"Good until they changed my shift. I missed lab on Thursday." Maya picked at the corner of the wrapper. "I talked to HR. They said everyone needs to be flexible."
Luis shook his head. "They keep calling it flexibility when it's our lives that have to bend."
Otis pulled up a chair for a moment. She had noticed Maya's hands, the fine cuts near her fingernails, the small burns from work that required more protective gloves than the department could keep in stock. "Don't leave that class," she said. "If the schedule is wrong, keep a record of every change. Dates, times, who made the decision."
Maya gave her a puzzled look. "What good will writing it down do?"
"More than hoping people remember fairly."
After they left, Otis sat for another moment looking toward the windows. She remembered being a young woman with a mechanical engineering degree and no one willing to trust her with a machine. She remembered the careful way she'd carried her first rejection letter, as though folding it neatly might make it hurt less. The past was never as far away as younger people imagined.
By nine, whispers had begun to move through the manufacturing buildings. Supervisors were told to prepare lists of employees by seniority, classification, and annual compensation. The payroll department received instructions to calculate severance costs for a reduction in force. No announcement had been made, but people who worked near the machinery knew how to recognize the sound of a shutdown before anyone admitted it was coming.
At eleven, Otis passed the glass conference room near Ryan's office and heard Logan's voice through a door left open a few inches. She had no reason to linger there, and she did not press an ear against the wall. She was putting clean towels into a restroom cabinet when the conversation became loud enough to reach her.
"Four hundred positions," Logan said. "Three hundred and twenty production and eighty maintenance. Payroll reduction starts next quarter. The presentation makes it look like we achieve the operating margin by streamlining."
Patricia Wilson answered in a strained voice. "Some of those positions maintain equipment we're required to inspect. We can't cut the people who know the lines and assume nothing changes."
"We can contract those tasks," Ryan said. "And the savings trigger the executive performance pool. We made those promises to the senior team last year."
"What happens to the people?" Patricia asked.
"They become a labor-market issue," Ryan replied. "We're not running a church."
Otis closed the cabinet slowly. She had heard numbers like this before. Hundreds had disappeared from payroll at other companies in an afternoon, their skills described in a memorandum as redundant. But this time she could picture the people inside the number. Luis, Maya, the woman in quality control who cared for her father, and the night-shift supervisor whose son had just started college.