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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (104347)	7/9/2003 11:18:55 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The reference to "incidents in Europe (France, Switzerland, Germany....)", and to "shootings at town council meetings" is so unspecific, it needs some qualifiers. town council meetings first - I know of one case only, and that was in Bern / Switzerland, where an elder bordeline male (with three or four lost trials against the townhall on his shoulders and his bank account) went beserk. Germany: I know of two cases, one at Erfurt high school last year a terrifying copy - sorry, sigh - of Columbine, and one a week or two ago in a Bamberg high school (a wounded teacher and a suicide). France: the German cases were enough for me. Maybe I just have not noticed. No common thread to all this. regZ dj

To: Ilaine who wrote (104347)	7/9/2003 11:25:28 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Respond to of 281500

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... I recall one time there was a fairly long line at my local Post Office. And this one postal worker (or supervisor or something) was practically threatening one of the workers who was helping at the counter to take care of the waiting clients. ("Are you going to take your break or aren't you ?".... "I told you to take your break !") Someone explained to me that this was a typical result of union mentality, which is about as bad as it gets in the Post Office. 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. Sounds a lot like French government workers ! Particularly the railways. The scenario you suggest, shootings at town council meetings, puzzles me. What is the motivation ? In these cases I had in mind, it was unstable workers who had a beef with one or two other employees, and the other workers probably just got hit with the flack. I know that a lot of head games can go on in the work place, and it can be worse the less genuine professional responsibility workers have. Thank heavens I have had very little personal contact with these sorts of things in my own jobs.