STANDING FIRM: The Business Case to End Partner Violence
Partner violence happens at home, but it walks through your door at work.
Imagine, on any given day…
Somewhere, a marketing executive is “reading her email” behind a closed door. She has come to work after a long night of abuse, physical and emotional. Her “email time” is her transition time from being an abused wife, to a corporate leader.
Somewhere, a crane operator is angrily talking to his wife on the phone for the tenth time that morning when he fails to hear the frightened calls from his coworkers to “STOP!” He drives the crane into a fellow construction worker, critically injuring him.
Somewhere, a sales clerk at a popular clothing store spends her day distracted, looking out of the front window of the store fearfully watching for her ex-fiancé. She left him three days ago, ending their long, abusive relationship and this is her first day back to work.
STANDING FIRM: The Business Case to End Partner alerts employers to the human, safety and financial costs of partner violence on the workplace and workforce and arms them with tools for effective organizational action. Partner violence costs businesses, whether they know it or not, in terms of increased health care costs, decreased productivity, absenteeism, and the very real threat of a workplace violence event. And, just as importantly, it is the RIGHT thing to do!
The Need:
Partner violence (PV) is responsible for one-fourth of all workplace violence incidents.
More than ONE in FIVE full-time employed adults have been victims of PV and 64% of them indicated their work performance was significantly impacted.
48% of abusers surveyed report difficulty concentrating on work.
Partner violence costs companies $727.8 million in lost productivity and $5.8 billion in health-related costs per year.
More than 7.9 million paid workdays are lost each year due to PV.
What Employers Can Do:
Recognize the business case for addressing PV in their organization.
Respond by taking effective organizational action steps.
Refer to available community services.
What Joining STANDING FIRM Means:
By joining, your company is signifying that PV is a serious organizational concern. STANDING FIRM members have access to resources to help you and your company develop a best practices approach to addressing PV in the workplace, according to your company’s needs.
Available resources include:
A complementary half-hour Getting Started phone consultation
Workplace policy and procedure templates
Various training options for managers, security, human resource personnel and staff
Customizable communication templates
Over 160 employers in the southwestern PA region have joined STANDING FIRM. Members can be for profit, non-profit, governmental or educational. Sizes of employers range from very large to very small. Often, mistakenly, smaller employers think that the STANDING FIRM initiative doesn’t apply to them because they are very small in size. However, it is important to know that over half of PV-related homicides of female employees occur in workplaces with fewer than 20 employees. If employed victims do not know how you will respond to a PV-related issue or threat, they will not tell you what is happening to them. If your other employees don’t know how you’ll respond, they won’t tell you what they know or suspect until it is too late.
How To Join
Employers can join STANDING FIRM by going to www.standingfirmswpa.org and click on Join Us.
