Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion : From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames

Author:Mark Ames [Ames, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9781932360820
Google: EdEDAQAAIAAJ
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2005-07-15T15:36:08+00:00

One employee was struck in the shoulder by a phone before he and other workers dashed into an office, locked the door and called police, Sgt. Kevin Volrath said. Other businesses in the West Acres mall lowered their steel security gates during Thursday’s incident.

This isn’t a classic case of employee rage, of course, but clearly there’s something wrong with Verizon’s human relations strategy—and its corporate culture. In 2002, Verizon cut eighteen thousand jobs, and in that same year it earned $4 billion in profits on $67 billion in revenues. The downsizing worked so well that in 2003 they started laying off workers in union-friendly states and shifting the jobs into union-free states, as well as announcing new massive layoffs, sparking large-scale telecom union strikes. To no one’s surprise, the union bent to Verizon’s will, signing a deal in September 2003 on behalf of its worker-members allowing the company, in an unprecedented cave-in, to fire its workers at will in the future, as well as offering the usual concessions: wage freezes, healthcare and retirement benefit cuts, and so on and so on. All this while the company was making literally billions in profits. One wonders what the workers would have got had they not gone on strike. Sold as Soylent Green meat, perhaps? Meanwhile their executives were paid more than half a billion dollars in salaries and bonuses between 1997 and 2001. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg earned more than $58.4 million in 2002 alone. In the months after the union caved, they downsized another 21,000 employees and earned $1.6 billion in profit. Wealth transfers just don’t get much more clear-cut than that.

The Piccolo Petes and Roman candles had just been cleaned up when, on July 8, a worker at a Lockheed-Martin plant in Meridian, Mississippi, shot and killed five co-workers, wounded seven, then killed himself with a shotgun blast to the heart right in front of his live-in girlfriend. Initial reports painted the killer, Doug Williams, as a racist freak who targeted blacks. However, a deeper look at the murder spree, once again, provides a far less conveniently evil portrait of the murderer. For one thing, Williams shot an equal number of blacks and whites (though more blacks died as a result of their wounds than whites), and Williams clearly avoided shooting some blacks during the spree. Lauderdale County Sheriff Billy Sollie said that Williams “passed by several blacks during the shootings, first aiming his shotgun at them, then raising it away.”

If anything distinguishes this spree from the others, it’s the over-the-top irony of where it started: Williams opened fire during a mandatory sensitivity-training seminar for employees, seminars which taught ethics and respect in the workplace. None of the media’s reports remarked on this obvious irony, nor the even darker triple-irony of a workplace massacre in a weapons plant (which produced parts for the C130-J transport planes and F-22 Raptor jets) that forced its workers to attend sensitivity courses. With distance, the irony is almost too obvious—it would get cut from even the lamest sitcom script.

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