London, United Kingdom
Day 300
God, I love it when things are efficient. At precisely 2 p.m., practically to the second, a call comes in from Jackie Stockett. In the last few months as I’ve racked up responsibilities like I used to rack up air miles, I’ve often been tempted to carry a placard above my head: Were you all raised by wolves? Be on time!
I am unsurprised and grateful that the director of the Indiana Working Draft is punctual. We need to know how she’s doing what she’s doing and there’s no time to spare. So far, we only have specific employment policies: all healthcare workers, member of the armed forces, civil service and the emergency services are required to work full-time, or part-time if they have dependents, until a broader working framework is created and passed by Parliament. Everyone else is free to work or not work as they see fit and it’s not functioning. The country is in dire straits.
It is very, very important that no one knows we’re talking to Jackie because a US-style working draft would be big news. No point panicking everyone until we know what’s going to happen. Gillian, as home secretary, will decide whether to move it forward; I’ll plan for any disruption it might cause.
Jackie Stockett is a busy lady; we’ve done well to get an appointment with her. I suppose the office of the Indiana Working Draft isn’t the place for slackers.
“Hello!” Jackie says.
“It’s very kind of you to give us some of your time, Jackie.”
“Too damn right I’m kind. The Patron Saint of Indiana.” She laughs and I see how this woman was able to create the world’s first working draft quicker than I was able to sort out bloody electricians.
“Right, you’ve got an hour of this saint’s time so tell me, what can I do to help?”
“Tell us everything you know,” Gillian, sat to my right, says, taking our discussion about asking open-ended questions a bit too far.
“We might be here a while.” Jackie claps her hands together. “Okay, let’s start at the end. The goal’s important, right? Here in the States we have the Human Scarcity Index, which you might have heard of.”
Uh, yeah. You could say that. It’s only been in every newspaper and magazine around the world as a symbol of humanity’s talent for adaptation or the end of days, depending on what you read. “Indiana is third in the table out of fifty-two states, and we have a lot less going for us historically than California and Illinois, the only two states that got us beat. Human resourcing isn’t just finding people jobs anymore. It’s a question of life or death. If garbage is on the streets, and bodies are piling up in homes, and factories aren’t producing medicines and delivery trucks aren’t getting food from farms to stores, people are going to die. It’s as simple as that. Third place means my state is surviving.”
Gillian interrupts Jackie’s speech. “Did you see the Plague coming? I mean, how much lead time did you have to prepare?”
Jackie laughs, a lovely, rich sound. “No, silly, I’m good at my job, not a witch. But I did see that once the Plague was here, we were going to need to change the job market real fast. I started off in Parks and Recreation, or Possums and Raccoons as people used to call it.”
I stifle a laugh. Gillian gives me a look.
“Sorry,” I say, feeling sheepish.
“You laugh at any jokes I trot out whenever you feel like it. Point is, Parks was always having its budget squeezed so I had to look ahead a lot. Sometimes I had to just ask for more money, there’s a few Indiana congresswomen still around who would happily never see my face again. I had to plan. May through September we needed double the staff than we did the other seven months of the year, and I was doing everything on a shoestring. Then the Plague came and Jesus, it was bad. I was head of human resources for the City Council of Bloomington. The private sector was a whole other mess but at the very least, every branch of city hall needed to continue to function with over half of its workforce—poof!—gone.”
I think back to the early days of the Plague with a familiar shudder. Men dropping off everywhere: the police, the armed forces, in every government department, every part of the civil service. Sudden gaps where crucial work simply wasn’t, and sometimes still isn’t, being done.
Jackie’s expression has gone from one of enthusiasm to exhaustion; even recalling the panic and sheer grind of those weeks is tiring. “Indiana already had one of the worst gender pay gaps in the country and a shortage of skilled workers back when this whole damn mess began. We didn’t have a head start, put it that way. But we did have two things: me and Mary Ford. She was head of human resources in Indianapolis, and before that we worked together for ten years here in Bloomington. Mary should be here with me but she got nabbed by Nebraska.” Jackie nods as though her friend is there. “I’m just saying, it’s important you know. I didn’t do it alone.”
Gillian looks at me with an awed expression; it’s rare to see anyone sharing credit for anything in civil service. Jackie’s a good egg.
“Mary and I sat down and made a plan to resource our cities, our schools, our hospitals, our police departments, fire stations, oh God, the list was endless. The army had its own plan in place, although it took them long enough to get ahold of themselves.”
“How do you get people to keep working with sick relatives, or when grieving?” I ask. This is the issue we’re finding the most difficult. Can we really stomach requiring a woman whose husband or son or father or, God forbid, all three, are dying to work despite it?
“We have bereavement exceptions, but you still have to work at least two days a week. That’s just the way it is. No one was turning up to work and everything shut down. I mean I get it. One woman who worked with me in Parks, Angela, had five sons. Five! I can’t imagine what she was going through.”
“So you categorize workers and job types,” Gillian says.
“Yep. We divided jobs into five categories based on urgency, proportion of male employees and difficulty of skill replacement. A garbageman is the classic example we use: it’s a Level 1 job. Garbage needs to be cleared off the streets or you’ll have another public health crisis on your hands; almost every garbage truck in the city had been staffed by men and it took around three days of training, mainly safety related, for someone to do that job.”
I’ve never been so glad I wasn’t tempted to go into politics after I left Oxford. Selling this to the British population is going to be a nightmare, and worse, it’s completely necessary.
“I’m guessing categorization is easy. Assigning people is the hard part,” Gillian says, frowning down at the notes she’s written.
“And forcing people to do the jobs assigned to them,” I add.
“Have you tried getting widows with grieving children out of the house to clean trash off the streets? It’s not a walk in the park,” Jackie says. “You need to be politically united to get it done. Our governor died and his replacement—Kelly Enright—is the most capable woman I have ever met. If the four horsemen of the apocalypse had the nerve to show up at her door, she’d have a PowerPoint presentation and a five-step plan to get them the hell out of her state. We had a meeting with her back in March. She sat down and asked us to tell her everything we knew at that point about jobs, the people needed in them and how bad things were going to get. It was a seven-hour meeting. By the end of it, she had brought in four aides and two lawyers. They drafted the Indiana Working Draft Order that night and Kelly signed it the next morning.”
I’d read the newspaper articles. I knew it was quick, but knowing that the first working draft in the world was drafted in one night makes me feel nauseous. There’s no way our process will be that efficient. I can barely get photocopying toner replaced overnight.
“Did you have a lot of people threatening to leave the state?” Gillian asks. Thank God we’re an island. There’s nowhere to go and Scotland isn’t speaking to us.
“Oh yeah, we have an easy solution for that: if you leave the state to escape the draft, you’re not allowed back in.”
“I’m worried about the optics,” Gillian says. “I love everything you’ve told me, Jackie, truly. What you’ve done is extraordinary. I just. Jesus, it seems so extreme. We’ve never done anything like this in the history of the nation.”
My mind goes back to my history degree. I’m pretty sure being a feudal serf in 1307 working for no pay in a field twelve months a year was worse than being forced to retrain as a plumber and work a 9-to-5. Just a tad.
“Stick to the key messages. Don’t use words like ‘optimize’ or ‘efficiency.’ Keep it simple. This is life or death. All those jobs that seem small? They’re not. If the streets are clean, people don’t get sick. If people can get their heating fixed in November, they don’t end up in the hospital with pneumonia.”
I wish I could film Jackie and run clips of her talking on TV. She’s like the friendly, no-nonsense grandmother I never had. If she says jump, I’ll ask how high.
“Second, work means purpose. Even if you don’t want it, or don’t think you want it, it’s a reason to get up in the morning. Work gives you a future even if you can’t see one for yourself right now. Third, lots of jobs are gone. Sometimes people say to me, ‘Oh, but lots of those people surely already have jobs.’ Yes, they did before the Plague, but not after it. Nobody’s buying houses, so that’s real estate gone. Nobody’s opening a pension or investing in a frozen stock market, so that’s finance gone. People aren’t shopping, so retail’s been decimated; we specifically recruited female warehouse workers to be garbage truck operators and hospital operators. They’re used to early starts and physical work. It’s not communist or a betrayal of your country to make sure people work and society works. I say, if we could justify sending teenage boys over to Vietnam to kill and be killed, for no reason, we can justify forcing healthy, able people to work in a paid job that’s required by society.”
Gillian has been furiously scribbling down everything Jackie’s said for the past hour. She’ll be implementing a working draft within a few weeks.
“Can I ask a quick question?” I ask. “Are you and Mary still friends?”
“’Course we are! We had lunch every Wednesday at Bynum’s Steakhouse for a decade. Now we do a video call every week at the same time.”
The meeting ends with the usual good-byes, thank-yous and promises to follow up by e-mail. Gillian looks at me with a resolute expression. I hate it when politicians look at me like that. It always means I’m going to work a seventy-hour week for the next few months.
“Let’s get started,” she says.