The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  Matheson. “I see how much the union’s needed, when I see how little’s changed. You sound like Sid.”

  Lea. “You’re the one who sounds like Sid!”

  Matheson. “And you have never worked a single day upon the shop floor, Colleague Pensilby.”

  Lea. “Not for lack of willingness. If only I had time, if others could be trained to take my place, I’d gladly work with hands for once instead of head! To turn a crank, pull levers, heave a handle, lift a weighty box, become myself machinery: how pleasant, for a change! To come home aching from exertion, neither stiff nor cramped from immobility! Variety’s as good as holiday, and I would welcome any break in my routine. I’m sure my desk, or Sandy’s phones, or janitorial broom, would offer you the same relief. And when at last we’re doing one another’s jobs, we’ll value and be valued by each other as we now ourselves each value.”

  Matheson. “I’m sorry, but you couldn’t do what we do; and my men and women wouldn’t want to do what you do—push a mop or paper. And there’s an end to your utopian dream of sharing jobs like sisters sharing skirts. Besides, it’s inefficient! Factories replaced the cottage industries because a congregated group could mass-produce more quickly by dividing labor up.”

  Daize. “Sometimes there’s droplets of sense in his verbiage.”

  Matheson. “Degrading specialists to generalists not only blunts the worker’s skills, negates his individual talents, in effect erases his unique identity; it also rewrites history—denies the revolution called industrial, and thus is anti-revolutionary.”

  Daize. “Soon, though, they’re carried away by the floodwater.”

  A knock at the door, and Sid enters.

  Daize. “Keep that door shut!”

  Sid. “I’m unable to otherwise enter, my dear.”

  Matheson. “It’s Sid!”

  Daize and Lea. “Sid!”

  Sid. “I’m relieved you remember my face.”

  Lea. “It’s been three months only.”

  Sid. “But undoubted oblivious, memorable months. I imagine them heady with challenge, adventure, and expansion of self. You look ruddy and lithe and well-rested and supple, like heroes afoot at a world-building dawn, when the best is brought out of the commonest folk. How’s the company doing?”

  Matheson. “We’re in the middle of a quarterly.”

  Sid. “I’d be happy to join you. It’s open to all, I suppose?”

  Lea. “Currently employed employees only.”

  Sid. “But there’s some of those waiting outside in the hall.”

  Daize. “Leave that door shut.”

  Lea. “It’s a subcommittee meeting, sort of.”

  Sid. “Subcommittee or quarterly meeting, which one?”

  Matheson. “A caucus, representative, we thresh apart the coarsest chaff and grain before we all together do the winnowing.”

  Daize. “If representing a current employee—or eighty—you’re welcome to stay, but not otherwise.”

  Sid. “Representative only for one am I: me.”

  Matheson. “You quit.”

  Sid. “A vacation recuperative—doctor’s command. Here’s a note for your files.”

  Lea. “You resigned!”

  Sid. “You must misrecollect. When I left, there was no resignation officially, nothing in ink. Without signing, I can’t have resigned. Nor did you ever send me a notice of being dismissed.”

  Lea. “What about that check we sent by courier!”

  Matheson. “You sent a check? For what!”

  Daize. “Don’t be a turnip. For salary owed, and for holiday pay he’d accrued. Not a penny more.”

  Sid. “I admire the changes you’ve made to the place. It’s a lounge for employees? It has that aroma.”

  Daize. “Whether or not you received it, we sent you a letter of severance. We’ve copies.”

  Matheson, to Lea. “We really did?”

  Lea, to Matheson. “We’re as capable as him of frowzy memory, if necessary.”

  Sid. “How are sales?”

  Matheson. “They’ve never been so good.”

  Sid. “Yet the stockrooms, I noticed, are chock to the brim.”

  Matheson. “With orders placed and ready to be shipped.”

  Sid. “He’s more knowledgeable than before of such things. A promotion? —Of course not: you’re all, so I’ve heard, on a level these days. ‘No more masters,’ correct?”

  Matheson. “We’ve instituted job rotation, so we all know more about most everything.”

  Lea. “Who’s been letting you inside the stockrooms?”

  Sid. “There’s a few still around of my faithful old friends, a few loyal, obedient daughters and sons. They admitted, did some of them, under their breath, as if sadly accustomed to spies, that they thought that the changes around here’d been carried too far.”

  Matheson. “While others feel we haven’t yet gone far enough. So what?”

  Sid. “It’s a taste, though you’re none of you managers now, of the manager’s foremost dilemma: you can’t ever please all your workers at once.”

  Matheson. “That credo, like all pessimistic faiths, does guarantee itself. But every day we’re nearer still to pleasing everyone—much nearer than you managed, manager!”

  Daize. “Since you’ve no business here, please be so kind as to leave us to ours.”

  Sid. “I neglected to mention receiving a call from Ottavia Farr-Mp in the morning today.”

  Matheson. “Who’s that? And wha’d she have to say to you?”

  Sid. “Representing the owners, she’d little to say that was nice—rather poured the hot grease in my ear, I’m afraid. But the owners apparently think that this plant has still got a director, you see.”

  Daize. “They are mistaken in thinking it you.”

  Sid. “Is that so? You perhaps have forgotten to send ’em a putative copy of putative letter?”

  Daize. “How could it matter if even we had? It’s not going to work, what you’re up to.”

  Matheson. “What is it that he’s up to? What’s the scheme?”

  Daize. “Ten or more people here heard you resign; and two dozen more witnesses watched you walk out; and a hundred and thirty will swear that you haven’t set foot for three months in the factory. Prudently, our constitution addressed absenteeism: regular workers have contracts which terminate after a ninety-day unexplained leave. You’ve been gone ninety-one. And in any event, it is thirty days only for absent directors, whose title devolves to the old vice-director then.”

  Matheson. “Was that not you?”

  Sid. “Convalescent, I told you, not absent . . .”

  Daize. “Prove it in court. In the meantime, you’ll find that you’ve lost your authority, squandered your eminence. Captains their ships don’t abandon, commanders their troops, or they cease to be captains, commanders. A leader’s who leads; and a ruler who abdicates denigrates not just himself but his throne, and all royalty ever. A boss should be seat of a company’s consciousness; quitting’s lobotomy, psychical suicide, self-vivisection—the treasonous head that secedes from the body. You’ve forfeited all of your rights, be they moral or legal, to leadership. No one’ll still take your orders here. Many in fact will be ready to swear that you’re trespassing even. Reality’s formed by consensus, and you’re the minority.”

  Matheson. “Our new director’s Daize! How nothing’s changed.”

  Lea. “Shush! It’s only a formality.”

  Sid. “But you misunderstand me. I offer to help.”

  Daize. “We have been doing just fine on our own, thank you.”

  Sid. “You call nine ninety-seven just fine!”

  Lea. “That’s a market blip, and well within the range of normal fluctuation.”

  Sid. “There’s no need for assuming this martyrdom, Daize.
An ideal is no thing that exists in the world, but idea—or a poltergeist haunting the brain’s lumber-room, which makes move without sensible cause limbs, eyes, tongue. Why give tribute to phantoms, or make yourselves victims for sacrifice unto unseen and unseeable gods? And this combative stance that you take’s inappropriate. Please understand, I’m not scheming, or creeping, or weaseling in. I am willing to make you all partners, or if you prefer, vice-directors. You’ve shown yourselves apt and ingenious, committed and plucky. But still, you’re no businessmen, nor businesswomen. And Daize, you’re correct that I hadn’t a right to let fall on your shoulders the burden that rightly was mine. I’m for making amends, and reclaiming my risk.”

  Matheson. “The only risks we run are freedom’s risks: enlightenment, responsibility, mistakes which earn us wisdom, not regret.”

  Sid. “I refer to the owners’ year-end ultimatum.”

  Daize, to Lea and Matheson. “We are expected to reach ten point five percent profit by end of the year, says Ottavia.”

  Lea. “What! Since when?”

  Matheson. “‘Since when’! So what?”

  Sid. “Did you fail to inform them? Collectives can’t thrive in such secrecy, Daize.”

  Daize. “If we do not, they’ll appoint a director who’s able to.”

  Lea. “Meanwhile, fire the old—whoever that should happen at year-end to be.”

  Matheson. “They cannot do it. We now run the place.”

  Sid. “But they own it, you nozzle.”

  Daize. “That’s why there can be, there will be, no bonuses—nor for that matter the costly rotation of jobs. We’ll be needing each dollar that’s coming in.”

  Matheson. “Could someone tell me please, not him, why we should care what ultimatums or demands the owners make? No longer do we have or recognize directors. Let them fire which one of us they wish; we’ll hire ’em back. Let them appoint whomever they desire; we will ignore ’em, flout ’ em—go on strike!”

  Sid. “The perennial solution, the nostrum you dote on.”

  Matheson. “And why are you still here? Our colleague asked you several times to leave.”

  Daize. “Some new director can disarrange everything, Matheson: reinstate wage differentials, or outlaw collectives, or even dismantle the union; demote or dismiss the whole mass of us—probably will, when they learn what’s been happening.”

  Matheson. “We’ll stay and work, regardless who they sack.”

  Daize. “Work without pay?”

  Matheson. “Unless they pay us, we’ll refuse to work.”

  Sid. “How hermetically sealed is his system of thought!”

  Daize. “What if they sell it, or close it, the factory?”

  Matheson. “We’ll lock ourselves inside!”

  Daize. “They can arrest us. It isn’t our property.”

  Matheson. “We’ll fight the cops if they don’t take our side! We’ll start a civil war, oppressed against oppressors! Fuck the owners, fuck the law! And fuck this messenger and lackey, who returns with promises to save us from his bosses by becoming boss again!”

  Lea. “Don’t you get it, Matheson? They own the factory. Unless they get their profits, they’re within their rights to wrest from us its management. Consider it like rent: we pay, or else we’ll be evicted. One, or all of us, the end result’s the same: our revolution limping to a standstill.”

  Matheson. “You’re all colluding, all the same! As soon as your own neck’s beneath the tyrant’s heel, you turn collaborationist, and stoop and scrape, and lick the polish from their boots! You’re sell-outs, all of you, without a bone of revolution in your skeletons! You’re welcomed back, sir, Mister Babcock. We’ll resume the conversation where we left it ninety days ago. The union, you’ll recall, was on the verge of striking. Now we strike. These thugs of yours have been apprised of our demands. Until you recognize our eighty-seven votes, and institute our bonuses, there’s no machines will run, and no machinists pass inside the gates. We’ll reckon now accounts, and learn who’s least dispensable, and who most otiose. Enjoy paralysis and impotence! Good luck increasing profits with no staff! Be sure to send the owners our hello!” Matheson exits.

  The male janitor enters.

  Lea. “Go away! The meeting’s over!”

  The male janitor exits.

  Sid. “It’s a tough situation you’re in. But I know what I’d do, were I you. Should I tell my idea?”

  Daize. “Thanks, but instead I’ll tell you what you should’ve three months ago done. With the layoffs you should’ve gone through. Yes, we’d planned to lay off a few people. Just think: he permitted their threat of a walkout to frustrate his lockout!—a toddler who covets a toy till it’s given him. Matheson Church is now offering twice the same gift. We’ll accept it with gratitude secretly; openly, though, with bad grace. We allow him to think that this hurts us. Our pride has been stung. So we dig in our heels, set our teeth, cross our arms, make provocative show of not yielding an inch. If they’re starting to weaken too early—they can’t have much cash in their strike fund—we rile ’em with insults, aspersions, inflame ’em with threats of replacement, arrest, litigation, thus keeping the picket line bristling, and Matheson ever declaiming. If lucky, we’ll pare from the payroll two hundred and seventy months workers’ wages, which betters the hundred and eighty we’d hoped for from layoffs. Then next year, we’ll bring in some scabs who are young and unskilled, who we’ll get at half price; while the overpaid uppity strikers, we leave them to wither and freeze—taking none of ’em back whatsoever, not ever, not even as scabs. There’s another of Matheson’s gifts to us: death of the union. We meanwhile with skeleton crew keep the factory running at idle. We offer support staff and foremen a raise, or a token reversal of equalization, with promise of more in the future. We minimize output; we’ve plenty in stock, Sid’s correct, that needs selling. We give away cases at fifty, even dump ’em at loss if need be—while committing to no guarantees for the new year. Shut up; I’m not finished. We naturally cancel all purchasing, let our supply contracts lapse, at whatever the penalty; we’ll renegotiate everything after year-end. The annealers and crimpers in need of replacing, we sell ’em for scrap, and buy new ones next year. We offload to the city that parcel of foreshore, postponing those upgrades for now to the docks. As a matter of fact, we sell everything isn’t nailed down. We’ll find buyers, and dictate our price, since we’ll promise to buy it all back in the new year at profit to them. We can even start pawning the windows right out of the walls, for the chattels need never change hands. As for next year, it’s gonna be hell; but for us, for the moment, the future has no real existence; our profit in short-term is everything. Drowning, a swimmer can’t think of conserving her breath. But we’ll make it to shore; we’ll survive. Let the new year take care of itself. —So you see, Sid, you’ve nothing to teach us, and nothing to bring to the feast but your mouth.”

  Sid. “I perceive that I should have allowed you more power.”

  Daize. “No, for I always had plenty of that. It was only esteem that I lacked; but it’s lacking no longer. For everyone, since your departure, now knows who exactly is running this company, who in the past ran it for you: your secretary, and your accountant.”

  Lea. “Flattering.”

  Sid. “Could you really have thought that I didn’t esteem you? How paltry our glances, our handshakes, our words. We’re ‘the animal gifted with language’? Pfuh! Man is the beast that communicates least. Let me mend my ineloquence. Daize, I esteem you. Rehire me. Allow me to work underneath you, beside you—whatever. I need to come back to work. Home, and this uniform structureless holiday, kills me. D’you know what it’s like, to so suddenly slip from the engine of life, like a cog from its axle? The machinery, horribly, runs on without you. Where yesterday a hundred and thirty and more individuals needed your stewardship, help, and largesse, there’s today only one estranged wife who
depends on largesse. There were yesterday phones that were ringing at three in the morning; today, none at noon. You were piloting industry then, and were serving the nation by saving from crime our metropolises; now you’re as good as a ghost in society—giving as little, as much still desiring. There danced through your banking accounts many millions of figures each week; but today, numbers dribble, excreted like wind from a sack, from your personal savings. I feel as if sloughed. But I’m full still of blood and sensation! I want to come back. Take me back. I esteem you. I need to get out of the house or I’ll shrivel and die.”

  Daize. “Pleading with me is no use. The dictatorship’s over. We now make decisions collectively. Lea, what do you think?”

  Lea. “Me? I only work here.”

  Daize. “Lea is abstaining. I vote that we cannot this moment afford an expansion of staff. And with no other voters with eligibility present, the motion is carried. I’m sorry, Sid. Surely there’s many more factories, companies eager to garner experience like yours. If you’re sick of your home, try your wife’s for a change, maybe.”

  Sid. “I am waiting to hear still what you have to say, Lea. We always together worked well, did we not?”

  Lea. “I agree with Daize, Sid. You’re redundant.”

  Sid. “Then I’ll leave.” Sid exits.

  A pause.

  Daize. “Nothing was personal. Never were you what I wanted to oust, but your doctrines. And never was I what I wanted to save, but the factory. I’ve no belief in anarchic equality. People don’t know what to do with equality, Lea. Look at Matheson: never content. When you flatten the landscape, the hills feel belittled, and stomach it badly; the valleys enjoy being raised, and want higher to rise, even higher than mountains were formerly. That is the nature of humans. We constantly measure ourselves by the people around us. We scarcely can stand at a mirror without our comparing the sight to the image we hold of ourselves in our minds. There was something that demagogue, Matheson, said that I thought not entirely inapt: that they wanted the chance to get more. It’s the chance, not the more, that is valuable, whether in money or power. The rich aren’t more glad or more blessed than the poor, but the poor won’t believe it: they need the exemplary fable; their hope of acquiring that wealth is what makes them the gladder and blesseder truly. What’s equalization—of wages, position, or rank? Simultaneous snuffing of hundreds of dreams. We should, arrogant in our satiety, hesitate robbing from others their stimulant hunger. I started as typist here, lowly and scorned, but impressed my superiors’ superiors, and proved my ability, step after step, until finally, seven promotions and seven years later, I found myself working so closely with Sid that my hands seemed to come out his sleeves. When I watched you dismantle the ladder I’d climbed, I felt hobbled, afflicted, negated: my history, all my accomplishments canceled, erased! Yet I never intrigued, never sabotaged. Always I gave you the benefit of my experience. I couldn’t do less. Situation impossible: wanting your system to fail, but you, Lea, to succeed; helping the factory prosper, but hoping its management foundered. Two unreconcilable aims, incompatibly clashing inside me, their dissonance loosing, untuning my nerves. Only now that I speak do I sound my distress to its depths. What relief to let air in by letting air out! I’ll yet turn politician, provided I’m always permitted to talk cleansing truth. But you’re silent—upset and annoyed with me. Say something.”