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-- (perry@ofuzzy1.com), August 02, 2001

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Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Laid-Off Workers Are Striking Back

Eve Tahmincioglu New York Times Service Thursday, August 2, 2001

NEW YORK Juval Aviv, a private investigator in New York, had lunch in April with a man he suspected of sabotaging one of his client's computer systems, causing up to $20 million in damage and indefinitely delaying a long-planned public stock offering.

Mr. Aviv, whose client was a New Jersey chemical company, told the man, the company's former manager of information-management systems, that all the evidence pointed to him and that he would help him make things right. After a few hours and many cups of coffee, the 56-year- old former employee, whose name Mr. Aviv would not disclose to protect the identity of the company, confessed his guilt.

The man was one of 50 people laid off from the company in February, and he had known another executive's computer password and had used it after he was dismissed to tap into the company's system from home and delete critical inventory and personnel files, Mr. Aviv said.

What caused this company veteran, who had been making $186,000 a year and who had a wife and three children, to crack? An anonymous note that he wrote to the president of the company before he was caught sheds some light on his motive.

"I have been loyal to the company in good and bad times for over 30 years," he wrote. "I was expecting a member of top management to come down from his ivory tower to face us with the layoff announcement, rather than sending the kitchen supervisor with guards to escort us off the premises like criminals. You will pay for your senseless behavior."

As the U.S. economy continues to stagnate and layoffs proliferate, workplace experts say, it is becoming more important than ever for employers to be vigilant against retaliation by the people they are letting go.

Workers seem to be angrier when the ax falls, said Beverly Smallwood, a Mississippi psychologist who does workplace consulting for businesses. Many workers have put in endless hours and sweat for the promise of hefty stock options that never materialized.

Linn Hynds, a Detroit employment lawyer, said, "I don't recall at any time in my history, and I've been in this for 30 years, where the degree of destruction was quite as high." Since December, Mr. Hynds has advised companies in 10 factory and office closings and layoffs involving 1,500 workers in southeastern Michigan.

At the same time, the people doing the layoffs at many companies - especially dot-coms - are younger and more inexperienced than their predecessors in the last big dismissal binge of the early 1990s. In their overzealousness, some of them make the mistake of bringing in security guards in inappropriate settings, increasing the victims' resentment and making retribution more likely.

The New Jersey chemical company committed two classic faux pas in handing out its pink slips, in the view of Mr. Aviv, who is president and chief executive of Interfor, a private investigation firm.

First, it treated a high-level executive who was accustomed to being coddled and who was familiar with the ins and outs of its computer network with undue harshness. Second, it failed to maintain a backup filing system to protect its crucial documents against sabotage.

The worker was arrested and is out on bail but may yet get off the hook, Mr. Aviv said, because the company does not want to look stupid and is considering settling the case to hush up the matter.

Two of the most common acts of revenge are theft of company property and breaches in the company's computer network, according to an annual survey of Fortune 1000 companies by Pinkerton, the Chicago security firm.

Ray O'Hara, Pinkerton's vice president for the Western region, estimates that employee retaliation occurs in only 1 percent of dismissals, but could be as high as 5 percent at companies that do not handle layoffs well or have a hostile corporate culture.

The electronic workplace, while making businesses more productive, also has created a situation where employees could bring a company to its knees with just a few keystrokes.

That reality was brought home five years ago when Timothy Lloyd, a computer programmer, was accused of hiding a software "time bomb" to delete critical files in his company's computer system after being fired. The case, which is still making its way through the courts, involved Omega Engineering, a temperature-control components maker in Bridgeport, New Jersey, which asserts that the damage could eventually cost it $10 million in sales and contracts. Mr. Lloyd has denied any wrongdoing.

Moreover, with the growth in telecommuting and the spread of Internet- capable hand-held devices, it has become easier for dismissed workers to wreak havoc outside the company premises.

As a result, security experts suggest cutting off employees' connections to the corporate networks before dismissing them.

"Every new wave of technology introduces new security exposures," said Richard Hunter, managing vice president at Gartner, a research firm. "Clamp down and take away passcodes."

"If people who have a reason to be upset have access to your system, then they have the means," he added. "The remaining question is: Do they have the motivation?"

A disgruntled employee at an East Coast service company certainly did, according to Jay Ehrenreich, a senior manager for the cybercrime unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York. The employee figured out how to alter product prices on the company's Web site and fouled up a month of bills, Mr. Ehrenreich said.

The sabotage, which occurred during a company reorganization and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, was never linked to a specific employee because its process for assigning identification numbers to access the network was so "messed up" the worker was able to obtain a bunch of IDs and hide his or her identity, he said. The company called in Mr. Ehrenreich to fix the problem.

Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 02, 2001.