Verbal abuse has no place in any workplace, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen—and it happens a lot.

I’ve never understood how anyone with a half a brain could think that boorish, abusive language and behavior would motivate people or get them to work harder, but unfortunately, it is all too common in today’s workplace. Some companies have even institutionalized it as a workforce strategy, an approach that makes me wonder how an organization like that stays in business.

Verbal abuse, however, isn’t limited to the private sector. There was a great example from the California State Senate last week, and it involved a soon-to-be-gone legislator by the name of Carole Migden, a Democrat from San Francisco. Migden has the distinction of being the first sitting California legislator to be voted out of the state Legislature in 12 years.

That’s something that is really hard to do in California’s grossly gerrymandered legislative districts—and her term is winding down. She’ll be gone in November.

Migden has had a number of problems, “including a $350,000 fine from state political ethics regulators and probation for reckless driving,” according to the Los Angeles Times. She’s probably a little testy, given all her troubles. So how does she deal with it? By some reports, she verbally abuses her legislative staff.

In fact, last week Migden was so abusive to the people working for her that the director of personnel for the California state Senate had to send her staff home for the rest of the week. You read that right—the state of California dealt with an abusive boss by sending her staff home.

According to a story in the Sacramento Bee, “Enedina Hidalgo, the director of personnel for the state Senate, was in the hallway when she heard Migden screaming at the staff, according to a witness to the event. The source said Hidalgo later entered the office while the senator was not present on Thursday, informing the staff of their rights. Soon after, Hidalgo returned to Migden’s office with Tony Beard Jr., the chief sergeant-at-arms of the state Senate. They told staff members to pack up their belongings and then helped them out of the building, the witness said.”

The newspaper also notes that, “It was the latest transgression for Migden, whose decade in the Capitol has been marked by controversy, volatile behavior and high staff turnover amid complaints that she is unreasonably demanding and verbally abusive.”

Migden denies that her staff was sent home, just as she has previously denied that her behavior is problematic. As the Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Alert blog noted, “Migden admitted during the primary that her curt demeanor sometimes rubbed associates the wrong way. But she was unapologetic. ‘I make no apologies that sometimes it’s a tough arena,’ she said at the time.”

Politics and government is a tough arena, but tough or not, verbal abuse has no place in any workplace, whether it be public, private or anything else. Fortunately, voters in San Francisco have already dealt with Migden’s behavior, but my experience is that people who are such out-and-out jerks rarely change their ways, even when confronted with their over-the-top behavior.

My guess is that Migden will land on her feet after she leaves office. She’ll get some plum political appointment to a state commission or board that pays a big salary for very little work. And, unfortunately, she’ll probably continue to verbally abuse those who work for her. Good people will be forced to deal with her bad behavior. Like any kind of abuse, the pattern will continue until the abuser is ultimately forced to own up to her actions.

You may remember my blog post about the Employee From Hell, a disgruntled computer engineer who had taken over the city of San Francisco’s computer system and denied access to everyone else despite being arrested and thrown into jail with a bail of $5 million.

Well, he’s finally surrendered the access codes to the city’s computer system, but only after a jailhouse visit and chat with Gavin Newsom., the mayor of San Francisco. “Newsom came away with the access codes Monday night after talking with Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, California, who has been held since July 13 on four felony counts stemming from what prosecutors describe as an effort to block administrative access to the network that handles 60 percent of the city’s information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records,” according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The interesting thing about this meeting was that it was so secret that Mayor Newsom told very few people he was doing it. “The visit was so secret that the mayor did not tell District Attorney Kamala Harris’ office or police about it,” according to the Chronicle. Newsom decided on his own to accept an invitation from Childs’ attorney, Erin Crane, according to mayoral spokesman Nathan Ballard. “Newsom ‘figured it was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he’s not Al Capone either,’ Ballard said,” the Chronicle reported.

And the newspaper adds: “Ron Vinson, the chief administrative officer for the [city of San Francisco] Technology Department, said Newsom hadn’t told him about the jail visit in advance. ‘But we are glad he was successful in getting the codes, since no one else has been able to,’ he said, adding that officials expected to have full control of the computer network soon and to generate new passwords for administrators.”

I don’t know about you, but as a manager, I’m torn about the way Newsom dealt with this. On the one hand, he did what he needed to do and took a very pragmatic approach by meeting with the disgruntled computer tech and getting the codes out of him. Newsom cut through everything and solved the problem.

But on the other hand, did the San Francisco mayor actually set himself up to be held hostage by other city employees who have a similar gripes and feel they can do something wild and crazy because ultimately, they will get some personal time and attention from the mayor? And isn’t that the real reason why he didn’t tell the police chief or district attorney about this beforehand? Chances are they would have advised against setting that kind of precedent.

As the Good Morning Silicon Valley column in the San Jose Mercury News points out, “since the story broke, a clearer picture of Childs has emerged, and it bears a remarkable likeness to one of the stock characters of the business world: the control-freak sys admin who thinks he’s surrounded by fools. The network—which handles 60 percent of the city’s information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records—was Childs’ baby. He designed it, installed it, configured it and managed it, and he didn’t want anyone screwing it up, so he kept access to himself.”

In other words, Terry Childs was one of those nut-case workers you hear about all the time, and the mayor of San Francisco jumped his own law enforcement experts to deal with the nut-case city worker himself. Yes, he got the desired result, but should he have let the law enforcement system work this problem a little more before getting involved?

That’s what I would have done. What Newsom did reeks of grandstanding by a guy who harbors ambitions of being the next governor of California. I’m not a fan of Newsom, and some of his own past personal behavior has been suspect, including a fling with the wife of his campaign manager.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, you probably view what Newsom did with the control-freak sys admin as being the smart act of a decisive executive. Well, I don’t. To me, it’s a classic example of someone who isn’t patient enough to let the well-established system deal with the problem and instead jumps in and big-foots everyone else in order to garner a little political edge.

Getting workers to get a handle on health care costs can be a tricky business, but here’s an easy way to think of it: Basic employer-sponsored health care coverage for an average American family costs nearly one month’s salary.

That new finding comes from Aon Consulting’s 2008 Benefits and Talent Survey released here in Washington during the Fifth Annual World Health Care Congress. And, as with most surveys like this, the Benefits and Talent Survey comes with a lot of caveats:

• The median annual contribution for family health care coverage is $3,120.
• The income for a median household in the U.S. is $48,201 annually, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s report “2006 Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” which Aon uses to reference the number.
• The $3,120 amount is obviously not one-twelfth of $48,201, but seems to assume about a 25 percent tax bracket overall, meaning take-home pay of about $3,000 per month.
• And, Aon’s report takes some literary license since it says that “the amount these families spend on employer-sponsored health care per year continues to edge closer to one month’s salary.” In other words, YMMV—your mileage may vary.

Clearly, the notion that health care coverage is edging “closer to one month’s salary” is a hot-button “hook” to the survey—one that I happily fell into—to get you to read more. That’s a good thing, because there are some other interesting findings beyond the dollar amount. For instance:

• Overall, Aon says that the 1,100 U.S. organizations taking part in the survey say that their health care costs have increased 10 percent annually since 2006.
• The cost to workers has gone up even more—15 percent in 2007 and 22 percent since 2006.
• Although employers have traditionally used cost shifting to reduce rising health care costs, organizations are now focusing on implementing employee wellness programs. “For example, 46 percent of employers today are implementing smoking cessation programs, up from 14 percent of employers in 2007,” Aon reports.
• Surprisingly, despite the push for more health and wellness programs, “the majority of employers do not have a process in place to measure program impact or track return on investment. For example, 92 percent of organizations do not have a data tracking process in place for overweight employees, and 87 percent of employers do not have a data tracking process in place for tobacco users.”

I was surprised by that last finding because one would think that organizations would be focused on how wellness programs do in furthering the ultimate goal—lowering health care costs by getting workers to focus on taking better care of their health.

The Aon study agreed, almost understating the obvious: “Tracking and benchmarking employee metrics must go hand in hand with implementing wellness programs and must be measured to determine the return on investment and changes in productivity.”

If America can’t ultimately solve the growing health care crisis, it won’t be for lack of talking about it.

I’m here this week at the Fifth Annual World Health Care Congress in Washington, where an intimate group of some 1,800 “prestigious leaders from business, health care and government” have gathered at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel to “have an honest exchange of ideas … to create a dialogue to advance quality, improve cost and expand access in health care, both nationally and abroad.”

That’s a lot of lofty talk, and the speakers are pretty lofty too. On Monday morning, I was treated to a discussion on “The Presidential Health Care Agenda” with representatives of the three leading presidential candidates, the chairman and CEO of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plans and former Secretary of State George Shultz. Their conclusion? It’s that 2009 “is the year something will happen” for health care reform.

Unfortunately, that’s the kind of analysis you sometimes hear when you get so many CEOs, big shots and health care muckety-mucks together to discuss something that everyone knows we need to fix—but just don’t know exactly how to do it.

What I was expecting here was more focused discussion and analysis, such as we recently had in Workforce Management with our special report on consumer-driven health care, or our story a few months ago when we wrote about health care transparency. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that in any sessions or hear it from any of the speakers.

In fairness to everyone at the World Health Care Congress, the high-flown discussions may all be moot, depending on who wins the race for the White House. My guess is that the new resident there will have a lot to say about how we tackle the health care crisis.

Stay tuned.