Spillway Review


back to Flash Fiction
back to Main Menu
back to Contents

   
                         

Ethics

by
John Rubino

© 2003

 
 
“It’s quite simple,” the personnel director says to me. He rocks back and forth ever so slightly in his swivel chair. His desk sits between us – an expanse of mahogany holding only a single miniature palm in a terra-cotta pot adorned with hand painted Mayan sun gods. On the wall over his left shoulder is an autographed photo of Paul and Linda McCarthy.

“Your department can’t afford to have you leave,” he says, not looking at me but watching his fingers gently stroke the top of his desk. “You should have cleared your vacation through the proper channels,” he adds.

I clear my throat and speak slowly to him. “This trip is very important to me.”

He looks up but his face is so expressionless that I’m not sure he heard what I said. Of course, there is the obvious unspoken question: Is he really saying I can’t go when my plane ticket is for this evening, only six hours from now? I’ve been planning this 3-week trip to Europe for the past two months – my first vacation since I started here. Every day I’ve talked, joked, and laughed about it; I’ve shared travel plans and itineraries. An hour before this meeting, my department had a small bon voyage ceremony with tea and scones. So I actually did let him know. I let my department manager know. The whole damn organization knows. Only not in writing and that’s what he’s using for leverage.

“We need you here. This is a crucial time for the movement.”

The goddamn movement. It’s my second year with this non-profit organization and I’m so sick of the pressure of sacrifice that I have to deliberately restrain from rolling my eyes. Everyone working here is on a bare minimum salary and puts in 50 to 60 hours a week. Add to that the volunteer work for weekend demos and nightly work parties. We’ve all done our part for the movement. Yet, that doesn’t matter as the management engages in a slow, painful, haphazard deconstruction of its employees. What initially was announced as a brief economic downturn is now rumored to be gross financial stupidity.

This is how it happens: at five o’clock every Friday the personnel director makes his rounds through the different departments to initiate another wave of unemployed colleagues. After six straight weeks, there was an announcement that all the layoffs were finished. On the seventh week, a new round started up again. In the beginning, it was usually a handful. Now, sometimes, it’s a single person. Stretching into its eleventh week, at three o’clock on Friday you can feel the nervousness shudder through the building. We’ve gone from 130 employees to 55 in a psychological torture which mimics the exact animal experiments we’re trying to ban.

He’s staring at me waiting for a concession.

“I need to make this clear,” I say. “Absolutely nothing is going to stop me from getting on that plane.”

His eyebrows raise. He takes a short, quick intake of breath and I know he didn’t expect that response. Yet he’s not upset. This is the same man who last week waited until 7 p.m. for an employee to complete a 70-hour workweek before firing him.

“I can’t guarantee that your job will be here when you get back,” he says calmly. The corner of his mouth twists upward, ever so slightly, and I know immediately I’ve just helped them cull one more paycheck off the books, one more step forward for the movement.