Four Men Who Refused to Stay Silent
He picked up and didn’t say hello.
“Mr. Burkholder, I’ve been trying to reach you since two o’clock. I didn’t have your number. I had to ask Eddie.”
“Jared.”
“That was my spot. I’d have been flat. I looked at the floor after, I saw where I’d been.”
“Listen to me. It wasn’t you who took down the chain.”
“I know who took it down,” he said. “I watched him. I thought, that’s not right, and I didn’t say anything, because I’m new. And then you got hurt and you got fired and I’m standing there.”
“Can you come to my kitchen tomorrow at seven?”
“Yes sir.” He didn’t hesitate. “I’ll bring something. My mom makes a cherry pie.”
“Trudy’s making coffee.”
“Then she can have the pie.”
Dale Linnell returned Trudy’s call at 8:10 Wednesday morning, and he gave me about nine minutes of the most useful advice I got in the whole business.
“Do three things today,” he said. “First, a letter to your plant manager and a copy to corporate, certified, return receipt, with the doctor’s note stapled to it. Illinois gives you forty-five days to give notice of an accident, and you’re not going to use any of them. Second, don’t sign anything from that company, not a severance, not an acknowledgment, nothing. Third, the men.”
“I’m doing the men.”
“Don’t write one statement and have four sign it. If four men use the same sentence a judge will smell it a mile off. Each of them writes alone, in his own hand, with the date, the time and where he was standing.”
“They’re coming to the house.”
“Fine. But you leave the room.”
I asked him about the firing. He was quiet a moment.
“A man who files a comp claim and gets fired the same afternoon is exactly what the retaliation section of the Act is for,” he said. “You’d have a case. But a case is eighteen months and a lot of your own money in the meantime. I’d rather the company figured out it was wrong before I had to prove it. Get me whatever those men write. And Galen, one more thing. Ask Eddie if the system keeps a record of who opens a lane.”
“What lane?”
“You told Trudy the foreman sent a truck down an aisle he’d closed. You don’t run a distribution center on a clipboard. Everything is a login somewhere.”
I didn’t know the answer, so I wrote it on the back of my hand.
Trudy drove to the post office on the square at 9:00. Kay at the window knew her, and knew what it was, and said nothing at all except, “Do you want the green card, hon?” The letter, with Dr. Sayers’s note, went certified to Bill Faber at the plant and to a name on Jodi’s letterhead in Peoria. Trudy kept the receipt in her purse.
They came at seven, one at a time, and they all came in the back door and stood on the mat with their caps in their hands.