As I am talking I’m also trying to shift tactics, wondering if there’s some tentative way to float out my new idea — CEO as supportive friend to the worker — to see if I can bring the idea into the room in a manner that doesn’t incite panic. I decide I’ll try to do so within the shell of the story of the Italian kid. How the new young workers consider themselves virtuosos, and perhaps there is a new kind of virtuosity for our organization to engage in. A virtuosity in making our workers feel valued and supported. Even before this sentence is entirely out of my mouth I feel I am in the process of making one of the worst missteps in my entire career. It’s like I’ve said we’re going to make money by spreading the plague. (Actually, if I had said that, I believe the reaction would have been considerably more positive.) But I’ve always been a visionary, and sometimes being a visionary means pushing past negative reactions to the success that lies on the other side. The more you gamble the more you win, if you win. But, of course, also the more you lose. How big a gamble was this and was it one I could actually win? Was this informal gathering the right place to be making my tentative first move? I look around the room and have another thought, also extremely obvious. These are all men who dream of some day having my job, of taking me out and taking my spot. This isn’t paranoia or is it? When I was their age, if I had found myself in a similar situation, I would have certainly wanted to do the same.
After the meeting is over I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like I’ve already made the first move in a chess game that might last for the rest of my natural life and worry that my opening gambit was extremely poor. But I’m still in charge. I can still choose to pack up the pieces and put away the board, go back to whatever game I was playing before (not chess but perhaps Monopoly). Never before have I shied away from a challenge, why would I start now? But is this the challenge I want? How do you know what you do or don’t want before it’s too late to turn back? I’m trying to step back from myself, look at the situation as I would if it concerned someone else. An aging CEO — always known for his panache, shrewdness and rapacity — decides to turn over a new leaf for the final chapter of his life and make life better for some actual people. Does it sound like something noble or does it sound like complete bullshit? Why is there no one close by who I trust enough to fully discuss these matters?
I’m thinking back to the informal gathering, how I couldn’t manage to get on top of it, couldn’t find a way to fully dominate the room, something I believe I once managed to do effortlessly. So if I can no longer dominate maybe there’s some other way, instead of domination something more like co-operation or collaboration. An organization that people work for because they want to be there, and a slightly decreased margin of profit is in fact a small price to pay for the energy I will get in doing the right thing. You catch more flies with honey than you do with poison, and yet I know the opposite is also true: if you give people a few small benefits and concessions, they will keep demanding more and more, practically forever. Try to be a friend to the workers and they will treat you like a cash machine that dispenses free cash until your dying day. And yet there still must be some way to get away with murder, to have the best of both worlds, to have our employees see me as a hero while I remain in control, never letting them feel they have the upper hand. This is the magic trick I will need to master if I only want to lose a few pawns without ever sacrificing the king. What kind of king is loved by his subjects and is it too late for me to make a play for such populist love?
For weeks and weeks I think about my presentation, which for all intents and purposes went normally enough, but it keeps coming back into my thoughts like an ongoing curse: what have I begun and what have I done. And yet, at the same time, I’m still not sure it’s actually started. I’m still not sure I’ve done anything at all.
2.
Sitting in the library these past few weeks, reading about the history of labour, I have often been shocked by the ferocity of violence directed against the workers. I remember something I heard as a child; I feel almost certain it came from my parents: if at the very beginning you knew how hard it would be you’d simply never start. Tomorrow we start, and though I now know so much more then when I first arrived, I still have basically no idea how it will be. How long a fight we’re actually in for. All I know is that, however naively, it has already begun and there’s no turning back. I know I need to sleep but I’m too wired, lying awake in this tent: thinking, thinking, thinking.
I have never felt so energized, so alive, so frightened, so engaged and supported. But this is only the beginning — when we’re still gaining energy, when everything feels possible — and later, as the strike progresses, everything will only become more difficult. Tomorrow will be perhaps the most challenging day of my entire life and I now realize I will have to face it with relatively little sleep. All of the reading I have done in the library in some way tells the same story over and over again: that they will do practically anything to protect exorbitant profits, resort to any savagery or brutality, but with guile and perseverance it is possible to wear them down, to win concessions. I know I shouldn’t be asking myself these questions now, that I should be steeling myself for the upcoming battle, but I can’t help but wonder: are concessions really enough? Around the bonfire someone said we must turn all these fields into co-ops, and that might be another step in the right direction, but would even that be enough? There is so much injustice in the world, the more you know the more endless it seems. So much of this injustice is aimed at people who look more or less like me, who come from parts of the world far from the so-called centre, but why do they only take from us? Why must we take all the bullets? They want our labour, for as cheap as possible, and they want our resources, and it’s easier to take from those you can say are different, from those you assume are less, even if you’re no longer able to say so as blatantly as they once did. And then hatred always has the fire to take on a life of its own. Concessions aren’t nearly enough, but this is where I’ve landed and this is what I will fight for in the long days to come.
If we make a union in these fields, is there anything we can do to ensure it doesn’t become corrupt? Or that later it doesn’t only look after the people who work here, we just look after our own, and everyone else can fend for themselves? We need to fight for ourselves, here and now, but we also need changes so large and impossible they encompass the entire world. I wonder if things moved so fast here because we could sit in a circle and talk, look each other in the eyes, feel each other’s presence, that we had each other’s backs, and I have no idea how that could ever happen on a global scale. I’m wondering how much I’ve really changed since the piano wire in my jacket pocket felt like my only hope. Or how much more I might change in the future. Here in the fields, since I got here and this terrifying project began, I’ve had such an intense feeling of people coming together, that people here want to care for each other, that this wanting to care for each other is so much more important than any money or benefits we might eventually be able to wring from the organization. How can we keep wanting to care for each other, not turn on each other, as things continue to get more difficult.