Department officials attribute the rise to an increased understanding among employees of laws guarding against a hostile workplace.

"I decided to meet this potentially hostile workplace with some marketing," she writes.

Automation and Anger Mr. Runyon has continued Mr. Frank's campaign to automate the country's 40,000 post offices, but critics say the automation has produced an impersonal and hostile workplace.

The investigation revealed a hostile workplace where supervisors verbally abused employees and had physical confrontations in the post office.

Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation."

The worthy purpose of policies that restrict office vulgarity is not for employees to protect the company from lawsuits but for the company to protect its employees from a hostile or offensive workplace.

In the beginning, the complaints were all too familiar: three minority officers in a small-town Police Department filed civil rights lawsuits, saying they had been passed over for promotions, harassed and subjected to a hostile workplace.

Five will get you 10 that I'll have a letter by the end of the week threatening all of us with a suit for a hostile workplace.

Slowly the tight muscles of her back relaxed, tensions born in the rancor of a hostile workplace.