The Dead Peasants

The Dead Peasants

“Somebody has to die, Charlie.”

 “For Christ’s sake, Nila, lower your voice! This is the cafeteria, Tasty Pullets’ headquarters no less. Somebody might hear you.”

“So we only discuss leghorn euthanasia?”

“You nuts? I didn’t spend twenty years as a corrections officer to end up some lifer’s playmate.”

“Charley, you’ve worked security here at The Pullet for what, two years? You like your job?”

“Not enough for murder,” he said. “Get real.”

Nila Orsbino’s tablemates shot worried glances at one another and squinted at her nametag. It seemed legit: Tasty Pullets, Nila Orsbino, Personnel Specialist. They compared her face with her picture. The real Nila, a thirty-year employee, usually dripped of corporate-cheerleader enthusiasm. The Cluck—Tasty Pullet’s rumor mill—claimed every time she opened her mouth, a cartoon caption opened above her head displaying Tasty Pullet’s mission statement. Some believed she had invented the chicken dance. She seemed real, but still . . .

“Listen, Nila, we just don’t get it.” Albert Hurst was soft-bodied with an eraser-pink face. He liked his life orderly, but Nila Orsbino was making entries in the wrong rows and columns, and Albert looked worried.

             “Folks,” said Nila, “the writing’s on the wall.” She found simple clichés her most persuasive personnel tool when soothing anxious employees. And this was Anxious Time. “Albert, do the math. Earnings are falling like stones—another three percent last month. The big boys can't make their boat payments. Somebody’s got to go.”

Albert grunted an inscrutable reply. Around the table, no one knew if it was agreement, acquiescence, or gas; only engineers were more inscrutable than accountants.

            “I’ll lay it out for you,” said Nila.

Albert nodded compliantly, his expression nonetheless sour. “By all means, continue.”

“Just like a chicken, boys,” she continued, “the Pullet needs to be fed.” She looked around the table. “The feed train ain’t keeping its weekly schedule.” Worry-lines darkened her tablemates’ faces. Real Nila had morphed into apocalypse Nila and ungrammatical Nila.

“So they’ll be hiring us out? Changing the company’s mission statement? Killer Pullets, Inc?” Everyone chuckled, including Tony Belton, the frog-like administrative clerk who last smiled in 1994 when a filing cabinet drawer fell on his supervisor’s foot.

“Different kind of contract, a COLI contract.” The three men responded with blank, uncomprehending looks.

“Eh?”

“Huh?”

“Border Collie?”

“It’s a personnel secret,” she said, lowering her voice to imply mystery and confidentiality. She spelled the letters, “C-O-L-I, Corporate Owned Life Insurance. Big companies do it all the time. The Pullet takes out a life insurance policy on you, even rank-and-file people. That’s why it’s called dead peasants’ insurance. You die, and the company gets the money. You might not even know about it.”

The men again cast concerned looks at one another but countered with humor.  Real men handle stress with adolescent comments.

“If I were dead, I wouldn’t know.”

“I’m worth more dead than alive.”

“Dead pheasants?”

Charley Sorens, more earnest because he carried-concealed, sobered first. “Nila, you're kidding, right?”

“No, Charlie, I’m not.” She twirled her straw around the rim of her drink cup with dismissive nonchalance. “State rules vary, but it happens all the time. Company writes off the premiums as a business expense. If you die, it gets the payment tax-free. Doesn’t even have to share with your beneficiaries.”

Tony puffed out his cheeks beyond their normal, frog-like dimensions, still counteracting stress. “Did anyone check this coffee?”

“Nila, that’s just not right.” Charlie’s closely cropped hair covered rigid ideas about right and wrong. “Damned unethical, I’d say.”

“Worse than that,” said Albert. “It’s sick,”

“Nila, you're saying I die so The Pullets’ big roosters can play golf at their country clubs and fly to meetings in the Bahamas.”

“I guess you could, Charlie. But it’s not all horrible. Some of that money helps the company stay in the black, offsets employee benefits.” Calling it their bottom line would support her plan.

Charlie said, “You mean if a couple of the right employees cross the rainbow bridge, maybe nobody gets laid off.”

“My contacts upstairs tell me our fiscal picture is grim.”

“Bottom line, Nila, you mean somebody needs to go?” said Al. A non-degreed accounting tech, Al worried constantly about being obsolete, a fireman on a train that no longer burned coal.

“Can’t we just get a body from a mortuary?”

Tony said, “Albert, just how would that help? Or are you volunteering to stop coming in? Give up your paycheck?”

“We have to volunteer somebody if we want to keep our jobs,” said Nila. “I don’t have clearance to know who is COLI-insured, but together, we can guess.”

Conceptually, Nila had won them over. Moral considerations suddenly paled. Possible euphemisms played in their minds: early retirement, permanent redundancy. It wouldn’t be murder, somebody just laid out instead of laid off. And for a good cause.

A flurry of potential names floated around the table but ultimately failed the vetting process. Certain positions were either too critical or the COLI payoffs were imagined too insignificant too boost The Pullets’ cash flow. Disagreement reigned. What was the coverage for a dead janitor? Who would empty the trash? How about a file clerk? None of them wanted the paper cuts. Apocalypse Nila had spawned a school of amoral bottom-feeders. Still, occasional pangs of conscience interfered with planning.

“How about Lester Schwandt in shipping?”

“Not her, he supports his mother.”

“Misha Bernhardt in Tech Eval?”

“No good. Five kids, two in college.”

“Zila whats-her-name in Customer Service?”

“You think they carry COLI on her?”

“I would have let her go years ago. She’s useless.”

“Not that useless. I heard she held several ‘positions’ for the lads upstairs.”

“Involved a trapeze, didn’t it?”

“Boys, boys. Stay on task.”

#  #  #

Over the next two weeks, Tasty Pullets’ cafeteria hosted more clandestine meetings. Societal mores faded from view. Charley seemed to have lost his fear of gang-rape in a prison shower. He knew rule one: don’t drop your soap. Albert shed moral concerns, savoring the feelings of acceptance in the group. Even Tony—usually ostracized for his compulsive need to file multiple paper copies in seven different categories—found solace. Keeping their jobs was key, and they’d do whatever was needed to accomplish that goal.

The mission was clear: identify viable COLI-covered employees. Nila mined personnel records for non-performers who wouldn’t be missed. Charlie sifted security documents for dirt on the amoral, depraved, or felonious. Like a trained scent-hound, Tony tore through administration, digging up splinters of information long thought lost. Finally, Albert, who had written himself off as a purposeless drone at the end of his working life, sorted through arcane spreadsheets, pre-millennium accounting files, and ancient record-dumps for hints of co-workers willing to die for the cause.

Nila’s Killer Pullets achieved dead peasant nirvana at the end of week three. “Three COLI-eligibles!” she announced, Victorious Nila had arrived: the commit-murder, save-a-job Nila. Life was good.

Ironically, their test case would be Emma Cafferty, a senior employee who worked in Risk Analysis. A straight-arrow with twenty-six years at The Pullet, she was the only child of deceased parents. If the records were correct, she lived alone and had no children. An introverted, low-profile personality, Cafferty’s riskiest behavior was annual participation in the company’s a cappella Christmas choir. With no living relatives, no one would complain when the company filed the COLI claim.

Three weeks later, Cafferty worked late, as she often did on Thursdays. She had told her colleagues; “There’s nothing on TV worth watching on Thursday nights.” Fatal outcomes sometime hang on small decisions.

Risk Analysis lay in darkness as she walked to the stairwell at the end of the hall. Because of a previous blackout that had left six Pullet employees stranded in an elevator, many of the late-night workers preferred to walk the four flights to the lobby. According to the Cluck, Emma often said, “My feet don’t need electricity.” A serious misstatement.

As she approached the stairwell, only the night janitor moved from office to office. She began to say goodnight but didn’t recognize the person and moved quickly toward the stairwell, which lead to the first set of twelve steps and the next landing. Just as she pushed against the door, the janitor called “Goodnight” in a cheerful voice, loud enough to cause her to look back. A polite, considerate woman, Emma turned to smile at the janitor just as she hit the stairwell door. In a different part of the building, another of the Killer Pullets switched off the breaker labeled Risk Analysis Zone 4.

Total darkness blanketed Emma Cafferty as she stepped through the stairwell door. In two steps she tripped over a tightly placed row of copy-paper boxes, heavy with the previous year’s Risk Analysis reports. In the brief instant the breaker switch was off, there was no time to stop her forward movement or cry out for help. Her body simply launched itself into an awkward dive, and she flew headfirst to the bottom of the stairwell, where she snapped her neck against the opposing concrete wall. In minutes, the unrecognized janitor removed the offending boxes, and returned his cart to the regular janitor’s closet. Risk Analysis had a position vacancy, and COLI money would soon feed Tasty Pullets, Inc.

#  #  #

The cafeteria buzzed with news of Emma Cafferty’s unfortunate accident. Around their regular table, the Killer Pullets feigned surprise and amazement at the tragic news.

“We did it,” said Nila, “We did it!” Visions of future paychecks and secure retirements blossomed in their collective minds. Nila said, “You know what we have to do next, we need to plan . . .”

A man’s voice interrupted. “Nila, we are so sad to hear about Emma. Did you know her well?” The speaker was Clyde Burtel, Tasty Pullets’ CFO or Chief Financial Officer.

“Oh, Mr. Burtel, no, not well. But we heard about it, and we’re so

distressed,” she said, gesturing to her tablemates. “Such a horrible accident, such a loss for Tasty Pullets.”

            “Without question. She was such a fine person. And for the company, she was extremely important. Not just anyone can replace her. She had unique skills.”

“Oh, I know,” Nila said, “and I understand she had degrees in finance and statistics.”

“That’s true.”

“But the company will be able to replace her with the COLI money and still help various benefits programs.” Nila made brief eye contact with her team. Job security was at hand.

 “Two years ago, yes,” Burtel agreed. “But no longer. We cashed out on almost all of the COLI policies. Now, we only carry COLI insurance on a half-dozen key executives.”

            “Oh, really,” said Nila. Her voice remained neutral but her eyes cast a look of worried concern her coup-mates. “You discontinued the program on mid-level employees then?”

            “Without question,” said Burtel. “The board decided it wasn’t ethical to exploit the rank and file staff. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Oh, you are so correct, Mr. Burtel, so correct indeed.”

Burtel moved off to talk with other employees in the cafeteria. Nila watched the CFO keenly, like a fox surveying a chicken.  Then she smiled at the Killer Pullets. Job security was again at hand.

The End

           

© Copyright Richard J. Schram 2016