Giving Workers The Treatment
Page 2
The Progressive
May 24, 2001
By Peter Downs
“We have policies that are very clear,” he says, “and we have a hotline for reporting any kind of harassment an employee might have.” In the cases of Crosty and Buffa, he adds, “it sounds like they were doing exactly what we want them to do.”
As you might expect, the Postal Service, given its reputation for workplace violence, has bought into the psychiatric testing. Last September, Postal Service executives proposed to give line supervisors the right to order emergency psychiatric exams for employees who are argumentative. Unionists say this will jeopardize their ability to represent their members. “We have a lot of union officers and very active union members who spend a lot of time arguing with management and defending their rights under the contract. Under this rule, they could be characterized as people who need psychiatric help,” says Steve Albanese, an American Postal Workers Union (APWU) national business agent based in Massachusetts.
Albanese admits there are some people who clearly need help, but he says the Postal Service has so broadened its definition of events that can trigger a mandatory exam that “it is very easy to tie someone up in that psychiatric situation.” According to the APWU, “The following is a list of factors that a supervisor can consider when deciding whether or not to send an employee for a fitness-for-duty exam: significant increases in unscheduled absences, increased bathroom use, changes in behavior or work performance after lavatory or lunch breaks, deterioration in personal hygiene and/or cleanliness of the work location, inattention to work duties and progressive deterioration in concentration and memory, [and] threatening behavior. Supervisors can also impose emergency fitness-for-duty exams if an employee becomes argumentative, or shows an unusual interest in news stories or literature dealing with violence.”
Even Ford’s communications manager thinks the new Postal Service rules go too far. Line supervisors at Ford don’t have the power to order anyone to take a psychiatric exam, he explained. “I don’t think anyone does,” Miller says. “That sounds kind of Stalinist.”
The American Postal Workers Union is challenging the unilateral change, which may end up going before an arbitrator.
The U.S. Postal Service refused to comment on this story.
A symposium and panel discussion at the American Psychological Association's annual convention last August called fitness-for-duty exams a huge growth area for psychologists. An article on the meetings in the association’s journal, noted that even though workplace violence is actually decreasing, more companies are seeking out psychologists to help them put in place programs to prevent violence, “creating a promising new niche for practitioners.”
William Foote, a forensic psychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and chairman of the symposium, called workplace violence programs a tremendous and potentially lucrative opportunity for psychologists. Gary VandenBos, executive director of publications and communications at the American Psychological Association, said there is so much business that, even in a town with a population of only 20,000, a psychologist in private practice could devote a day a week to corporate workplace violence consulting. VandenBos is co-editor of Violence on the Job: Identifying Risks and Developing Solutions.
The web site for Michael H. Corcoran, Ph.D. & Associates, Inc., for example, asks: “Will the expert you consult be willing to render an opinion of dangerousness and be willing to put it in writing?” and “Will the expert be willing to do this without interviewing the subject personally?”
Some psychiatrists in the field doubt that any reliable judgment can be made without interviewing the subject. Dr. Renato Alarcon, chief of psychiatric services at the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, is chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on the Misuses and Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists. Speaking for himself, he says it is possible to tell if a worker is likely to become violent on the job, but not with 100 percent accuracy. But, he insists, “it will require more than just one session with the worker, and it will also require information from other sources close to the patient, including relatives, acquaintances in the neighborhood, work, etc.” If a psychiatrist is evaluating someone who is already on the job, he says, “one measure to prevent mistakes is to require a second opinion. That would give the individual the option to appeal and have his or her own evaluator.”
Unionists are skeptical of the objectivity of the psychiatrists the companies use. “We call them prostitutes, because they will write whatever the Postal Service wants them to,” says Shirley McLennan, vice president of APWU Local 4 in Louisville, Kentucky, of the doctors who do fitness-for-duty exams. She says the Postal Service will even bring in doctors from Cincinnati to do fitness-for-duty exams instead of using local Lexington doctors.
Donald Soeken, a former U.S. Public Health Service psychiatric social worker who used to be in charge of giving fitness-for-duty exams, says the psychiatric exams almost always are shams. “The doctor will go into all the areas that could discredit a person,” Soeken says. “He’ll ask early life questions, late life questions, sexual questions, whatever he wants to ask, and then write it up and give it to the boss or law firm. Any doctor worth his salt will find something wrong, or even make up something, and if you don’t answer one of his questions, then you are uncooperative and you can be fired for that, too. What they are trying to do is put a person out on a psychiatric disability. If they succeed, you would never work again in your lifetime.”
Soeken is sometimes called the father of the fight against abusive fitness-for-duty exams. While doing such exams for federal employees at the Public Health Service’s outpatient clinic in Washington, D.C., in 1978, he discovered that many of the people sent to him were either whistle-blowers or people who had a personality clash with the boss. The employer making the referrals expected him to give them the ammunition to get rid of employees for mental health reasons.
“I only found two people who were serious [psychiatric] cases,” he said. Soeken, working with syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and Maryland Congresswoman Gladys Spellman, exposed the abuses of mandatory psychiatric fitness-for-duty exams. This led to an executive order from President Ronald Reagan banning the exams in the executive branch. Between 1945, when President Harry Truman ordered the beginning of mandatory psychiatric fitness-for-duty exams, and 1984, 10,000 federal employees were forced to undergo them, Soeken says.
After leaving the Public Health Service in 1994, Soeken established Integrity International to assist whistleblowers in the private sector. Since then, he has testified as an expert witness in seventy psychiatric reprisal lawsuits. Soeken warns anyone who will listen not to trust the company psychiatrist.
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