Rising tide of workplace violence takes its toll

• Key insight: Discover how tailored workplace-violence insurance closes coverage gaps standard policies often miss.
• Expert quote: Lee Stokes warns societal intolerance makes "no industry immune" to workplace violence.
• Supporting data: Workplace violence costs U.S. businesses about $300 billion annually, with millions affected.
  Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review

At a time when indiscriminate violence permeates American life, it has become a mind-numbing staple that often leads the nation's 24/7 news cycle. Acts of fury inevitably spill into the workplace where more than 2 million victims, including 5,000 fatalities, cost businesses $300 billion.

"We've become this incredibly intolerant nation," laments Lee Stokes, founder of CSA Insure and the National Workplace Violence Safety Alliance (NWVSA), which has sought to help close an important insurance gap in the face of this troubling trend. "We feel like it's okay to do people bodily harm if something doesn't go our way. And so right now, we know that no industry is immune to workplace violence."

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Each year, employees are killed on the job for a variety of reasons. In one of the more startling claims he encountered, a warehouse employee was brutally beaten to death with a hammer over infidelity allegations involving the attacker's spouse. 

"It paid out a $400,000 benefit to that person's family," he reports. "Workers' comp in that scenario wouldn't have paid anything because it excludes any payments of violence that are due to a personal nature."  

While insurance carriers might cover work-related injuries or deaths from a gun or knife, exclusions also would apply to other objects used such as a soda bottle, stapler or pair of scissors that would not typically be classified as intended for violence, explains Geoff Godsey, a producer and vice president with Alliant Americas who sells NWVSA's workplace violence insurance.

"People are angry, and they're bringing a range of different issues into the workplace," he observes, noting that there are essentially four types of individuals who inflict bodily harm in the workplace. They include an intruder, customer, co-worker, friend or loved one. 

Another common coverage exclusion would be if it's determined that a victim of workplace violence was the aggressor. "In almost 100% of coverage cases, the employee will not receive any benefits," Godsey says.  

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While life insurance, additional medical expense or rehabilitation coverages are available to help defray the cost of a violent incident in the workplace, he explains that standalone policies may be inadequate or too expensive.  

The workplace violence coverage Godsey sells offers a survivor benefit that's paid out to a victim's family members or significant others, including income-replacement, dismemberment, rehabilitation and mental-health components. 

"We find in about 95% of incident cases, the victim needs some level of rehabilitation, and in almost 99% of incident cases, the victim needs some level of counseling," he reports.

After the program was rolled out, a coma benefit was added because in so many of these cases a severe head trauma is suffered. "The person either ends up in a coma or has to be put in a medically induced coma in order to recover," Godsey notes.

Risky business and high anxiety

Perhaps not surprisingly, the highest incident rate is in healthcare because it's such an emotionally charged environment. Workplace violence cost the healthcare industry $18 billion last year, which Godsey says is unsustainable and will raise the cost of medical services that are already too high because people who are being hurt or killed on the job must be compensated. 

In fact, this industry has declared workplace violence an epidemic between physicians being shot every month multiple times and as many as 80% of all nurses facing an assault in their career. 

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It's one reason why there's a nursing shortage and the same can be said about teachers who also work in another high-risk profession, according to Stokes. He recently met with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott several times to support legislation that would allocate tens of millions of dollars toward preventing violence in schools across Texas where he also hoped workplace violence coverage would be purchased for all state employees. 

The fast-food industry is another highly vulnerable target. Stokes recently sold a policy to the Domino's Franchisee Association whose members have 7,000 stores. "A pizza delivery driver is more than two times likely to be a victim of workplace violence than a police officer," he says.

As a property and casualty commercial broker, most of Godsey's clients own multifamily apartments where leasing agents and maintenance staffers often are in harm's way. A large client of his with about 26,000 units in its real estate portfolio had two leasing agents strangled last year, which led to severe work-related injuries as a result of that violence. 

"It's very similar right now to what's going on in the healthcare space, and that we've seen a dramatic increase in workplace violence-related injuries for people who work for apartment property management groups," he explains.