Page 11 of Rich and Bossy

I cringe when he does it.

“One of the workers at the Minnie warehouse is trying to organize.”

I’m pretty sure some of the air comes out of my lungs. It feels like I can’t breathe, but I know I’m breathing. The worst part is, I don’t even get angry about it. I just stand there, kind of stunned.I knew she had balls, but not brass eight-hundred-pound gorilla balls.

He doesn’t need to say the name. I know who it is. I’m actually a little impressed. When she goes for it, she really goes for it.

She told you before she left. She wasn’t fucking around.

This should be easy enough to counter, but we need to do it quick, before she gets someone over there that knows what they’re doing. A warehouse union would be an absolute nightmare to deal with.

“Okay.” With my elbows on the arms of my chair, I tent my fingers under my chin.

John’s always been a hot head whose feet get way ahead of his brain. He’s always ready to fight—that makes him a good partner, but it means I have to be aware of his tendencies, too. Right now, he could be making a mountain out of a molehill. I won’t panic until we have facts.

“Give me the information. All of it.”

“You should already have it if you weren’t jerking off in your corner penthouse.”

“Just, go over everything.”

“Fine, you know Paul Morrison, the manager? You met with him a couple days ago, right?”

“Sure.” He kissed my ass the entire time, but all I could think about was Hazel, so I just let it go.

“He reached out this morning. I figured someone would’ve gotten to you first and you’d be ready to fight when I got here.”

“Nobody reached out to me. Not when I have an all-star errand boy like you on my side.”

“Dick. Of course he didn’t. Nobody wants to bother the CEO. Everything falls on my shoulders.”

“You are aware that the first O in your title stands for Operations, right?”

He ignores that part. “He overheard her talking to people in the break room. Getting a feeling, reading the room. To see if people would be interested in getting something rolling.”

“Overheard her how?” I have a hard time believing he chums it up with the workers in the breakroom. And he’s a good three hundred pounds. Not exactly a candidate for hide-and-seek world champion.

“He didn’t say.”

“I doubt people would discuss this shit in front of him.”

“I don’t think he’d make this up either.”

I wave a hand forward. “Okay, did he give names?” I know it’s her. It has to be her.

“No, but he said they all sounded pretty fed up. They were looking into first steps on how to file paperwork and that kind of thing, where to go from there.” He flops back in the chair, groaning. “Do you know the kind of shitstorm this will bring? Not just to profits, but the media shitstorm. If people are trying to form a union, it means workers are unhappy, which means the company must be driving them like slaves. That’s the story. For us, it’ll be like we’re a bunch of bullies. And once that snowball starts rolling, it can get real big, real fast. From coast to coast we’ll have people trying to organize, picketing and protesting and writing shit online. This is going to get out of control.”

“Well, we advertise on the big media, so they can be reminded that those ad dollars are fluid and can go elsewhere.”

“Yeah, but people get their news on social media now and from podcasts and YouTube shows. Information is not as locked down as it used to be. We don’t have nearly the control over the narrative we would’ve had five years ago.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We have cards to play, and this is a little premature to go scorched earth like that. I’m sure there’s a way to remedy this that’s way easier.” Wehaven’t gotten this far by jumping at shadows and losing our shit the second things start to go bad. “One thing at a time.”

“Fine. Then that one thing is to shut this shit down immediately. Snuff it out before it’s even lit.”

Of course, he’s absolutely right. “Okay, well get the lawyers in a room and start making a plan.”

For the first time this morning, he cracks an actual grin. “Will do, bitch.”

---