The year 2000 Califano report commissioned by Postal Service management concluded that the national (U.S.) risk of being killed at work is 1 in 130,000.

A bully-tolerant workplace can be quite pathological, gripped in fear, with everyone, including management, too petrified to hold the bully accountable for her unforgivable behavior. The bully routinely practices psychological violence against her Target. Yet she rarely has to resort to physical violence or threats of it to satisfy her control needs. Violent outbursts follow frustration about not having some needs met. Bullies are in charge and rarely frustrated. Some bullies do threaten violence, but nearly all bullies are content to damage people without fists or weapons.

There is a highly profitable workplace violence "industry" created by management consultants who don't want employers to hear the 11% figure. They want employers to fear employees. That illogical fear convinces employers to pay huge fees for psychological testing of non-supervisory employees and of pre-hire job applicants. Testing is wrong for two reasons. First, an uncritical acceptance of testing places a premium on personality as the cause of all action. In reality, hostile workplaces, in other words--situations and circumstances--coerce people to do strange things. A second error is to omit testing management, who comprise 89% of the pool of bullies (according to our research). This means that the customers for the testing, the perpetrators, are exempt from having their own aggressive impulses detected.

The industry experts, acting as sycophants for management, busily and expensively ferret out lower-level workers who appear to pose a potential risk to become violent and affix the scarlet letter "V." Many ex-law enforcement types work in the "industry" which helps maintain the notion that employees are fraudulent, not trustworthy and simply waiting to explode with guns blazing. Zero-tolerance clauses also enable a manager to provoke a worker over the course of several years and to terminate her immediately if she dares to react emotionally with a verbal threat. The workplace has become a police state for some based on irrational fears.

One federal worker, a mother with kids in child care, was dragged away unceremoniously from work in handcuffs when she innocently commented that since her workplace was hell (and she had her bully to blame for that) she could sympathize with postal workers who had become violent because no one listened to them either. She not only lost her job, she was prohibited to contact her children while she wrangled with law enforcement that night.

One man killed himself and his branch manager of the state agency on the day of his return from recuperation from a heart attack induced by that manager. The manager greeted him in the parking lot, provoked him before entering the office. The man, described as very gentle and caring by all who knew him, got in his car, drove away only to return in minutes with a loaded gun. His co-workers considered the killings a tragedy only because the suicide. It turns out that the branch manager was a favorite in the state capitol. His reputation was as a "turnaround guy" who cracked the whip in each of the several offices to which he was assigned. Staff turnover, workers' compensation and disability claims was his legacy. He was hated by employees, encouraged and respected by the folks in the central office who generally disrespected their workforce.

Post-shooting analysts have to carefully dissect each episode of someone "going postal." If the shooter (it always a gun or guns in the U.S.) selects certain people, then we are reasonably sure that those victims had previously frustrated the person by ignoring or denying repeated complaints about mistreatment at work. That is, when the victims are an EEO officer, a human resources staffer, the boss of the bully, then we can attribute the violence to unaddressed bullying. Sadly, the knee-jerk, simplistic story told is that the shooter was a wacko. Reporters interview the bullying supervisor who defames the employee as a poor performer "with troubles" as the body is being loaded into the coroner's wagon.

It is more likely that Targets direct the violence inward and commit suicide. Given the role shame and humiliation play in their lives, Targets have great difficulty getting out of bed, suffering from depression. By the time they kill themselves, they have lost their marriages, their homes, their children, and all hope of surviving economically. It was bullying that probably drove them out of the job and started the decline in the quality of their lives in the first place. Unfortunately, the link between the suicide and the cruel mistreatment and subsequent loss of the job is less obvious than the trail of bodies in a public shooting rampage. A federal agency union representative knew of nine suicides in one year in her agency directly attributable to bullying.

On a scale of damage one could suffer at work, incivilities would fall near the low end. Bullying would cover a wide middle range of destructive, intimidating workplace practices. Physical violence appears at the high end, score 10.

The most important difference between workplace violence and bullying is that the latter is a daily occurrence for many people. Violence is rare, but bullying is estimated to affect on-sixth of the U.S. workforce. Headlines about violence regrettably distract the public from addressing the more prevalent and insidious phenomenon of bullying that destroys the lives, careers and families of millions of Americans.