Termination Man: a novel (18 page)

“Whatever he is,” she continued. “He certainly seems to be destined for bigger and better things at TP Automotive. I get the feeling that he’s been tapped to move up the ladder soon.”

“Yeah,” I said, recalling my conversation with Beth Fisk, in which the HR manager had said as much. “Provided that they can keep him out of trouble.”

“Whew,” Claire said, poking me in the ribs. “Have I touched a raw nerve? You don’t seem to like that guy very much, do you?”

“He is what he is,” I said as neutrally as possible. “He’s our client.”

I let it go at that, hoping that we would not have to talk any further about Shawn Myers. In my line of work, you needed to get along with all sorts of people, from the stuffed shirts in the boardroom, to the hotheads on the factory floor. And thus far, I had proven myself fairly adept at navigating my way through the oddballs, petty tyrants, and miscreants that inevitably show up in organizational environments. But Shawn Myers, I realized, was steadily working his way under my skin. Not too many people had done that over the years.

So I changed the subject. “I think they’ll be able to bounce back. Afterwards, I mean.”

“Who are you talking about?” Claire asked. She rolled over onto her side and cocked her elbow beneath her head.

“I mean Alan and Lucy—after we engineer their resignations. They’re both bad fits for UP&S; but they should be able to find other homes, other companies where their talents might be better appreciated.”

“Since when do you care, one way or the other?” Claire asked. I was about to take offense, but then I thought:
She’s right
. I suppose I was troubled by the fact that Alan had so genuinely cared about the pre-TP Automotive version of his company—
but hadn’t that also
been
true of Kevin Lang?
And surely Lucy Browning wasn’t the first target of mine who had also been a fundamentally nice person.

So what the hell
was
wrong with me?

“Claire,” I said. “It’s not like we work for the mafia. We aren’t taking people for long rides and shooting them in the back of the head. We do our jobs so that companies can get—”

“I know, I know,” Claire said. “So that companies can get the right people on the bus. I read
Good to Great
myself, Craig. Call it what you want, but at the end of the day, we’re still getting people fired. We’re still screwing them over, at least from their point of view. If that wasn’t the case, then we wouldn’t be so careful about protecting our identities, by cloaking what we do in all these aliases and games. Now, you can either accept that and be honest with yourself, or not. I choose to accept it.”

I said nothing. She was right, in a way—but also wrong, I believed.

“If you disagree with me,” Claire continued. “Why don’t you give Kevin Lang a call? Tell him what a favor you did for him by getting him canned from GLFS.”

“That’s a cheap shot.”

She laughed. “I think Kevin was the one who got the cheap shot, and we were the ones who delivered it.”

“But Kevin smoked that joint of his own free will.”

“Right, right. A joint that he would never have touched if you hadn’t tempted him with it, using that patented Craig Walker charm. I saw his file—I know that he probably likes men. You think I don't know what you were up to?”

I felt my face redden. I supposed that I had never thought about it that way. I wanted to believe that my good looks and personal charm had nothing to do with it—that Kevin had taken the joint because he was a habitual pothead.

“So what are you saying, Claire? Do you think that what we do is wrong? Are you having trouble sleeping at night?”

“Hey, hey. Why don’t you back off? You’re the one who brought it up. And no—I don’t see anything wrong with what we do. What’s the difference, really, between an MBA who engineers the termination of a few disgruntled employees, and another MBA who engineers the shipment of a thousand American jobs to some Latin American or Asian country? You ask me, what we do is a drop in the bucket, ethically speaking. At least we terminate people who hate their jobs anyway. Those other guys lay off workers who actually care about what they do.”

Kevin cared. Alan and Lucy care,
I wanted to say,
but stopped myself.

The truth was that they cared a lot more than Shawn Myers ever would. But Claire had a valid point: All three of them were bucking the system. And the system had discarded plenty of employees who had kept their shoulders to the grindstone for years, all in the name of higher share prices and bigger bonuses for senior managers.

Claire was talking about the recent trend of major American companies transferring their operations to so-called LLCs—low-cost countries. They had been shipping factory jobs to LLCs for generations, of course; but in recent years the trend had accelerated to include white-collar jobs as well. Motorola now performed most of its research and development in China, where engineers could be hired at a fraction of what it costs to hire engineers in the United States. At the same time, Procter & Gamble had moved many of its accounting and other support functions to Costa Rica and India, eliminating thousands of American jobs in the process. 

This was the sort of thing that could never have happened in the post-WWII days of Cold War tension abroad, and communist agitation on the home front. Back then the average corporate manager had seen his position as a sacred trust, in which he was charged with turning a profit while simultaneously preserving the welfare of his community stakeholders. The idea was to preserve American capitalism by assuring that it benefitted everyone. And throughout the 1950s, 60s—and even through the 70s and 80s—this had made America a place were capitalism did benefit almost everyone, the proverbial rising tide that lifted all boats.

But now we lived in a globalized world, where community allegiance and the old social contract were regarded as quaint relics of the
Ozzie and Harriet
era. A place where CEOs commanded rock-star salaries, while accounting and engineering jobs were regarded as disposable commodities.

Maybe Claire was
correct in regard to the relative distribution of guilt
, I thought.
Or maybe she was actually wrong.

In either, case, Claire was right about one thing: Given what I had already done, I was in no position to be splitting hairs in the realm of ethics and morality. 

Lunch hour in the company cafeteria. With only a few hundred employees at UP&S, there was no hot meal service here; but there was a long row of vending machines along one wall of the cafeteria. These were stocked by Aramark, the largest player in the field of industrial food service. For a few dollars, the vending machines enabled you to purchase a plastic-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich or a gyro, which you could then heat in one of three microwaves that Aramark also provided.

It wasn’t particularly good food; but it was edible if you didn't allow yourself to think too much about minor issues like preservatives and sodium content. This was another aspect of working undercover in a factory environment: lots of substandard food.

The lunch hour was turning out to be a source of real opportunity in my observation and strategizing campaign against Lucy Browning and Alan Ferguson. By the end of my first week on the job, the three of us had become regular lunch companions. I realized that Lucy and Alan had been lunch companions prior to my arrival, of course; and they had graciously included me as the new face in their midst—or the FNG, as Alan still occasionally liked to call me.

Not surprisingly, the topics of our lunchtime conversation frequently turned to the ongoing turmoil at UP&S. On this particular day, Lucy seemed to be hatching some sort of a scheme to attack Shawn Myers with grassroots democracy.

“I’ve been talking to some of the women in accounting,” Lucy said. “They have to work under Shawn Myers, too, you know. I’ve got the idea that we could put a petition together, asking TP Automotive to either remove Shawn Myers or force him to undergo some sort of sensitivity training. To tell you the truth, though, I don’t think that any sort of training is going to turn Shawn Myers into an acceptable manager. He needs to go.”

“And you think that you can accomplish that with a petition?” I asked, striking what I hoped would be just the right chord of pessimism.

“They will if they think that they might have a revolt on their hands,” she said.

It took an effort for me to keep my face neutral. Lucy was obviously naïve—she had no idea how big corporations work. Did she think that UP&S was some sort of Athenian democracy, where she and her friends could vote Shawn Myers out of his position? The more likely outcome would be that she would not be the only one to lose her job as a result of the revolt. If there was indeed a petition, anyone who signed it would become a marked employee, just as she and Alan had become marked employees. She could do no good with these methods. She could only take other employees down with her.

“So let me get this straight: You plan to put together a petition attacking Shawn Myers, convince a bunch of other employees to sign it, and then submit it to Beth Fisk. Is that right?”

“We plan to simultaneously submit a copy to the corporate offices of TP Automotive,” Lucy said. But I knew that the “we” here was only Lucy—and possibly Alan. 

“Well, it will be interesting to see how that works,” I said.

Alan gave Lucy, and then me, an exasperated look. “We won’t change anything by working within their system,” he said. “Here inside the company, they control everything. It’s like being a dissident inside the old Soviet Union.”

Yes
, I thought, recalling the previous night’s conversation with Claire.
Except for the fact that the citizens of the former Soviet Union had no choice about their form of government. You’re an
employee
here at UP&S of your own free will.

“Therefore,” Alan continued. “Our only recourse is to appeal to outside parties.”

“What are you talking about, Alan? The EEOC? Some sort of class action suit?”

“No. Lucy and I have been talking, and I don’t think that we have enough evidence to take a legal route against them. Not yet, anyway. There’s also the fact that they’ve got most of the office staff intimidated.”

“Meaning that most of the office staff want to keep their jobs,” I said, unable to resist pointing out the folly of what they were apparently planning.

“Wait till you’ve been here a few months, Craig. Then see how you feel. But yes, if you really want to break it down that way, I suppose you’re right. It was only a matter of months ago that UP&S was on the verge of bankruptcy, and everyone believed that they were headed for the unemployment line. Then TP Automotive comes in here and plays the white knight. So they believe that they can do whatever they want. They think they can call Lucy an idiot, or put people in senior management positions who have no business being there. I mean, think about it, Craig:
Shawn Myers
? He’s not qualified to organize a bake sale, much less run a company.”

I couldn’t argue with Alan’s last observation. And I feared that if I pushed the company’s side of the conflict too much, I would risk arousing his suspicions—the last thing I could afford to do.

“Okay, Alan, I see your argument. So what’s your next step, then?”

Alan leaned closer to me in a conspiratorial fashion. “Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone,” he said. “But about two weeks ago I contacted a journalist from the
Detroit Automotive Gazette
in Detroit. I told him about the crappy situation here, how the Myers have been screwing up the company.”

“You spoke to a journalist from the
Detroit Automotive Gazette
about the situation here at UP&S?” I asked.

“
Hey, keep it down!
” Alan said in a loud whisper, leaning even closer to me. “I don’t want to tell the entire cafeteria, you know.”

“That’s pretty bold, Alan,” I said, doing my best to affect the half neutral, half sympathetic pose that would be expected if I were really Craig Parker the new employee, and not Craig Walker—the undercover consultant. “So is this journalist biting? Or has he blown you off as simply one more disgruntled employee?”

“He wants to do some more fact-checking,” Alan said. “And I believe that he wants to cultivate another source inside UP&S, or inside one of the other companies recently purchased by TP Automotive. I’ve heard that there has been some turmoil at one of their companies in the Cleveland area.”

Great Lakes Fuel Systems
, I thought, but did not say.

“Once he does all of that, I believe that we can expect an article about TP Automotive’s shenanigans. Something that will publicly embarrass their senior management, and show them that they can’t come into a company like UP&S and do whatever they please.”   

But that’s where you’re wrong
, I thought.
They
can
do whatever they please, as long as they don't break the law, and as long as their poor decisions don't put the company out of business.
Moreover, there was no law on the books that would prevent TP Automotive from moving Shawn Myers into the top spot at UP&S. Nor was that decision—by itself—likely to put the company out of business. Shawn Myers had an entire support network within TP Automotive that would prop him up, despite his own unsuitability for a leadership position.