Page 37 of Working for Keeps

“Say it,” I tell him. “Whatever it is. Say it now, because we have six hours.”

“I’m not taking his deal,” Mick says. “And I’m not deciding that on my own either. Get in your car.”

At six o’clock on Friday morning, the shift bell rings at Halvorsen Works and the whole of first shift walks onto the floor and goes to work.

I stand at the window of the office trailer with a cold cup of coffee while they go in, and I put the cup down. My hands.

They know. Every one of them has a certified letter in his fist or in his truck or on his kitchen table, because the courier came at a quarter to six exactly as promised, and I was standing across the road in the dark with my hands in my coat pockets when he got there, because Mick put me in my car at midnight and did not once suggest I stay home. Red Holloway met that van at the gate with the whole executive committee behind him and a folding table and two urns of coffee, and they read the letter out loud to every man who came up the road, and then they told him what it was for.

Artie Vasquez is first up the road and first through the door. Kowalski goes in. Bo Rasmussen goes in.

Every one of them puts his boots on and clocks in and starts his machine anyway, because the steward they elected and the old man who has kept that hall since before most of them were born stood at a gate in the dark and asked them to, and because not one thing about this morning was decided behind anybody’s back.

Thump-hiss. Thump-hiss.

The floor of the trailer picks it up and hands it to me through the soles of my shoes. That is a local of four hundred men refusing to take a swing, and I have never heard anything like it come up through a floor.

The boardroom of Halvorsen Works is cold enough to see your breath in, and nobody at the table has touched his water glass.

I sit at the mahogany table with my hands loose in my lap where nobody can watch them. Old Mr. Halvorsen is at the head, hunched into his tweed. Down the union side: Red Holloway with his hat on the table in front of him. Toby. Artie, who has not looked at me once.

And Mick.

He’s in a clean flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled and his forearms on the table, and there is nothing on his chest where the pin should be.

It spent last night on a table in a cinderblock room where he left it, and nobody at this table has said one word about where it is now. He’s not looking at me either, but for an entirely different reason, and every so often his boot finds mine under the table and stays there.

At nine o’clock, the projection screen throws its cold blue light across all of our faces, and Roland Keller arrives on the wall.

Chicago. The lake. The silver hair. Smiling/ He’s smiling because he has spent the last eighteen hours waiting for a phone call telling him that the Forge Creek local walked off the floor in a rage, and no such call has come, and I think he read that as stupidity rather than as danger.

“Good morning,” Keller says. “I’ll be brief, gentlemen. As of Friday the twenty-second, the parent board executed an asset purchase agreement with Cardinal Holdings. Manufacturing at this facility ceases August fifteenth. The land transfers for redevelopment.” He doesn’t pause. He’s a man reading a weather report. “Ms. Warden will now present the transition baselines, and we’ll record the workforce deployment schedule so that we can begin the wind-down in an orderly fashion. Vera.”

I don’t stand up.

“No,” I say.

Keller’s smile doesn’t move. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m not presenting the deployment schedule.” I slide my chair back, and the legs shriek on the linoleum, and I stand. “I’d like to start with what came off a courier van at the loading dock yesterday morning. Eleven pages. The executed letter of intent, addressed to the local executive committee. No sender.”

The smile stays exactly where it is.

“I have no knowledge of any⁠—”

“You needed a strike.” I walk to the podium. “You’ve needed one since the day you signed. Section fourteen, Clause B. A stoppage before the dispute window opens is a material breach, and a material breach lets you terminate the collective agreement, freeze the pension fund, and void every dollar of severance. That’s nine million dollars, Roland, and it was sitting there on the table, and all you had to do was make four hundred angry men swing at you.” I look at the screen. “So you mailed them the knife.”

“That is a slanderous accusation from an employee in the middle of a documented performance⁠—”

“And when they didn’t pick it up, you sent a second one.” I don’t raise my voice. “A quarter to six this morning. A courier at the gate with a certified letter for every man on the seniority list, group health plan terminated at close of business today. An administrative consequence of a signed asset transfer, and your counsel has it clean. You called me at eleven-forty last night to be sure I understood exactly what that letter would do on this floor at six in the morning, and you offered to put the coverage back if I sat here and read out a deployment schedule.”

At the head of the table, Mr. Halvorsen makes a small sound into his tweed.

“They didn’t swing.”

Keller stops.

“Every man on that shift is on the floor right now,” I say. “They voted a hundred and sixty-one to hold, last night, after their steward stood up and told them himself what he’d been sitting on since Monday, and put his pin on the table for it. Pull up the production telemetry. It’s on your desktop. First shift at their stations, second and third clocking in behind them, four hundred people in contract and in full compliance, every one of them knowing since seven last night exactly what you’re doing to them.”