http://alternet.org/workplace/39681/--snips
The blazing hot summer has produced yet another American workplace rage massacre by a disgruntled employee. On June 25, a 22-year-old worker at a Safeway grocery chain warehouse in Denver....
The rage murder crime first appeared in the mid-late 1980s, when a rash of post office massacres by postal employees gave American slang a new term: "Going Postal." Within a few years,
post office massacres jumped like a virus to the private workplace, beginning with a disgruntled employee at a printing press in Louisville, Kentucky, who killed or wounded 20 coworkers in 1989... and from there, the crime metastasized to the middle-class American schoolyards.
Until the late 1980s, no one had even conceived of the workplace as a potential killing zone where any coworker is a potential rage murderer. Today, gossiping over who is most likely to "go postal" in your office is one of the favorite water cooler conversation topics....
What changed in the US workplace isn't a sudden influx of guns on the market, or an influx of psychos in the workplace, but rather the most obvious and powerful cultural force of all:
Reaganomics. Yet if you consider the possibility that these crimes have a socio-economic cause, just like inner-city violence does, then
you find that much more is revealed by profiling the company where the massacre took place than by profiling the murderer.
Profile Safeway. Its current CEO, Steve Burd, is a classic post-Reagan corporate vampire whose every working hour has been dedicated to enriching a tiny layer of shareholders and executives -- including himself -- at the expense of tens of thousands of Safeway employees. Burd's policies of constantly slashing workers' pay, pensions, health care benefits and so on earned him hefty bonuses during Safeway's best years in the 90s.
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