Company - Max Barry [97]
“We didn't want to do it this way,” Jones says. “But we're prepared to.”
You carry out raids at dawn because that's when the enemy is at its most disoriented. It's like that on level 2 of Zephyr Holdings, except it's four thirty in the afternoon. Senior Management is weary from a long day of increasing shareholder value, the buzz from the wine over lunch has worn off, and it's been more than an hour since their last coffee. When Zephyr employees burst into their offices and tear the phones out of their hands, they are too befuddled to react. Every one of them, Blake Seddon included, is dragged from his or her leather office chair, hauled into the boardroom, and stuffed into a seat around the great oak table. They sit there in shock while a scruffy, angry throng coalesces around them. Every few minutes, above the growing din, they hear a ding and even more people crush into the boardroom. Soon they are pressed so tight that they are like a single animal, the zephyremployee, an enormous beast, normally docile and easily tamed, but (apparently) aggressive and unpredictable when provoked. The boardroom fills with their excited talk, the kaleidoscope of their shirts, blouses, and ties, and the hot, sweaty odor of their bodies.
Senior Management tries to protest, but the employees angrily shake their chairs. They try to communicate with one another via facial expressions. None has any idea what is happening, but as a young man clambers onto the boardroom table and holds up his hands for quiet, they all feel the same sickening feeling: the bulwark of the suggestion box has failed.
The noise drops away. Jones clears his throat. It is very important that Jones not betray weakness at this point, but knowing that and executing it are two different things. He feels his knees tremble. His eyes meet Blake Seddon's, and he sees rage in them. Jones swallows, then again. His throat constricts tighter and tighter.
Senior Management—not Blake, but an older man with outrageous eyebrows—grows tired of waiting. “Just what do you think—”
“I have something to read!” Jones shouts. The man falls silent. He swallows again. “It's an old speech, but we have adapted it for modern times. The important thing is that it still holds true today. So you,” Jones says, his voice rising, as Senior Management starts to interject again, “are going to sit there and listen to it.”
He takes a breath. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all employees are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are dignity, respect, and the pursuit of a life outside of work.
“That whenever any company becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the employees to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new management, laying its foundation on such principles as to effect their safety and happiness.
“Prudence will dictate that management should not be changed for light or transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that employees are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the management to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and degradations, pursuing invariably the same cost-cutting objectives, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such management.
“We, therefore, the employees of Zephyr Holdings, solemnly declare that we are, and of right ought to be, free and independent; that we are absolved from all allegiance to Senior Management, and that all authority of Senior Management over us is totally dissolved.” There is a lot of shouting and executives trying to talk over the top of him by this point, so Jones decides to repeat it. “Totally dissolved!” he yells.
There is bedlam. Senior Management struggles to free itself from the grasping hands of the employees.