I sometimes represent local members of the postal workers' union.
After many years of interaction with postal workers, my perception is that the working environment is peculiarly dehumanizing with a lot of daily degradation and humiliation - which I find incomprehensible. Not many work environments simultaneously contain the worst of working for the government, belonging to a union, and working for private industry. Martin Marietta is probably similar but not as bad. I know engineers at Martin Marietta who like the place, but that's very different from being an assembly line worker.
The US post office has developed a zero tolerance program for violence. If someone is threatening violence, they're out the door, immediately, and can't come back until they've passed a fitness for duty exam which includes a psychological evaluation. This is because postal workers are typically members of some labor union, and also many of them are in the civil service, with Veteran's preferences, so they have rights that workers in private industry don't have.
This policy was put into place after a number of incidents of mass murder by a postal worker.
In private business, if you aren't producing, you're out the door. In this quasi-private, quasi-public environment, postal workers typically can fight for months while still getting pay until they are finally terminated - or, sometimes, get their jobs back.
I think the "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore" syndrome arises in part from a sense of entitlement. For postal workers, if the boss looks at them funny, they go running to file grievances with the union, and civil rights claims with the EEOC. Sometimes justified, more often than not, completely unjustified.
Last year I kept a guy on the payroll for more than a year before I ran out of viable options and persuaded him to let me pull the plug, and I probably could have kept it going longer if I had been willing to be dishonest.
The scenario you suggest, shootings at town council meetings, puzzles me. What is the motivation?
Here, it seems that males are most vulnerable when they are teenagers in high school, getting pushed around and subjected to daily degradation and humiliation by more athletic men, and rejected by women, and when they are middle-aged, and being shoved aside by younger men.
In other words, there is a strong component of damaged ego. |
