EXCERPT: Breaking Down at the Post Office

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted October 3, 2005.

The following is an excerpt from Mark Ames' recently released book, "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion -- From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond" (Soft Skull, 2005).

Q: What does it mean when you see a flag flying at half-mast outside of a post office?
A: They're hiring.

--Contemporary American joke

The "going postal" phenomenon began with U.S. Post Office massacres. In the popular mind, these post office murder sprees still have no context. They were too bizarre, too ridiculous. Post offices are quiet, colorless places in the public eye. Nothing could be more dull, even comically bland, than a United States Post Office. And no one could be more harmless than the mailman in the blue-gray shorts, driving his white delivery truck or power-walking in his pith helmet.

Think of a postal employee and you tend to think of a friendly neighborhood fixture, a kind of fiftees throwback to the happy days of community-oriented neighbors waving hello to each other. A general assumption is that a postal employee is someone who wanted a simple job for reliable wage and benefits. Some are liberal arts intellectuals who want to live the kind of life you imagine a Western European bureaucrat lives -- relaxed work, steady pay, plenty of spare time to work on the great American Novel. Others come from run-of-the-mill stock attracted to the womb of a large, secure structure, including former military people.

Unlike the DMV, a post office feels almost as quiet, relaxed, and clean as a community library. It is, in a sense, Middle America itself, the Middle America of the Andy Griffith Show. This hasty misperception of the post office culture made the murders there seem completely out-of-the-blue, surreal, and without context. If that can happen in a post office, where next?

When massacres started breaking out in our post offices, most people reasoned that it was merely another symptom of our violent culture. The post office massacres just confirmed the fear that the country is full of nut cases and they could be anyone, not just your neighbor, but even your mailman. Killerus Americanus was merely innovating and morphing, launching a new post office product to add to its line of murder styles. And that made some people proud in an ironic, contemorary way -- hence, the water cooler jokes, the "going postal" expression, the absorption into black humor.

One reason the whole rage murder phenomenon may have started with post offices is that the 800,000-employee-strong service, the nation's second-largest employer, was one of the earliest and largest agencies in the post-New Deal era to be subjected to what was essentially a semi-deregulation and semi-privatization plan, in what the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute calls "the most extensive reorganization of a federal agency." The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, signed by Republican President Richard Nixon, aimed to make the USPS self-sufficient, running on its own profits. Before then, the USPS operated at a loss for 131 of the 160 years that it was in operation.

The reform was pushed through in the wake of a growing nationwide postal worker lockout in 1970 to protest falling wages, a strike so effective that Nixon called the National Guard to New York to end it. Under the act, the postal workers union could no longer call or threaten strikes, but rather were required to solve all disputes through collective bargaining, and failing an agreement, hand the dispute over to binding arbitration.

Postal workers have never gone on strike since. And the postal market was opened up to greater competition. In 1973, Federal Express started delivering. In other words, the postal service was the first post-New Deal experiment in loosening a large number of workers' rights and opening up their company" to the brutal world of competition. Today, even with competition, USPS employees earn better wages and higher benefits than FedEx employees, something that the postal service is criticized for by reformers.

The U.S. Postal Service was able to function more profitably through the familiar tactics of pushing its workers to work harder and of creating an increasingly stress-jammed atmosphere, thereby squeezing more work out of them, or "increasing worker productivity" in the value-neutral language of economics. Oddly enough, the first year that the federal government stopped subsidizing the USPS, 1983, was also the year of the first post office shooting, in Johnston, South Carolina.

Perry Smith worked for the USPS for twenty-five years. In late 1982, his son committed suicide, devastating Smith. The death of his son naturally affected his work. He lost weight, stopped grooming himself, and generally looked and behaved like a man in a downward spiral. His supervisors responded not by showing sympathy, but by reprimanding him for every minor violation they could find. One time, a supervisor discovered that Smith left his letter satchel unattended for a few minutes and warned him that he faced disciplinary action. When it happened again, he was suspended.

Mark Ames is editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, The eXile and author of the forthcoming book Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »