Designing Out Crime
Preventing Violence to Shop Workers - Ten Years of the Freedom from Fear Campaign
EDITOR’S NOTE: According to the European initiative and report Preventing Workplace Violence and Harassment, the office, factory, or shop should not be settings where people are subjected to threats of or actual violence, harassment, or bullying. This behaviour, the report states, is unacceptable, yet unfortunately too many people are exposed to these risks as part of their everyday work. Whilst the incidence varies from one workplace and one sector to another, it is a problem across Europe.
Employers and unions have a common, shared interest in preventing harassment and violence. In recent years the European Union Social Partners, trade union representative groups in the EU, reached an autonomous agreement on tackling the issue, which amounts to hundreds of thousands incidents, many of which go unreported.
The U.K. equivalents, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) for workers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), and the Partnership of Public Employers (PPE) for employers in the private and public sectors, have issued this guidance to implement the agreement. They have the support of the Government, including the Health and Safety Executive (HSE); the Advisory, Conciliation, and Arbitration Service (ACAS); and the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS).
The Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers (USDAW) has run a high-profile campaign against staff violence in the U.K. for the last ten years. In this article, USDAW head of health and safety, Doug Russell, assesses the ten-year campaign and identifies a worrying trend in under-reporting.
USDAW is a general trade union with membership in retail, distribution, and manufacturing industries. The majority of our 430,000 members work in retail. The union had been concerned about the effects of violence and abuse against retail workers for some time. Third-party violence has been recognised as a work-related health-and-safety problem in the U.K. since the 1980s. USDAW worked with HSE and with the retail employers on detailed guidance for the sector that was published in 1995. However, by the turn of the century, reports from members and workplace reps suggested that the problem was growing.
So, in 2002 we decided to renew our efforts to do something about it and launched the “Freedom from Fear” campaign. It has been one of the biggest and most high-profile campaigns the union has ever run. From the outset we received support from the British Retail Consortium and the Association of Convenience Stores as well as many of the leading retail employers. The Freedom from Fear campaign has a number of closely-linked aims:
- Making sure that employers are doing what can reasonably be expected to protect workers.
- Making sure that the Police and the criminal justice system treat crime against shops and shop staff as serious crimes.
- Working in partnership with employers, Police, and local authorities to make shops safer for workers and for shoppers.
- Campaigning to build support from the majority of customers who do not like to see shop workers attacked or abused.
While third-party violence is a work-related hazard, it is slightly different from many other hazards covered by health-and-safety law. The violence and abuse is carried out by members of the public, and much of it is associated with other crime. So, in addition to working with employers to make sure that they meet their duties under health-and-safety law, we have to campaign on the wider community front as well.
The Impact of Violence and Abuse
The definition of violence we adopted is one that was developed by the HSE in the early 1980s—any incident in which a person is abused, threatened, or assaulted in circumstances related to their work.
It includes the more obvious examples of physical assault, which can often result in serious injury or even death, and threats of physical violence, but also includes verbal abuse. Some of this abuse comes from suspected criminals, for example, when workers challenge shoplifters or people who are trying to claim refunds for goods that did not come from their store. It also comes from aggressive customers, for example, when they can’t get what they want or get impatient waiting in the queue and take out their frustration on the worker in front of them.
Racist or sexist harassment is a particularly nasty form of abuse and is distressingly common. And the violence does not only take place inside the workplace. It is clear that employers do have a duty to support staff when they or their families are attacked outside of work by the troublemakers they have had to deal with in the store.
The stress caused by this abuse is damaging. At the outset of the campaign we produced a report titled Voices from the Frontline that showed that workers were off with long-term illness as a result of abuse in just over half of the stores where we had union reps. In nearly half of the cases there were examples of workers leaving their job to find work that did not involve face-to-face contact with the public.
So, on top of the costs from theft of money and goods, the damage to property, and the damage to reputation, there were clearly significant human costs involved in the levels of physical assault and verbal abuse that shop workers were facing.
Hard figures on the extent of the problem are difficult to find. The way in which most Police forces record crime makes it difficult to identify retail violence. While the British Crime Survey does provide some interesting information on overall levels of work-related violence, the sample size used makes it difficult to drill down to the level of an individual sector such as retail.
In practice, the best and most consistent data set available over the period of the campaign is produced by the BRC in its annual Retail Crime Statistics report. This survey does suggest that things have improved over the period that the campaign has been running, as illustrated by the chart on the following page.
There is no single measure that can be identified as the main cause for this success. But over the period in question, retailers have invested considerable resources in upgrading security in stores and in training of staff in conflict resolution.
Large Scale of Under-Reporting
While the figures from the BRC’s annual survey do give some hope that we are moving in the right direction, there is no room for complacency. It is widely recognised in the sector that there is substantial under-reporting of incidents, both in terms of workers using internal reporting systems to tell their employer and in terms of businesses reporting incidents to the Police.
For the last six years, USDAW has surveyed between 1,000 to 2,000 shop workers in the period from July to September to collect information on the extent of violence and abuse they experience and to gauge their attitude toward the problem.
The survey consists of short face-to-face interviews carried out by union reps who are involved in our Organising Academy. It covers workers in a wide variety of store formats from large hypermarkets to small convenience stores. As it involves personal discussion on a one-to-one basis with a fellow shop worker, it casts some useful light on the issue of under-reporting.
Verbal Abuse. Levels of verbal abuse are much higher than reported figures in the BRC survey would suggest. Much of the verbal abuse consists of being sworn at or the use of personal insults, often of a racist or sexist nature. While workers do often find this upsetting, they also see it as such a common occurrence that it is not worth reporting.
Threats of Physical Violence. Workers are generally more frightened by threats of physical violence and our survey shows that these are also very common. As with the verbal abuse there was a slight decline in levels of threats down to 35 per cent. However, this followed several years where the numbers increased. Nearly one in ten workers report threats of violence at least once a month.
Physical Attacks. In 2012 we also asked about physical attacks. Four per cent of workers said they had been attacked at least once in that period. When our reps talk to their colleagues, the physical attacks reported range from minor incidents where a customer may have pushed a worker to the rarer more serious incidents.
Of course, it is to be expected that a survey that goes out and asks will find higher levels than are reported. So, it is not surprising that our survey shows higher levels of abuse and attacks than the reported figures. What is perhaps shocking is the scale of the difference—from four per 1,000 worker for reported incidents to four per 100 workers in our survey—and the degree to which many shop workers seem to accept abuse and even incidents of assault as “part of the job.”
Triggers for Abuse. The workers conducting the survey also collect views from the shop workers on the most common causes of abuse and aggression. Our research confirms the consistent finding of the BRC Retail Crime Surveys that the main cause of physical violence and threats of serious physical violence is when shop workers intervene in cases of suspected theft by shoplifters.
For verbal abuse there are a range of other commonly reported triggers. It is notable that the need to ask for proof-of-age when selling age-restricted products is by far the greatest single factor—a fact that has been confirmed by other research that USDAW has conducted with shop staff.
However, there are other factors commonly mentioned as well, including goods not in stock, issues with refunds or merchandise exchange, refusing alcohol to someone intoxicated, problems with self-scan tills, among others.
What Workers Want. As part of the survey, workers were asked what else they thought their employer could do to make them feel safer. The two most common suggestions were better support from line managers when a customer was being abusive and having more uniformed security guards. However, greater use of physical security measures, higher staffing levels at high-risk times, and better training to deal with incidents also featured among the suggestions.
Industry Guidance
In response to the evidence, particularly the level of under-reporting, the BRC formed its own working party on violence to staff three years ago and has produced a useful set of guidelines that spell out the basic standards that retail businesses need to follow.
Much less welcome have been some of the changes to support for the victims of crime. In 2012 the Government introduced major cuts to the Criminal Injuries Compensation scheme (CICA). This policy change was railroaded through Parliament despite strong evidence presented by USDAW and others about the value of the financial compensation to victims of cri sme that the scheme provided. Around 100 USDAW members a year who would previously have benefited from compensation now have no financial support to see them through the recovery period following an incident.
The Future
Looking back over the last ten years, there is much to be welcomed. Retail employers have taken their responsibilities seriously, and there has been some strong evidence of improvement. USDAW will continue to work with employers and other stakeholders to strengthen the protection that workers receive.
However, it is not all good news as the changes to the CICA demonstrate. The most recent evidence from the BRC and from national crime statistics shows a sharp rise in levels of shop theft, which is still the main cause of physical violence for shop workers.
And there is still a feeling that the criminal justice system does not treat retail crime with the seriousness it deserves. While sentencing guidelines do spell out that assault on a worker serving the public should be an aggravating factor, our members are concerned that many cases don’t get to court, and, when they do, sentencing is often considered too lenient. Police response to reports from stores also varies across the country.
The National Retail Crime Strategy Group, which has survived under the chairmanship of different Home Office ministers from all the main political parties over the last ten years, has a vital role to play. Recent developments such as the lead taken by ACPO representatives of the Group on the development of standards for dealing with retail crime are welcome.
USDAW also believes, however, that a change in the law is needed to demonstrate that abuse and assault of public-serving workers is unacceptable. Society expects shop workers to uphold the law by preventing theft and refusing sales of age-restricted products, so society should make sure that those workers are provided with legal protection. That is why the union is calling for a clear legal offence of assault on workers in public-facing roles.
