COMPLAINT ON DISPLAY UNHAPPY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION WORKSHOP STUDIED TO UNDERSTAND WHY SO MANY BIAS ACTIONS ARE BEING FILED AGAINST EMPLOYERS NATIONWIDE.(LIFE & LEISURE)

Byline: FRANK GREVE Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON -- Gene hates Tony. Dave mistrusts Steve. John keeps his head down. All gripe about their boss. It sounds like any American workplace.

What makes theirs different is that Tony -- Anthony Bowden, an African-American man -- went nuclear last year. He filed bias charges against his bosses at the exhibit-building shop in the bowels of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.

Most of Bowden's white co-workers are resentful. They figure he's playing his race card to get ahead. But racist epithets were hurled in his direction, they admit, and the Smithsonian's managers now are struggling to explain which way they were looking for several years as the sawdusty eight-man woodworking shop went haywire.

It sounds like a great place not to work. Lots of workplaces are like it, though. Last year, 175,000 workers nationwide filed bias complaints, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, most of them involving race.

To understand what's going on with workplace bias complaints, Knight Ridder spent a month listening closely to Bowden and his co-workers. Nearly all …