Workplace Massacre in Alabama: Did Endless Downsizing and Slashed Benefits Cause the Rampage?

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted March 13, 2009.

So far we've learned that McLendon's hit list names the three companies he had worked for since 2003 -- Reliance Metals, which makes construction materials; Pilgrim's Pride, the nation's number one poultry producer, where his mother also worked, until she was suspended from her job last week; and Kelley Foods, a smaller family-owned meat-processing company from which McLendon apparently quit just last week.

Even more striking to someone who has studied these workplace massacres, it appears that McLendon was bullied and abused at work. One clue as to why he'd end his spree at Reliance, where he hadn't worked since 2003, could be that he was trying to kill the source of the pain: workers at Reliance used to taunt him incessantly, giving him the nickname "Doughboy." Which basically means "fatso" and "faggot" combined: McLendon was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, but he weighed roughly 210 pounds.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but "Doughboy" is the exact same nickname that workers at Standard Gravure, a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., gave to a guy named Joe Wesbecker back in the 1980s.

Like McLendon's case against Pilgrim's Pride, Wesbecker also was locked in an ongoing labor dispute with his company, whose top shareholders had gone on an eight-year plundering spree, leaving little for the workers; the government backed Wesbecker's case against Standard Gravure, and he "won" his dispute, but it was irrelevant.

By 1989, the culture had changed, all power went to the CEOs and major shareholders. Standard Gravure's senior executives ignored the arbitration rulings and continued to treat Wesbecker however they felt, slashing his pay under a different pretense, which would require a whole new round of arbitrations.

Joe "Doughboy" Wesbecker finally cracked: on Sept. 14, 1989, he unleashed America's first private workplace massacre, pitting aggrieved worker against vampiric company, borrowing from the numerous post office shootings that had erupted a few years earlier. The result: seven killed, 20 wounded, and the death of the company that drove him to the brink. And an unending string of workplace massacres by "disgruntled employees" ever since.

Next time any asshole calls a kid or a co-worker "Doughboy," put the bully and the bullied on the top of your next Ghoul Pool list. Bullying in the workplace, like bullying in the schoolyard, is only now being recognized as a serious problem, with devastating psychological consequences -- and the occasional rampage massacre.

Conventional wisdom used to say that victims of bullying should "deal with it" since it was "just the way things are"; nowadays, after all the workplace and school shootings, anti-bullying laws and codes are becoming increasingly common.

But let's go back to Pilgrim's Pride, the company that the Alabama investigator first named as the possible motive for the massacre. You might have heard of Pilgrim's Pride before, not only because you've bought their chicken, but because of the notorious undercover video shot in one of the company's chicken slaughterhouses in 2004.

When you look back at that video, and you place future-rampage-killer McLendon and his mother in that environment, the gory, sadistic details take on new meaning:

PETA says its investigator witnessed workers "ripping birds' beaks off, spray painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half -- all while the birds are still alive." In one shot, workers jump on live chickens with their entire body weight, sending blood and innards splashing on the lens of the hidden camera.

Mostly, the workers appear to have been acting either out of sheer boredom with their jobs or out of anger with management, sometimes for making them work too many hours. One sequence filmed on 6 April this year [2004], shows workers amusing themselves by throwing 114 birds against a wall, their stunned bodies collecting beneath it. At one point, a supervisor walks past and shouts "Hold your fire" so he can safely pass. Once out of the way, he tells the workers to "carry on."

So this is the vicious world that McLendon spent some two years working in, and his mother far longer. The way the company treats its chickens is a good metaphor for how Pilgrim's Pride treats its workers, shareholders and American taxpayers. 

See more stories tagged with: workplace, massacre, alabama

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

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