Guns at work: keeping employees safe in troubling times

Every year, nearly two million American workers report being workplace violence victims, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In fact, homicide is the fifth-leading cause of workplace fatalities in the United States, accounting for eight percent of all fatal on-the-job injuries. Nearly half of all states, however, now have laws in some way addressing employees’ rights to possess firearms on or near their employers’ property. Accordingly, employers diligently attempting to take measures to provide a safe workplace must navigate complex waters. Let’s examine some of the issues relevant to “parking lot laws” and how they could create a powder keg of conflicts with your workplace violence policy.

Risks for employers

There are obviously many practical and humanitarian reasons why prudent employers would want to enact policies with the goal of preventing workplace violence, but you can also point to good legal principles.

As a general rule, no laws explicitly create a duty for employers to prevent workplace violence, but the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act, which regulates workplace health and safety, imposes a general requirement on every employer to provide employees with a workplace free from recognized hazards that are causing (or are likely to cause) death or serious physical harm. Although the requirement is open-ended, employers found to be in violation may be cited by OSHA. Thus, the liability can also be somewhat open-ended.