Going Postal In Baker Oregon
Going Postal is a term postal employees cringe at every time they hear when an employee has committed some kind of atrocity as in the Baker Oregon incident. We don’t like the stigma attached to “Going Postal”. It happens everywhere in society, but when you have over 700,000 employees the percentages favor an incident that will be publicized nationally giving the impression that the postal job requires personalities that are inclined to go over the edge of sanity at any moment.
The job, in almost every function, is one that requires proud, motivated, aggressive, athletic, competitive get-the-job-done personality types who thrive on details. The problem is that there are more and more details in the daily list of required functions that an employee is required to do in a much narrower window of time to perform them in.
Management has new automated tools at their disposal that find physical and mental limits and are required to push craft employees to reach his best capabilities and to perform on that level every day putting pressure on the supervisor and requiring a certain level of intentional alienation with craft employees.
Management is under pressure to keep their distance maintaining a critical edge to keep employees from manipulating them to lesser levels of performance.
Some managers go beyond what is necessary and can push an employee beyond his level of tolerance which can set up an environment of volatility. By keeping such a high level of stress, employees may or may not be capable of understanding his station with respect to his job and flounder, causing a snow-ball backlash effect leading to instability and acting out in inappropriate ways, with one thing leading to another where emotions can escalate out of control with reactions leading to violent behavior.
A fellow employee just retired and during his last day speech he held up and unaddressed envelope filled with responses to barbed language he received over the years from management. Instead of confronting management concerning what was said, he wrote it down and put it in the envelope. It was a thick envelope on his retirement day.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.