Going Postal: When the Workplace Became a War Zone

Between 1983 and 1993, workers at United States Postal Service facilities killed 34 of their colleagues and supervisors in a series of attacks that entered the language as the phrase “going postal.” The phrase embedded itself so thoroughly that it became a synonym for explosive workplace rage — with no reference to the actual events required. What drove the attacks, why they happened when they did, and what they reveal about American institutions under pressure is a story the catchphrase mostly obscures.

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The Sequence That Made the Phrase

The first major Postal Service mass shooting happened in Edmond, Oklahoma, on August 20, 1986. Patrick Sherrill, a 44-year-old letter carrier who had been disciplined and threatened with termination the previous day, arrived at the Edmond post office before dawn and killed 14 coworkers with two .45-caliber pistols before shooting himself. It was the deadliest workplace shooting in American history at the time and the third-deadliest mass shooting in US history up to that point. The news media called it the “Edmond massacre.”

The Edmond shooting was followed by attacks at post offices in New Orleans in 1988, Escondido and Riverside in California in 1989, two separate attacks in 1991 — in Royal Oak, Michigan (4 dead) and in Ridgewood, New Jersey (4 dead) — and another in Dana Point, California in 1993. A 1993 attack in Dearborn, Michigan killed one worker. The clustering of these events over a decade at a single employer was unusual enough to generate congressional hearings, federal investigations, and a government report commissioned by the Postal Service itself.

The phrase “going postal” appears in print as early as 1993 and was popularized by media coverage of the string of attacks. It went into common usage quickly enough that by 1995 it appeared in the Dictionary of American Slang without any explanation of its origin.^1^

What the Califano Report Actually Found

The federal investigation that mattered was the 1994 United States Postal Service commission report, commonly called the Califano Report after former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano, who led the inquiry. The commission interviewed over 1,000 postal workers, surveyed thousands more, and examined the management culture at USPS in the decade preceding the attacks.

What it found was damning. The Postal Service in the late 1970s and 1980s had adopted an aggressive efficiency and productivity culture driven by mechanization, automation, and pressure to process record mail volumes with reduced staffing. Supervisors were evaluated and promoted based on productivity metrics. The culture that resulted — documented as routine and widespread — involved systematic harassment, public humiliation, and intimidation of letter carriers and mail processing workers by supervisors who faced little accountability for how they obtained results.^2^

The postal workers who killed were not a random cross-section of disgruntled employees. In nearly every case, the shooter was facing discipline, termination, or a workplace conflict that had been escalating over months or years without resolution. Patrick Sherrill had been threatened with termination the day before the Edmond attack. Thomas McIlvane, who killed four people in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1991, had been fired and fought a losing grievance process for months. Joseph Harris, who killed four people — including his former supervisor and her fiancé at their home — in Ridgewood in 1991, had been fired two years earlier and had been obsessing over the grievance ever since. The Commission also found that the USPS grievance process was chronically backlogged, slow, and biased toward management outcomes, leaving workers with no effective outlet for legitimate complaints.

Why “Going Postal” Was Statistically Misleading

The statistical reality is more nuanced than the phrase suggests. The Postal Service employed approximately 750,000 workers during the peak years of the violence. Adjusted for workforce size, the rate of workplace homicide at USPS was actually lower than the national average for all workplaces during the same period. More retail workers, taxi drivers, and convenience store clerks were killed at work in proportional terms than postal workers.

What distinguished USPS attacks was not their frequency but their organization and lethality. The postal shooters came to work with weapons and lists. They targeted specific people — supervisors, coworkers involved in their grievances, union representatives who had failed them. The attacks were, almost uniformly, the endpoint of a documented grievance process that had failed the shooter over months or years, making them legible as institutional failures in a way that random robberies gone wrong are not.^3^

This also made them eminently preventable in retrospect. The Califano Report recommended specific changes: supervisory accountability for management practices, improved grievance processes, better employee assistance programs, and pre-employment screening. USPS implemented some of these changes in the mid-1990s. Workplace homicides at USPS declined significantly after 1993. The phrase “going postal” outlasted the phenomenon it described.

The Pattern Kept Appearing Outside the Post Office

The postal shootings triggered a broader examination of workplace violence that produced federal guidelines and an industry of workplace violence prevention consulting. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration began publishing workplace violence guidelines in 1996. The FBI developed behavioral threat assessment frameworks for evaluating employees who showed warning signs. Human resources practices around documentation of employee conflicts became more systematic.

The pattern identified at USPS — institutional failure to address legitimate grievances creating conditions for catastrophic violence — reappeared in other contexts. The 1999 Xerox Corporation shooting in Honolulu, where Bryan Uyesugi, 40, killed seven coworkers in a conference room, shared key elements: a documented history of workplace conflict, prior management interventions that failed, and a final precipitating event involving discipline. The 2010 shooting at a Hartford Distributors warehouse in Manchester, Connecticut, where Omar Thornton, 34, killed eight coworkers after being confronted about suspected theft, added a racial harassment component — Thornton’s final phone call to police described systematic racism from supervisors — that was largely dismissed at the time.^4^

The Language Did Real Work in Burying the Problem

“Going postal” became a cultural sedative. Naming the phenomenon after the institution made it seem like a quirk of one peculiar employer rather than a systemic problem with how American workplaces handle power, grievance, and desperation. It allowed everyone who wasn’t a postal worker to feel uninvolved.

Approximately 2 million American workers experience workplace violence each year, according to OSHA estimates. Homicide is the second-leading cause of workplace death for women and the fourth overall. The conditions that produced the postal shootings — unaccountable supervisory power, inaccessible grievance processes, workers with no effective recourse — are not unique to one employer or one era. The phrase “going postal” froze understanding of the phenomenon in 1986 and let the underlying conditions continue unremarked.

The 34 people killed in postal facilities between 1983 and 1993 were not killed by a peculiarity of the mail business. They were killed at the end of institutional processes that had enough off-ramps to have stopped any of those deaths and didn’t take them. This same pattern — warnings present, institutions failing to act — connects to Columbine, Virginia Tech, Parkland, and the Las Vegas shooting.

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Sources:

1. United States Postal Service Commission on a Safe and Drug-Free Workplace. Breaking the Cycle of Violence: A Report on Violence in the Postal Service. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Chair, 1994.
2. Ames, Mark. Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion. Soft Skull Press, 2005.
3. Duhart, Detis T. Violence in the Workplace, 1993–99. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, December 2001.
4. Niehoff, Brian P. “A Theoretical Model of Organizational Retaliatory Violence.” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 1999.