The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [26]
Another vocational group with relatively low rates, it turns out, is postal workers. The expression “going postal” became part of the American vernacular after some particularly bloody assaults by U.S. Postal Service employees against their supervisors. Yet postal employees are actually about two and a half times less likely than the average worker to be killed on the job.10
All in all fewer than one in twenty homicides occurs at a workplace. And while most of the media hoopla has been about disgruntled workers killing one another or their bosses—the Uzi-toting fellow at the next desk—few workplace murders are actually carried out by coworkers or ex-workers. About 90 percent of murders at workplaces are committed by outsiders who come to rob. The odds of being killed by someone you work with or employ are less than 1 in 2 million; you are several times more likely to be hit by lightning.11
Larson deconstructed as well the survey that produced the relentlessly reproduced statistic of 2.2 million people assaulted at work each year. Most of the reported attacks were fairly minor and did not involve weapons, and once again, the great majority were committed by outsiders, not by coworkers, ex-employees, or bosses. What is more, the survey from which the number comes would not pass muster among social scientists, Larson points out. The response rate is too low. Fewer than half of the people contacted responded to the survey, making it likely that those who participated were not typical of employed Americans as a whole. 12
Given that workplace violence is far from pandemic, why were journalists so inclined to write about it? Perhaps because workplace violence is a way of talking about the precariousness of employment without directly confronting what primarily put workers at risk—the endless waves of corporate layoffs that began in the early 1980s. Stories about workplace violence routinely made mention of corporate downsizing as one potential cause, but they did not treat mass corporate firing as a social ill in its own right. To have done so would have proven difficult for many journalists. For one thing, whom would they have cast as the villain of the piece? Is the CEO who receives a multimillion dollar raise for firing tens of thousands of employees truly evil? Or is he merely making his company more competitive in the global economy? And how would a journalist’s boss—or boss’s boss at the media conglomerate that owns the newspaper or network—feel about publishing implicit criticism of something they themselves have done? Pink slips arrived with regularity in newsrooms like everywhere else in corporate America in recent years, and they didn’t exactly inspire reporters to do investigative pieces about downsizing.13
To its great credit, the New York Times did eventually run an excellent series of articles on downsizing in 1996. In one of the articles the authors noted off-handedly and without pursuing the point that about 50 percent more people are laid off each year than are victims of crime. It is an important comparison. From 1980 through 1995 more than 42 million jobs were eliminated in the United States. The number of jobs lost per year more than doubled over that time, from about 1.5 million in 1980 to 3.25 million in 1995. By comparison, during that same period most crime rates—including those for violent crimes—declined. A working person was roughly four to five times more likely to be the victim of a layoff in any given year than to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a stranger. 14
For many, job loss is every bit as disabling and demoralizing as being the