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

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

McLendon's killings holds few similarities to that other massacre that transpired this week in a school in Stuttgart, Germany.

One major difference between the Europe's and America's school shootings is that they happen all the time in America, with a frightening regularity, whereas they're still incredibly rare in Europe -- two school massacres in Finland and two in Germany, all of them unusually bloody by American standards, but none of them appear to have sparked an unstoppable trend in Europe's schools.

That's what makes America's modern-day school shootings so unique -- they happen so frequently and predictably (and for every shooting you hear about, there are dozens of averted shootings, shooting plots, kids caught with hit lists and duffel bags, etc., much of it covered up because they're minors). This was exactly what the most famous school shooters, Columbine's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, hoped for when they attacked their school: "We need to fucking kick-start a revolution here! We need to get a chain reaction going!"

But whereas they've found a huge cult following among American kids devastated by a culture that coddles the bullies, pushes them to the limits to compete and succeed, and pumps them full of prescription drugs because mommy and daddy are themselves being crushed at the workplace -- outside of America, Columbine's influence has been sparse, as a culture like Germany's is different from ours on so many levels.

For one thing, Germany is much more humane to its citizens than America is: its teachers are much more respected than in America, where "people who can’t do teach," while all citizens have free health care and certain employee rights -- like, for example, mandatory paid vacation time (America is the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country not to mandate paid vacation time to workers).

The difference between a common maniac's murder spree and crimes that result from intolerable conditions and injustices is that the maniac's killings take place in a kind of vacuum, resulting in shock but not widespread sympathy and an unstoppable ongoing movement. In that sense, the two school shootings in Finland and the two in Germany don't seem to be anything like what we have here.

Which brings me back to McLendon. Last week, Pilgrim's Pride suspended his mother, 52-year-old Lisa McLendon, from her job. Pilgrim's Pride won't say exactly why they suspended her from her night shift, except to darkly note it was a "very serious matter." So serious, in fact, that they told her she could come back to work in a week if she "resolved" the matter to their satisfaction.

So again, what was she suspended for? This is where the corporate sadism gets surreal: According to one report, she was suspended for overstating her work hours on her time card. In other words, given her lawsuit (now no longer such a threat to Pilgrim's while it is "restructuring" under American courts), she very likely decided she couldn't wait for the courts anymore and decided to clock in her time spent putting on and taking off the required protective gear.

Suspending her in such a case would be a classic example of illegal corporate retribution against a worker with a labor dispute -- but what can a small-town Alabama hick do, with so little money and only so much resources, against a many-headed corporate beast like Pilgrim's Pride? The fact that Michael McLendon had the names of so many lawyers written down on lists in a spiral notebook shows that he tried going the legal route, but I mean, really, who's fooling whom? You think a small-town Alabama chicken-plucker has a chance in hell of fighting these oligarchs in the courts?

The lead attorney in the class-action suit against Pilgrim's Pride explained the dilemma this way:

"What has been difficult for these workers, both because of the raids and that there's been a lot of press about layoffs at Pilgrim's Pride, a lot of workers are afraid of retaliation for coming forward, afraid of losing their jobs," [Jenny Yang] said. "We are trying to make sure people are aware federal laws protect them against retaliation for participating in the case."

But anyone who understands company-labor relations since Reagan knows that companies routinely flout these laws and retaliate at will, suffering at worst a minor slap on the wrist, usually getting away with it completely.

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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