SAN FRANCISCO — Call it work rage. As the corporate world slims down, speeds up and grows more uncertain, workers are getting mad. Anger at employers is getting more pervasive, security experts say, in a job market where few people expect to finish a career where they began it.
Resentment usually surfaces in the traditional form of griping. But increasingly, it is playing itself out in a darker fashion--sabotage.
Most managers don't want to even talk about their workers who deliberately inflict damage on the job. Few companies have worked out programs to anticipate and deal with the problem. But employee sabotage is costing American corporations hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars every year, and it is being carried out by everyone from dock workers to corporate vice presidents.
Just ask Dennis Dalton, president of security firm Dalton Affiliates in Fremont, Calif.
Hired recently to find out who was carving graffiti into the imported hardwood that lined one of San Francisco's best-known downtown skyscrapers, Dalton set up security cameras in the elevators and posted signs outside warning riders they were being monitored.
The security consultant, a veteran of the business, could hardly believe what the videotapes recorded. Vandals repeatedly gouged profanity-laden hate messages into the wood, forcing the office tower's owners to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars replacing paneling.
Both the building's owners and Dalton initially believed they were looking for outsiders, people who did not actually work in the building.
"There were a group of bicycle messenger folks that we strongly suspected were the primary people," Dalton recalls. Instead, "we caught office workers using pocket knives and other instruments on the wood," he says. "It ran across the spectrum . . . to our chagrin and surprise, up popped a professional white-collar employee." All but two of the many vandals the cameras recorded, he says, were employed by firms whose offices were in the skyscraper.
Companies Find the Enemy Within
In another instance, Dalton says, owners of a Boston high-rise wanted him to find out who was defacing elevators lined with imported marble.
"Again, we put in cameras, this time hidden--with a court order. We found that the vandals were dock workers, secretarial-computer people, computer workers. And then we caught a vice president who wrote graffiti on the elevator's marble in response to the nasty messages from the employees. At that point, you think, 'This is getting bizarre.' "
