In this overly litigious day and age, there aren’t many workplace acts left that are so over the line that they qualify as drop-dead, you’re-fired-on-the-spot, no-additional-proof-needed offenses.

In fact, there’s only one that readily comes to mind as I think back over a long career of managing far too many people who seemed hellbent on doing something stupid that would get them canned. You know what I’m talking about—it’s taking a punch at someone while on the job.

Generally speaking, people who get physical with other people in the workplace lose their job, and usually pretty quickly. And, that’s what is probably going to happen at The Washington Post, where a longtime editor recently blew his cool over a story and came to blows with a reporter who called him something incredibly vulgar that I can’t repeat here.

According to Washingtonian.com, “Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran [Washington Post] feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia on Friday. The fracas took place in sight of Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli’s office. Brauchli rushed to separate the two. It should be noted that Allen is nearly 70, but he served in the Marines in Vietnam. He also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for criticism. Both apparently came into play when Allen jumped Roig-Franzia.”

Gentle readers will need to read the Washingtonian version (or this report from the Washington City Paper) to get the full flavor of what was said and the circumstances that led up to the comment and fistfight, but it’s safe to say that the altercation is a reflection of the pressures people are feeling in their jobs during these uncertain times.

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, however, had a different and distinctly old-school take on the fisticuffs:

“Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. … Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions—a situation thought of as ‘creative tension’ and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss.”

I’m old enough to remember the era that Weingarten writes about. I experienced it as a very junior editor at the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a long-dead Hearst newspaper that was well-known for such eccentric and passionate newsroom behavior.

I saw fistfights in the newsroom and at the watering hole we called a bar that was just across the street, people falling-down drunk on the copy desk, and all sorts of other behavior that was casually ignored back then but that would get you quickly canned now.

It was colorful, it was fun, but mostly, it was all fueled by the intense passion people had for their work. This is what Gene Weingarten remembers, and it is an era that, for better or for worse, is long gone.

Today, passion in the workplace is defined as work that you find incredibly meaningful or challenging (known now as employee engagement), and managers are all for more of that, but they tend to draw the line at having so much passion for the job that it pushes you to punch someone in the nose.

Back in the days that Weingarten and I remember, passionately defending your work was viewed as a good thing, not something that you worried about losing your job over. Managers back then were more concerned about channeling that passion back into improving the work, and HR was only consulted when the situation got so out of hand that the line manager couldn’t control it anymore.

So, there’s almost something retro to reading about fisticuffs taking place in a major American business over part of the job that people are passionate about. Unfortunately, passion like this gets you fired today, and HR is involved at the first hint of trouble and to make sure all the legal bases are covered so no one, least of all the company, gets sued.

So it goes in the American workplace, circa 2009. You be the judge of whether that’s good or bad.

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It’s surveys like this that drive my fellow blogger and social networking evangelist Kris Dunn completely bonkers.

A new survey of chief information officers by Robert Half Technology found that 54 percent “said their firms do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while at work.”

An additional 19 percent said that their organization allows the use of social networking sites for business purposes only, while some 26 percent said their workers could use such sites for personal use while on the job.

“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a press release about the study. “For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes.”

Here’s my take: Doesn’t this sound a lot like the discussions and debates we used to have about employees using the Internet while at work? There was a lot of time and energy spent on policing shortsighted policies that were constructed around the notion that anyone who was on the Internet while at work must be goofing off and not doing their job.

That was a wrongheaded notion in many, many workplaces, and I can’t help but think that not allowing employees on social networking sites while they’re on the job is following along the same path.

We’ve written here at workforce.com about the perils and pluses of social networking, but a lot of that was focused on the notion of posting too much personal information online and how that might come back to bite you.

Smart companies, however, are finding ways to integrate social networking technology for the benefit of their workers, like BestBuy did with its BlueShirt Nation site. But, there are also potential legal issues for organizations that use social networking for recruiting, and forward-thinking organizations are proactively working to craft employee policies that deal with things like how workers use Twitter in today’s workplace world.

But telling workers they can’t use social networking sites while at the office seems to be a move that is both regressive and foolhardy, especially since so many workers use smart phones or other such devices to access their social networks. That’s a lot harder to police than it was back when you could simply block all Internet access on office computers.

Robert Half’s Willmer does offer one piece of solid advice along with this survey: a caution that employees should always exercise good judgment, no matter how lenient their company’s social networking policy.

“Professionals should let common sense prevail when using Facebook and similar sites—even outside of business hours,” he said. “Regrettable posts can be a career liability.”

Yes, that’s always the worst-case scenario. Workers can always post something regrettable that might damage their career, but to my way of thinking, that’s a lot more likely in a world where organizations try to keep employers away from social networking while on the job rather than coming up with a smart policy to deal with that eventuality.

Workers in this day and age are going to use social networking sites and I don’t think there’s any way to get around that. This latest survey simply tells me that all too many businesses simply haven’t faced up to that fact yet. Maybe more will use this recession as an opportunity to work on figuring that out.

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Never let it be said that I like to dwell only on bad news. As a longtime member of America’s workforce, I’ve been zinged, zapped and zipped by the Big, Bad Recession just like everyone else. And that’s why I am grateful for whatever positive workforce-related news that I can find.

Here’s what I’m talking about, courtesy of global consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide and its latest survey on the “Effect of the Economic Crisis on HR Programs”: The number of employers planning to reverse salary cuts and freezes and restore matching contributions to 401(k) plans has increased in the past two months, according to a survey that was conducted this month with 175 large, U.S.-based employers.

Key findings include:

• Some 33 percent of employers that froze salaries plan to unfreeze them within the next six months, up from 17 percent two months ago.

• Forty-four percent say they plan to roll back salary cuts in the next six months, compared with 30 percent two months ago.

• Twenty-four percent of employers plan to reverse reductions to 401(k) match contributions in the next six months, versus 5 percent in June.

• Seventy-one percent of respondents have made some changes to their 2010 health care plan because of the economic crisis. The most commonly reported changes include increasing deductibles, co-pays or out-of-pocket maximums (41 percent) and increasing the percentage of premiums paid by the employee (40 percent).

In other words, although salary freezes may start coming off, increases in employee costs for health care benefits this year are probably going to stick around.

“Some employers are seeing the light at the end of tunnel and feeling optimistic about the prospect of improved business results,” said Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards consulting at Watson Wyatt, in a news release about the survey. “However, even as some of the program cuts are rolled back, many employees are facing smaller raises, lower bonuses and higher health care costs.”

That’s a sobering reality to keep in mind. Yes, there are signs that the recession has bottomed out and that things will start getting better, but it is going to be a long, slow climb back. We will all continue to feel the pinch for months—and as I pointed out yesterday, perhaps even many years—to come.

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This won’t be surprising to anyone working in this Year of Living Dangerously during the Big, Bad Recession, but Hewitt Associates just released a survey showing just how badly the economic downturn has affected raises and salary increases.

Would you believe that 2009 salary increases were the lowest in 33 years?

Although I’m sure that Compensation Force blogger Ann Bares will have a lot more insight and perspective on this given how much she has already done on some other salary studies and reports, here are the highlights of the Hewitt survey from my point of view:

• Salary increases hit a record low in 2009 at 1.8 percent for salaried exempt employees, down from 3.7 percent in 2008. This is the first time that base salary increases dropped below 3 percent since Hewitt started tracking the data in 1976.

• Hewitt projects that the 2010 increase for salaried exempt employees will be 2.7 percent. That’s below the 3 percent projection for next year that Watson Wyatt projected last month.

• Executive employees saw only a 1.4 percent salary increase in 2009, and the 2010 projection is 2.6 percent.

• Nearly half the companies Hewitt surveyed (48 percent) froze salaries in 2009, up from 2 percent (yes, that’s 2 percent) the year before. Only 13 percent of companies anticipate a salary freeze next year, but more than two-thirds of those organizations also had a freeze in 2009.

• Variable pay in 2009 was the highest level on record. Variable pay spending for salaried exempt employees was 12 percent in 2009, up from 10.8 percent in 2008. For 2010, companies are budgeting variable pay bonuses at 11.8 percent.

“Even during past economic downturns, we have not seen such dismal salary increases as we did this year,” said Ken Abosch, the leader of Hewitt’s North American Broad-Based Compensation Consulting business, in a statement that seemed of accurately capture the dismal nature of things. “It truly is unprecedented.”

Anyone who is still working (and managing) knows that this has been an incredibly difficult year for everyone in the workforce. The Hewitt survey is just yet another piece of evidence that shows not only what we have all been going through but, more importantly, how slowly the recovery is expected to be throughout the coming year.

In other words, we’re in for a long, slow, gradual recovery. Don’t expect any big changes anytime soon.

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One great thing about the large management and HR consulting firms is that they do a lot of interesting surveys, and this recent one by Watson Wyatt is no exception.

Here’s what I’m talking about: “Raises for U.S. workers are expected to rebound in 2010, following a year in which many companies slashed raises in the wake of the recession,” according to the Watson Wyatt 2009/2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards survey report that was just released.

Like most surveys done by the big consultants, this one is broad, deep and timely. It covers 235 U.S.-based employers that span all industries and have a minimum of 1,000 employees each. And, the survey was done pretty recently—from April 6 to May 15.

The key survey finding is that “companies are projecting median merit increases of 3.0 percent for 2010”; that compares with the 3.5 percent merit increase that companies originally projected last year for 2009, before the onset of the recession. Of course, that original 3.5 percent increase went down the toilet with the economy, and as the Watson Wyatt report notes, “Now, companies say median merit pay increases will [only] be 2 percent in 2009.”

I’ll leave it to my favorite comspensation expert—Ann Bares of the Compensation Force and Compensation Cafe blogs—to make sense of this with her special insight and analysis, but what jumped out at me was something from a separate companion survey of nearly 900 companies conducted by Watson Wyatt Data Services. It found that “only 10 percent of companies are planning no pay raises for workers in 2010 compared to 25 percent this year.”

That really surprises me, because I thought that a lot more than just 25 percent of companies deep-sixed raises during the Big, Bad Recession of 2009. In fact, that 25 percent figure sounds absolutely incredible when you consider all you heard about furloughs, salary cuts, buyouts, layoffs and all manner of workforce cuts this year.

I’m also surprised by the notion of 3 percent raises for 2010, because as much as I wish it were so, I  question whether businesses will actually feel confident enough in the economy to go that far when they start their 2010 budget planning here soon. My feeling is companies will be a lot more conservative than that, especially since no one really knows if we have hit bottom on the downturn yet.

“This has been a very difficult year for both employers and their workers,” said Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards consulting at Watson Wyatt, in a gigantic understatement. “But there is some good news on the horizon. Employers plan to give larger raises next year, and many plan to reinstate previously cut pay raises as planning for an eventual economic recovery continues.”

Well, I really hope there is good news on the horizon, as Laura Sejen believes, but I’m not ready to jump on that bandwagon just yet. Color me skeptical that the economic recovery is as close at hand as she says it is.

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