Workers Who Fight Firing with Fire

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America has been hard at work in the past 10 days, and here is what happened: a Federal Express pilot took a claw hammer and attacked three others in the cockpit, forcing one of them to put the fully loaded DC-10 cargo plane through a series of violent rolls and nose dives in a melee that brought the whole crew back bleeding. A purchasing manager in suburban Chicago stabbed his boss to death because, police say, they couldn't agree on how to handle some paperwork. And a technician who quit because he had trouble working for a woman sneaked back inside his fiber-optics laboratory, pulled out a 9-mm Glock semiautomatic pistol and started firing at workers, who ducked or fled or curled up in closets and file cabinets. By the time he finished the job, two were dead, two were injured; he walked upstairs to an office and shot himself in the head.

Even Americans who see a potential for violence almost everywhere -- who aren't surprised anymore to hear of toddlers taking bullets while holding their mother's hand -- like to suppose there are a few sanctuaries left. One is a desk, or a spot behind the counter, or a place on the assembly line.

But murder has become the No. 1 cause of death for women in the workplace; for men it is the third, after machine-related mishaps and driving accidents. And while most workplace murders occur during stickups in taxis or convenience stores, the picture of on-the-job mayhem in recent months has included a dainty Connecticut flower nursery, the homey pizza parlor of a Denver suburb and just, last Wednesday the high-tech interior of a Japanese company in North Carolina's lake-dotted Research Triangle Park.

It was there, 45 minutes after the start of last Wednesday's 7 a.m. shift at the Sumitomo Electric Fiber Optics Corp., that Ladislav Antalik, 38, from the former Czechoslovakia, turned his bile into a bloody mess. Antalik's behavior was not a complete surprise to those who knew him. He was a loner and, some say, not very good at his job; he had chafed under a female supervisor. A few days after quitting, he had returned to Sumitomo and tried to go back to work, only to be escorted off the property by sheriff's deputies.

The case of Auburn R. Calloway, on the other hand, who attacked three of his fellow Federal Express pilots while flying as a jump-seat passenger, is mystifying. The crime-conscious Calloway had organized a Neighborhood Watch program. As an ex-Navy pilot, he knew to respect the cockpit code of solidarity that says you leave your differences on the ground. His possible motive: he was scheduled to appear the next day before a disciplinary hearing at Federal Express to face charges that he lied about his military and work experience.

A decade ago, such tragedies were bizarre and rare, the stuff of amateurish television scripts. But not a month goes by these days without a grotesque outburst of violence in the workplace. In March alone, a worker who was let go entered a Santa Fe Springs, California, electronics factory and shot three + people to death before killing himself. In Boonville, Missouri, a drunken ex- convict walked into a military school's cafeteria in search of his estranged wife; he didn't find her, but fatally shot her boss and a co-worker.