Sticking It to The Man

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:



Sticking It to The Man
When an employee blows his top, the company is often the one to blame.

Gabriel Arana | August 13, 2010 | web only


Forget Joe the Plumber. America has a new working-class hero: Steven Slater. The 39-year-old JetBlue flight attendant got into a tiff with a disobedient passenger who, after refusing to sit down as the plane taxied, accidentally hit Slater in the head with a bag. Slater took to the plane's intercom system.

"To the passenger who just called me a motherfucker: fuck you. I've been in this business 28 years and I've had it," Slater said before grabbing some beer from the plane's galley and making his getaway via the inflatable emergency chute. (Slater perhaps misspoke -- he has been a flight attendant for 20 years.) Police later arrested Slater at his home in Queens and charged him with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, and trespassing.

Within hours of the incident, supporters erected a Facebook page soliciting funds for his legal defense. The page, which as of Friday had 195,000 fans, reads like a human-resources complaint file. "On behalf of the millions of unsung, often abused and frequently harassed people in service industries, I salute you," wrote one commenter. "I've dreamed of doing something like this for years!" exclaimed another. Almost instantaneously, Slater -- who by all accounts had been a stand-up employee until the incident on Monday -- became, as the New York Daily News put it, "the toast of the online community."

It would be easy to see the episode as nothing more than an amusing breach of decorum, but the public celebration of Slater as a working-class hero reveals what polling data readily show: A record number of Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs, and many are ready to stick it to the man. And the fault may lie with management. Researchers who study how people perceive fairness in the workplace say that when employees have a breakdown, it's frequently the boss or the way the organization handles the conflict that is at fault.

"Often we tend to blame the person who explodes, but more and more our research has shown that businesses create environments where people feel this is the only way they can strike back," says Stephen Gilliland, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Arizona. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=sticking_it_to_the_man_10

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Check out "HOPA Girl"

Plug it into Google.

She's Elyse Porterfield, and she's this week's second Internet Folk Hero.

--d!