Workplace

Dilbert has to deal with unproductive meetings, system failures and even Ratbert, the new company concierge. But at least he doesn't have to worry about tripping over computer cords in his home office while racing to answer the phone or having his kids discover the paper shredder. As more workers flee the cubicle to telecommute or start businesses in the spare bedroom, experts are pointing out that working at home poses some dangers.

Sass Nielson will never forget the day her boss at Walt Disney Co. expressed curiosity about a short story she had written. The request made her cringe, and not because Nielson, a senior trainer at the Burbank-based entertainment company, feared that her supervisor would criticize her writing. The short story--an autobiographical account of meeting a famous female comic--revealed something much more personal than her prose. It revealed that Nielson, 46, was a lesbian.

A Competitive Opportunity: 42% Part of Good Management: 24% A Major Challenge: 22% An Affirmative Action Issue: 8% No Serious Impact: 4% Source: Conference Board survey of 131 organizations

No workplace has the notoriety of the U.S. Postal Service when it comes to on-the-job violence. Several tragic shootings, beginning with the 1986 Edmond, Okla., massacre and, more recently, the 1993 deadly rampage of former Dana Point postal worker Mark Richard Hilbun, are responsible for that reputation. Yet studies show that the Postal Service has a slightly below-average homicide rate: .6 worker homicides per 100,000 employees, compared to the national workplace murder rate of .7 per 100,000.

What kind of help do you give employees who have seen a co-worker shot at work? Leaders of employee assistance programs from around the nation will find out beginning Saturday in Anaheim when the Employee Assistance Professionals Assn. Inc. holds its annual conference. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend the national conference, which runs from Nov. 13 to Nov. 17. Employee assistance programs grew out of workplace alcoholism programs.

The Labor Department will propose rules that deal with workplace repetitive motion injuries today, just days after the House voted to cut the department's budget for refusing to honor Republican calls for a moratorium on new safety regulations. The ergonomic regulations proposed by the department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration are dramatically weaker than those drafted in June, before the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress.

Orange County Red Cross on Friday will offer a low-cost class on preventing disease transmission in the workplace. During the two-hour class, employees will learn how to use protective equipment that can lower their risk of exposure to infectious materials; proper reporting procedures; and follow-up on exposures to infection and blood-borne pathogens like HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis.

The percentage of drug abuse among American workers and job applicants declined for the fifth consecutive year, according to a company that tested 2.2 million of them last year. Even so, 8.8% of the people tested in 1991 came up positive, said SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories in Philadelphia. The company said 11% of the workplace drug tests were positive in 1990, down from 12.7% in 1989 and 13.6% in 1988.

The Labor Department issued guidelines Thursday designed to reduce homicides and other workplace violence against health-care and social-service workers. In California, similar guidelines to curb such violence were adopted in 1993, and a subsequent state law imposes additional safety requirements on hospitals. Federal officials said the health-care and social-service industries were targeted because roughly two-thirds of the reported incidents of workplace violence occur in those fields.

After a year of hard politicking, the state Senate gave its approval Thursday to a statewide indoor workplace smoking ban that could become one of the nation's toughest. The bill, which passed on a 22-9 vote, seeks to prohibit smoking in restaurants and most other indoor commercial and public buildings. But it was watered down during its tortuous path through the Senate and would allow smoking in bars and hotels, at least temporarily. The legislation must return to the Assembly for its approval.