In Panama City, Florida a man called a local restaurant and threatened “to drive my truck through the building and kill everyone”, following a domestic dispute with his wife who was employed there.  He made good on his promise smashing through the Waffle House and hitting his wife with his vehicle.  She was taken to the hospital with non life threatening injuries.  He was arrested for attempted murder and felony criminal mischief.  This was just one of the estimated 13,000 acts of violence against women at work each year by their domestic partners.

“They treated me like a common criminal”, said the employee after being escorted from the building after being let go from his employer of 12 years.” “It’s hard to recover from watching terminated co-workers escorted to the door”, stated another employee of a company involved in laying off employees in the midst of downsizing.  So why does it happen this way?  Why do companies resort to such protective actions?  It is not so much of a fear of a violent response, but more as, it is protection of proprietary information and the brand.  Policies are created to prevent a just terminated employee from walking out with client lists, memos, or other proprietary information; some of which may or could be used against the company.  To guard against the theft of information, sabotage, or disgruntled or even violent behavior, their departure is closely supervised. 

Two employees working late at night for a franchisee of a national fast food (QSR) chain decided to post a video of themselves on You Tube.  What they thought was a good idea at the time was videoing themselves tampering with food products.  Disgusting, unsanitary, vile… you get the idea.  It received over 60,000 hits on You Tube and was viewed by millions more on several major network and cable newscasts. The employees were promptly fired and the information flowing out from the location ensured the public that the food was not served.  It was also determined that one of the employees was a convicted sex offender.  The highly embarrassed franchisee admitted that there was no pre-employment screening process in place – not uncommon in the industry.