Workplace Shooting Signals Growing Anger

In the film "Up in the Air," the protagonist played by George Clooney flies around the country firing people for corporations conducting mass lay-offs. In one scene, Clooney goes to St. Louis to wield the axe for a company. Sitting across from his victims at a borrowed desk, he calmly watches as they cry, rail and melt down at the loss of the jobs that had defined their lives often for decades.

Director Jason Reitman had hired non-actors who had experienced a recent firing to play the laid-off workers, delivering lines as they relived their personal dramas, and bringing a level of genuine anguish to the scenes that's uncomfortable to watch.

While the film is fiction, in the real world the anger that's bubbling over from the loss of jobs, fraud and corruption in corporate management, and the pressure of foreclosures and bankruptcies on unemployed families is taking its toll. Today, a St. Louis man who was involved in a class action lawsuit against his company's pension review committee for losses and excessive fees, went on a rampage at the ABB, Inc. factory, shooting eight co-workers and killing three. Then he killed himself.

One of the most ironic lines that Clooney spouts to his victims in his role as the corporate downsizer is that firing them is "not personal." Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of getting laid off knows exactly how personal it is to lose a livelihood, be plunged into economic uncertainty and to have to start over again in a career. The lack of compassion by corporations looking to appease shareholders and uphold a bottom-line goal despite the human costs demonstrates a truly soulless approach to management that I think will cause Karmic repercussions when the economy improves.

This ongoing economic Armageddon is cutting deeply into the American psyche and will have an impact for many years to come -- workplace violence being just one example of the backlash from a citizenry that is simmering with rage and looking for targets to blame.