White-Collar Sabotage Defines the ‘90s : Work: Retaliation in firms forced to get ‘lean and mean’ ranges from insider smear campaigns to murder.
It is a task of the investigative business to watch the extremes of human behavior--where commercial competition breeds industrial spies, where political fervor turns to terrorism, where greed begets corruption and fraud. In recent months, we have noted what appears to be an increase (statistics are lacking) in what might be referred to as “white-collar sabotage.” If confirmed, this may in turn tell us that disturbing changes are taking place in the attitudes of the American work force.
Industrial sabotage, the traditional blue-collar kind, has a long history. Except for wartime acts by foreign agents, most sabotage is the result of labor strife. Some of the most dramatic examples of industrial sabotage have occurred during strikes. In 1963 and 1964, for example, four separate train derailments took place during an extended strike against the Florida East Coast Railway. In the 1970s, the General Motors assembly plant at Lordstown, Ohio, was plagued by sabotage. In response to competition from Japanese imports, management had built the new plant, reorganized jobs and established what it boasted was the world’s fastest auto assembly line. The workers rebelled with slowdowns, strikes and sabotage.
In recent years, we have also seen the disturbing phenomenon of fired employees returning to kill or kidnap former supervisors and co-workers. In two incidents last fall, former postal workers killed several former co-workers. In the past five years, angry or mentally disturbed former employees of the Postal Service killed more than 20 people, most of them supervisors, in shooting sprees.
Unlike these examples, white-collar sabotage is not bloody, but it appears to arise from the same motives as ordinary sabotage: anger at being dismissed, unhappiness in the workplace, hostility toward management. White-collar saboteurs don’t break machines, they write memos. Their hostility may first manifest itself in poison-pen letters, some pornographic, most of them just nasty. Some of the letters detail accusations of misconduct or mismanagement by corporate executives, leaving it to investigators to determine whether the whistle-blowing is merited or merely a smear campaign.
The saboteurs might go even further, fabricating false information, sending out phony letters on company stationery and doing other things to disrupt operations. While the fakes may be obvious to the recipients, they nonetheless suggest that the company is troubled, a perception that, during difficult times, can be damaging. One company was nearly brought to its knees by this kind of sabotage.
As in blue-collar industrial sabotage, the perpetrators take few risks and rely on simple techniques. Their effectiveness derives from their access as insiders and, above all, their inside knowledge. White-collar saboteurs seldom pose any physical danger but can be the source of significant economic damage and emotional distress.
Watching the fringes of human behavior often reveals things about society in general. The numerous financial-fraud prosecutions we have seen in the past few years, for example, say something about the nature of the economy and the prevalent attitudes of the 1980s. Similarly, one could infer that white-collar sabotage reflects a deeper malaise among today’s employees. The findings of a Roper poll published last November in Fortune magazine seem to support this. The Roper organization, which polls employees every few years, found that the attitudes of middle managers, professionals and other white-collar employees have soured.
Pruning companies to make them lean and mean for the 1990s has been especially tough on white-collar workers. As the result of mergers, restructuring, down-sizing, new technology and efforts to further reduce corporate overhead, white-collar workers see themselves as bearing the brunt of the cuts, and at the same time being pushed to work even harder. Many who joined companies with the expectation of lifetime employment are finding that what they might have regarded as a marriage vow--in good times and bad--has become more like a limited warranty--until retirement or recession, whichever comes first. Stress is up; loyalty is down.
According to the Roper surveys, 65% of white-collar workers in the mid-1980s regarded their companies as favorable places to work. In the 1988-1990 poll, the proportion declined to 55%. In the earlier survey, 51% thought that their companies treated them with respect as individuals. In the later survey, the number dropped to 43%.
As statisticians know, even a modest shift at the center can produce dramatic effects at the tail of the curve. To illustrate this point, suppose in a company of 1,000 employees we were able to scale their attitudes from happy to hostile. Normally, two-thirds would fall somewhere in the middle, being reasonably satisfied or just mildly discontented with their lot. Statistical analysis would indicate that only one person in 1,000 would be a potential troublemaker out at the tail of the curve. However, if attitudes in the middle become one level more dissatisfied, then our one serious malcontent becomes 20. Multiply this across America and the perceived increase in white-collar sabotage is easily explained.
That the U.S. economy will sooner or later recover is virtually certain. Whether the thousands of white-collar jobs lost in the recession are regained is problematical. Much of the recent corporate restructuring may be permanent. White-collar workers are no longer above the sweat or beyond the uncertainty of the factory floor. The fragile thread of corporate loyalty has been badly frayed. If not repaired, white-collar sabotage may persist for years to come.
