Free Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames

the so-called “free” workforce. A “free” employee didn’t have to be fed, clothed, and sheltered by the shareholders; he had a greater incentive—the fear of death or starvation—to work hard and keep his job; and he would constantly compete with other “free” workers, keeping a lid on their wage demands. Slavery, and the Confederate culture, was destroyed not by a shift in morality but by economic progress. The Confederate culture was bad for business. It was nothing personal, it just had to go.
    Thus, the modern American work culture derives from the same sources that defined slavery’s official work culture. When the master managed his slaves correctly, they often responded by fulfilling his expectations, with cheerful, bosspleasin’ initiative. In the same way, most AT&T employees responded positively to their company’s treatment of them, just as the company expected. The overwhelming majority identified their own best interests with the Company’s, a relationship that only soured as the Reagan Revolution redefined the corporate culture’s priorities by giving executives the opportunity to squeeze as much profit out of their employees as quickly as possible for as little expenditure as possible, a tendency that has only accelerated, particularly under George W. Bush’s presidency. Similarly, a large number of slaves saw their interests and their master’s as one, provided that the master upheld his end of this bargain.
     
    This irrational yet perhaps instinctual mammalian tendency for a subordinate human to identify his interests with the master’s/boss’s/company’s, in spite of the huge difference in profit that each side gains in this relationship, is identified by historian Kenneth Stampp as one of the six key slaveholder tactics for creating a good slave. Those six were:
Strict discipline to develop “unconditional submission”
Develop a sense of personal inferiority
Development of raw fear
Establish notion that the master’s interests are the same as the slave’s
Make slaves accept master’s standards of conduct as his own
Develop “habit of perfect dependence”

     
    When I read that list, I can pretty much imagine myself back in the mid1990s, when I worked for an investment fund in Moscow, putting in eighteen-hour work days, seven days a week. Many of those hours I spent getting screamed at and sent running around Moscow like a headless chicken. The dependence comes from the salary; the strict discipline from working ungodly hours and being exposed to constant ego-bruising screaming; the fear from fear of losing your job, falling off the career ladder, or a host of other ways that modern corporate theory consciously instills fear.
    The identifying of interests between master and employee is the most significant of all. It was an emotion powerful enough among slaves that they usually did act on their own initiative—not only by painting fences without being told in order to please their master, but also by exposing rebellion plots by other slaves in order to protect their masters and curry their favor. There are numerous painful examples of loyal slaves taking up arms against rebellious slaves in order to protect their masters, including the Nat Turner uprising, on which I will expand in a later section.
    The instinct to identify with one’s superiors and one’s company is so strong that even in the current corporate squeeze, even when employers have done all they can to exploit their power over employees, workers at all levels still manage to remain loyal to the companies that treated them like old coffee grinds. As Charles Heckscher observes in White Collar Blues , “Middle managers in general— the overwhelming majority in my sample—want to be loyal. They want a community that goes beyond short-term performance and reward, that nurtures and supports, to which they can devote themselves. Though I myself, like many researchers before me, often felt the demands of the