The union meeting was tomorrow. The assessment he needed to see was somewhere in a corporate filing system. The and he was going to find it. Marcus Hayes stood up from the kitchen table, turned off the light, and went to bed. He didn't stare at the ceiling, but he didn't fall asleep easily either.
He lay in the dark and thought of the shape of the life he had been living, and the shape of the life that might be available to him if he stopped agreeing to fit into spaces that were too small. Outside, the sound of the ocean carried faintly on the night air, the way it always did in this town, constant and unhurried, and completely indifferent to the calculations of the people who lived beside it. For once, Marcus found that indifference comforting. The ocean didn't need him to be useful. It just kept moving.
And somewhere in that sound, he found enough quiet to finally close his eyes. The union rep's name was Gerald Booth, and he had the kind of voice that sounded like it had been through a few things and come out the other side with most of its patients intact. He met Marcus at the hotel on Friday morning before the shift started in a conference room on the second floor that smelled like carpet cleaner and recycled air. Gerald set a yellow legal pad on the table. Clicked his pen twice and looked at Marcus the way a man looks at a problem he has seen before and knows how to handle.
Walk me through it, Gerald said. Marcus walked him through it. He had written everything down the night before. The way Clare told him to Don's exact words, the timeline, the language about reclassification, the reference to the outside firm's preliminary report. He put the paper on the table between them and Gerald read it without interrupting his pen, making small marks in the margins.
When he finished, Gerald looked up. You got the numbers? The incident rate, the budget performance, 3 years of it. I pulled the reports last night. Gerald looked at him.
You just had them. I keep records of my department's performance. I've kept them since year two. Something shifted in Gerald's expression. Not surprise, exactly.
More like the quiet satisfaction of a man who has spent years watching people arrive unprepared and has just encountered the exception. Good, he said. That's very good, Marcus. He leaned back. Here's what I'm going to tell you.
What they're doing is not illegal on its face. A company has the right to restructure operations, but what they don't have the right to do is misrepresent the basis for that restructuring, especially if the documented performance contradicts their stated rationale. He tapped Legal Pad. We're going to request the full assessment, not the preliminary, the full document, and we're going to put your numbers next to theirs, and we're going to make them explain the gap. How long does that take?
Couple of weeks, maybe three. Depends how fast they respond. Gerald studied him. You worried about your job? Marcus considered the question.