Read Online Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames - Free Book Online Page A

slaveholding.
    Blassingame writes, “In order to obtain the maximum labor at the cheapest cost, the planter had to construct healthy cabins, provide adequate, wholesome food and proper clothing, permit recreation, and provide medical attention for his slaves […] He also had to maintain a great degree of social distance between himself and his slaves. A Virginia planter asserted: ‘[The slave] ought to be made to feel that you are his superior, but that you respect his feelings and wants.’”
    Substitute “employer” for “planter” and “employee” for “slave” and see how the above passage reads: “In order to obtain the maximum labor at the cheapest cost, the employer had to construct healthy cabins, provide adequate, wholesome food and proper clothing, permit recreation, and provide medical attention for his employees […] He also had to maintain a great degree of social distance between himself and his employees. An AT&T executive asserted: ‘The employee ought to be made to feel that you are his superior, but that you respect his feelings and wants.’” It’s difficult to say which is more disturbing—how eerily recognizable yesterday’s slaveholders are to us today, how oddly pseudo-humane they appear to be in theory, or indeed, how much crueler today’s benefits-slashing employers are to their employees compared, at least rhetorically, to slaveholders.
    This familiar-sounding slave management theory isn’t confined to our forefathers. As far back as Roman times, in the first century AD, the agricultural writer Columella’s De Re Rustica offered guidelines to slaveholders on how best to manage their slaves. Essentially he argued that a slave will work better if he is treated with more respect, or at least the appearance of respect : “Such justice and consideration on the part of the owner contributes greatly to the increase of his estate,” he wrote. Among Columella’s recommendations were that the master should see to it that there was proper lighting in slaves’ quarters and enough space in their workspaces, and that they should be provided with sufficient clothing. Columella also suggested that the master should sometimes consult his slave, since this would give the slave the impression that his master cared about him and would thus inspire the slave to please his master by working harder. As Financial Times writer Richard Donkin wrote, “Is this what many hundreds of years later would be described as enlightened self-interest? Such thinking would not be out of place in the ‘family friendly’ employment policies of today’s companies. Should we, therefore, identify Columella as the father of human resources as we know it?”
    Donkin is too fond of his subject—work—to go that far. He answers his own question with a noncommittal, “Maybe not.” Yet even he could not avoid noticing the awful similarities. After his “maybe not,” Donkin cites Bradley’s book, Slaves and Masters : “It is quite clear that Columella’s recommendations on the treatment of slaves were designed to promote servile efficiency as the key to economic productivity in a situation where the owner’s profit from the agricultural production was a dominating principle… . [T]heir social contentment had to be secured as a prelude to work efficiency and general loyalty.” Bradley also showed how the Roman ruling class viewed slaves as “idle and feckless,” much like North African masters or American masters viewed their slaves. Donkin comments, “[T]his has parallels in some of the entrenched attitudes among those twentieth-century employers who allowed their labor relations to be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual distrust.” This is a startling admission for a mainstream business writer like Donkin to make, and unfortunately he drops it.
    The similarities between the antebellum “workplace” and the modern workplace go even deeper, to an interpersonal relationship level. American slaveholders