way to protect the safety of others at the work site. He says he counsels his clients, however, to continue paying the workers and to bring them back when the danger fades.

Employers also use other options. For instance, when employers suspect violence is possible, they sometimes add security guards and relocate the employee to make it harder for a potential assailant to find her.

Also, many employers offer employee assistance programs for staff members with personal problems including domestic violence. The specialists--typically outside psychologists and other counselors on contract--give advice on dealing with the emotional consequences of spousal abuse along with, when necessary, tips on finding a shelter.

One of the benefits of these programs, at least in theory, is that employees can get help confidentially--an important consideration for a problem as stigmatizing as domestic violence. Supervisors, meanwhile, avoid getting directly involved in messy family disputes--unless there is a threat of workplace violence and they need to take action to protect staff members.

“Everyone knows if you get sucked into the middle of a spousal dispute, there’s no end to it,” said Frank Cronin, a Los Angeles management lawyer who specializes in employment issues.

Rod Libbey, Bank of America’s manager of employee assistance programs, added that “these kinds of problems are highly personal and it’s more than likely that someone will follow through and get help with a confidential resource” than with a supervisor.

Besides, Libbey said, “you really don’t want managers getting into areas where they aren’t competent, because they might give bad advice.”

At Bank of America, employee assistance counselors indicate that domestic violence caseloads have risen noticeably in recent years, a trend Libbey attributes to increasing media attention.

However, problems involving drug and alcohol abuse, along with issues related to divorce and raising teen-agers, still come up more frequently than does domestic violence, say Libbey and other employee assistance specialists.

For employees such as Kimberly, an accountant for a retailing company who did not want her last name used, frequent support from her employer has been a huge help in protecting her from an ex-boyfriend.

The company’s security staff and receptionists have been given descriptions of her ex-boyfriend and are on the alert to make sure that he does not sneak into her office.

Her bosses let her change her work schedule to make her routine less predictable and make it more difficult for her ex-boyfriend to follow her. Kimberly also was given permission to repeatedly take time off to go to court hearings and file police complaints, without losing vacation or sick days.

Still, even at a supportive company, problems emerge. To stop her ex-boyfriend from leaving threatening messages on her voice mail, Kimberly asked if all of her incoming calls could be routed through the switchboard. When her boss balked, she dropped the idea.

Kimberly says her work performance has held up well despite her concerns but sometimes, when she becomes preoccupied with her ex-boyfriend’s threats, mistakes find their way into her calculations.

And on the week when a judge sentenced her ex-boyfriend to jail for violating a restraining order protecting her, Kimberly said, “I just sat at my desk. I couldn’t do anything.”