The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

The Monday of that week, Mr. Kessler called me up to the front office.

Kessler was the plant manager. He was not a bad man and I am not going to make him one. He had come up from the floor of a cabinet shop in Wausau thirty years back, and he still walked the lines every morning with a coffee in his hand and knew whose wife was expecting. But the plant had been sold two years before to an outfit out of state, and since then he had a man on the phone every Thursday who had never smelled sawdust and who wanted to talk about labor as a percentage.

“They want one off every shift by year end,” Kessler said. “I fought it. I lost. Second shift gave me theirs this morning.”

“One what?”

“One man, Rob. One name. By Friday.”

“We’re not slow. We’re booked into February.”

“I know what we’re booked into.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s not about the orders. It’s about a number on a page that has to be smaller on December thirty-first than it is today. I don’t like it any better than you do.”

“So how do I pick?”

“That’s the foreman’s job. Use the production count. It’s clean, nobody can argue with it.” He looked at me then. “And Rob, I need it from you. If the shift foremen can’t make this call, the next thing that man on the phone is going to ask me is what I need shift foremen for.”

We were not a union shop. There was no seniority list to hide behind. If there had been, Earl would have been the last man out the door instead of the first. It was a layoff by the numbers, the personnel office said, lowest count goes, and that was all the law asked of a plant like ours.

I took the count sheets out to the garage and sat on an overturned bucket with them. Eleven hands on first shift. I went down the list the way I suppose every man in that spot has gone down it.

Jeff had three kids and a baby coming. Kim on the wrap station was raising a grandson by herself. The two young fellows on the machining end rented half a duplex together and would have been all right, but they were the fastest hands I had and both of them could run the router, which nobody else could.

And there was Earl. Slowest count on the sheet. Sixty-seven years old. House paid for, as far as I knew. Wife gone. A man who had never in six years come to my office to complain about one thing.

I told myself he was probably ready to go anyhow. That was a lie, because I knew about August.

The plant’s pension was the old kind, from before the sale. The new owners had closed it to anybody hired after they came, but the men already in it stayed in it. It paid its full benefit at thirty years of service. A man let go short of thirty kept what he had vested, nobody could take that from him, but the formula cut the monthly check, and it cut it for life.