My co-worker wants to fight me while at work. How do I handle it?

Hey, it’s Bernard Nomberg the Nomberg Law Firm in Birmingham. One incident that comes up from time to time is violence
in the workplace particularly between two co-workers. How should the non-
instigating co-worker deal with the situation? Well, if that happens. If that
situation happens and you’re not the instigating co-worker, you should
immediately report whatever is going on from a safety as a security standpoint. It needs to be reported to your supervisor or it needs to be reported to safety or Human Resources. Every employment
setting is a little bit different but depending on what departments you have
and the protocol that’s in place for your company, you need to try to follow
the procedures and the policies that have been implemented within the company. Most companies will have policies and procedures about that but then what
happens in this situation if you get hurt by that co-worker? Well again, you still need to report it as soon as possible and if the incident
is the the actions the interactions with this co-worker who has escalated maybe a disagreement or something that’s going on with with the co-worker. If it’s
related to work then it’ll be covered as a workers’ comp event, meaning medical
and the like should be covered. But if it has nothing to do with employment,
and we’ve addressed this in another video here on the page, then it probably
won’t be covered. Let me give you a very quick case in point. You have a
co-worker who is accusing you of being too slow and it’s causing a slowdown of
his work being done and he feels threatened by his job because of this
and he escalates the argument or a disagreement to an argument to fight. That would be a covered event through work comp. On the other hand, if
the co-worker just was upset with you just upset by something that happened at home and this has nothing to do with the work and you just happen to
be the nearby co-employee. Again, that could be covered. The events that
shouldn’t or won’t be covered is if you bring a issue that is going on outside
the workplace into the workplace setting and someone gets hurt but it has nothing
to do with the employment then that that’s a questionable situation. Every
one of them are different of course because factually everything
is a little bit different. If you have these situations or this
concern, just give us a call. We’ll talk you through it. 205-930-6900. Nomberglaw.com on the internet. We also have Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter.

Written by Raul Dinwiddie