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On the morning of November 14, , recently fired letter carrier Thomas McIlvane entered the post office facility in Royal Oak, Michigan, walked to the area where management sits, and shot his former bosses. He killed four people, wounded four others, and then killed himself. It was not the first nor the last time a postal worker murdered his coworkers, nor was it the deadliest.
But it was one of the most illustrative events of the "going postal" phenomenon. By now, Americans are all too familiar with the pattern of media coverage after a mass shooting, much more so than they were in A common feature has always been the news interviews with coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances of the shooter in an attempt to create some kind of profile of why this person committed such an atrocity.
Perhaps it is only in retrospect, having seen tragedies like this unfold so many more times, that I could truly appreciate how unusual those post-shooting interviews were in Royal Oak.
Instead of the typical attempts to reckon with an unthinkable event, nobody at Royal Oak seemed to think it was so unthinkable. In fact, many of them had been waiting for something like this. Then, he said something you almost never hear anyone say after a mass shooting. As I talked to some of my coworkers about this week's edition—who doesn't love someone slacking them about year-old mass shootings?
In the late 80s and early 90s, a spate of shootings by disgruntled postal workers became the primary way most Americans thought of the post office. Until Columbine, any outburst of violence was framed through the lens of "going postal. Gradually, it even became a joke. In the meantime, a series of investigations into the post office's workplace uncovered a culture that not only contributed to those shootings but many viewed as the main culprit. There were more than a dozen General Accounting Office GAO reports on labor-management relations at the post office and a full House investigation and hearings the USPS Inspector General's office, whose reports I have frequently cited in this newsletter, wasn't created until The findings of these investigations were scandalous.
Time and again, they found the postal service fostered a broken and dangerous relationship between bosses and workers at best, a cruel and abusive one at worst. They found everyone knew the problem but no one could or would fix it. And they found that attempts to replicate small but successful experiments disappeared into a morass of bureaucratic complacency and petty fighting between USPS management and the various worker unions.
The country largely averted its gaze from this story. And when it didn't, it was turning "Going Postal" it into a late night comedy punchline. To be perfectly clear, none of this is meant to excuse or condone the actions of any of the shooters.
Ultimately, these dozen or so individuals—the number of these incidents fluctuates depending on exactly how one defines a workplace shooting—were a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of postal workers who found it agonizing to go to work every day.
Most of them did not deal with this difficult situation by murdering anyone. Many of them simply kept suffering, afraid to leave their job because the post office was one of the few employers willing to provide middle-class wages with benefits to workers without a college education or any trade skill set. It is easy to be fatalistic about the shootings and conclude that troubled people will always do troubling things. But the post office shootings are worth exploring again.
Not because those dozen or so people committed murder, but because of the hundreds of thousands of other postal workers who didn't. The post office's workplace culture impacted more than , Americans at the time yes, the USPS now employs some , fewer people than it did in Postal workers tried to get people to care, but they almost never could.
In recent years, thanks in large part to the rise of the gig economy and a resurgence in the organized labor movement, Americans have started to care a bit more about the conditions under which we work. And the post office ought to be no exception to that re-examination.
So today is going to be the first of a two-part series about working at the post office. This issue will be about the lessons learned from the postal shootings of the "going postal" era.
The second will be about whether any of this has gotten better in the years since and what that says about the nature of labor in modern America. If you work for the post office and have thoughts for the second part after reading this issue, email me. I'd love to hear from you. One final disclaimer: It's impossible to talk about working for the post office as a singular, unified experience.
Individual postmasters and supervisors play a huge role in determining whether that specific office is a good or bad place to work. What we'll be discussing here are troubling trends that have repeatedly emerged in the USPS's history. But by no means are they universal. Just like every other huge organization, the USPS has good bosses and bad bosses.
Unfortunately, it has had an awful lot of bad ones. In fact, the problem has been so rampant in the country that the act of subordinates killing superiors or supervisors actually has a special term i. We examine the origins of the coinage as well as the reasons behind the phenomenon.
On August 20, , a post office employee named Patrick Henry Sherrill opened fire at the Edmond, Oklahoma post office. Sherrill shot two of his supervisors, killed a total of 14 colleagues and injured 7 others. Studies have found that up to 75 of going postal incidents involved the use of guns. While most employees in both blue as well as white collar jobs have a dislike for their supervisors, it has been seen that employees that went postal were often the ones whose employment status had recently changed.
Employees that lost their jobs, got their hours decreased, lost out on a promotion they thought they deserved etc.
Usually, a supervisor is able to observe threatening or questionable behavior a few days ahead of a workplace violence related incident. However, in cases where employees did go postal, it was seen that threatening or questionable behavior in the perpetrator went unnoticed by supervisors or was ignored. When someone outside the workplace is extremely angry or irrational, people may also say that he or she is going postal, in a reference to their dangerous mood.
When someone does go postal, they can be very difficult to reason with, which can make defusing the situation very difficult. In some cases, law enforcement receives training in dealing with people who are going postal, in the hopes that someone can be stopped and treated without injury to anyone involved. In other cases, someone may be so upset that more drastic measures such as physical or chemical restraint need to be taken.
Ever since she began contributing to the site several years ago, Mary has embraced the exciting challenge of being a researcher and writer. Mary has a liberal arts degree from Goddard College and spends her free time reading, cooking, and exploring the great outdoors. Mary McMahon.
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