Why Jim Badasci 'Went Postal': How Bullying Bosses and Economic Devastation Are Behind America's Latest Workplace Shooting
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There was another workplace rampage killing last week, just outside of Fresno, Calif., leaving two company employees dead and the other employees grateful to be alive.
Fresno, like so much of unofficial America, is still in a state of shock these days, after suffering from a nonstop barrage of tragic events and trends, of subprime devastation, a three-year drought, and political corruption and machinations that seem to be accelerating with every month.
So, unlike workplace shootings in the past, this one was quickly pushed off the front pages and almost forgotten, just a couple of days after it happened.
But like so many workplace shootings, scratch the surface of Fresno today to get a sense of context, and you'll be shocked by how corrupt, desperate and bizarre the situation has become.
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This is particularly interesting, because I've written about this in the past: the definition of mental illness in today's workplace is when you're too sensitive to mistreatment, bullying, stress, wage cuts, firing, etc., and you want to fight back; a healthy mind should be able to take it all in stride, accept it with a harmless grumble and "move on."
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Getting screwed over the way we have been these past 30 years is something new -- as are the workplace massacres, pitting employee against company, which only started after the Reagan Revolution handed all power to the shareholders and convinced the losers in that deal -- the 90 percent of Americans whose lives got worse in every measurable way since then -- that in fact it was in our own best interests to turn corporations into little profit gulags, where the inmates could be downsized at will, and mass layoffs in the tens and hundreds of thousands became so common in good times and in bad that it proved Stalin's dictum about "one victim is a tragedy, a million victims is a statistic."
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It is as if we've come to accept these rampage slayings as inevitable, as if there were always worker-on-worker killings in the American workplace, as if the workplace was always a dangerous place, a stressful place, a humiliating, degrading, insecure place where no one could be trusted, from the executives stuffing their pockets to the co-worker you wrongly suspect of being "the type who'd go postal."
All that is brand new by any historical measure: The first of these modern workplace massacres, pitting abused employee against his own company, took place just 20 years ago this month, at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Ky., when an aggrieved employee arrived at work with a gym bag full of weapons, and killed eight co-workers and wounded 12, before blowing his brains out.
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Workplace shootings, in which an employee stages an armed suicide attack on his company, or supervisors, or co-workers, only began a couple of decades ago, after Reagan's Revolution successfully stripped whatever power and leverage employees once had and handed it all to the shareholders and executives.
Since then, it's been hell for an increasing number of Americans, and it's no coincidence that a brand-new crime of desperation appeared with the Reagan Revolution: the worker who "goes postal."
The first massacres began in the mid-to-late-1980s, and the shootings have repeated with such regularity that it seems we've gotten to the point where we almost accept them as part of the landscape, as if they're inevitable and they've always been with us, and always will.
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I have no connection to the people in this story.
