Dolores Pruitt carried the ratified union contract around the break room like a hymnal, open to page fourteen. She had a hand warmer in her other fist, cracked and shaken out of habit, though her next freezer stint was an hour off.
“Four dollars across the board,” she said, and tapped the line. “Five-forty on the cold premium. Read it yourself.”
They read it. Benny from receiving read it twice and kissed the page, which she allowed. Nineteen years in the freezer had taught her that people believed numbers they could touch.
Then she turned to page twenty-two, the clause she had written longhand on a legal pad at two in the morning during the second week of bargaining. A robot may be assigned a station only where its total hourly cost falls below the contract wage for that station. The company had fought it for six days. Their lawyer had called it unprecedented. She had called it arithmetic.
“That thing in the freezer bay,” she said, “loses them money every hour it stands there. Now it loses them more.”
Nobody looked toward the freezer, but everyone knew what she meant. The unit had arrived on a flatbed in April, leased, gray, a head shorter than Benny. It had picked for three weeks in the spring and then been parked by the dock door to the freezer, plugged into the wall, its fans ticking behind the racks. Ray Okafor had told the floor plainly that it cost more than a person. People had liked Ray for saying so.
At ten past two, Ray put his head around the break room door and asked if she had a minute.
His office was a converted supply closet with one window onto the freezer airlock. Frost had feathered the glass in the corners. He sat, opened the laptop, and turned it around so it faced her.
“I reran the model on the new wage table,” he said. “I wanted you to see it before anyone upstairs does.”
She pulled the chair in. The spreadsheet had a column for every station in the building: dry pick, receiving, returns, loading, freezer. Down the left side ran the unit’s costs. Lease, power, maintenance contract, the remote operator who watched four units from a desk in Charlotte. Down the right ran the people.
She went through it slowly, with her finger, the way she went through anything the company handed her. She checked the lease against the figure posted in the April memo. She checked the power rate against the utility bill she had made them produce in bargaining. She checked the maintenance line twice, because maintenance was where companies hid things, and found nothing hidden.
“Dry pick,” she said.
“Still underwater. By a lot.”
“Loading.”
“Underwater.”
Her finger came to the freezer column and stopped. The base wage with the four-dollar raise. The cold premium at five-forty, the number Benny had kissed. The forty-five minute rotation rule, which meant the company paid for warm-up breaks in which nobody picked anything. The unit had no rotation rule. It did not need to stand in the airlock and wait for its fingers to come back.
The two columns sat one cell apart. The unit came in eleven cents an hour under.
“Run it again,” she said.
He ran it again. Eleven cents.
“Without the premium?”
“Then it’s a dollar ninety over.” Ray did not look away from her. “Dolores, it’s your clause. I’m reading it the way you wrote it.”
She knew. She had written it to be read exactly that way, so nobody could argue about what it meant. A station goes to the machine when the machine is cheaper, and never before. At two in the morning she had pictured it holding the machine back for good.
Freezer was the top rate in the building. Every raise she had ever won had gone to make it the top rate. Senior freezer pickers got first bid on overtime, and she had held the senior freezer bid since 2015.
Through the window, the unit stood where it had stood since spring, frost on its shoulders.
Ray slid the transfer form across the desk. It needed a steward’s signature to confirm the assignment met the terms of Article Nine. Ray had typed FREEZER, SENIOR BID in the station field, and under it her name.
She reached into her jacket pocket for a hand warmer, felt the two spares she had brought for the afternoon stint, and set them on his desk, unopened.
Then she picked up the pen and signed where the clause said she had to.