UNION BLUES.(job loss narrative)

Ad Nauseam, by Donald Antrim

Chased Away, by Akhil Sharma

All Washed Up, by Antonya Nelson

Cloudburst, by Peter Trachtenberg

In 1979, I went to work for the London Sunday Times. I had come from the New Statesman--small, fraternal, left-wing. The Sunday Times was large, internally competitive, and politically centrist. But since my job on the literary pages was the same--deputy in a department of two--I didn't expect much to change. This was naive. The Statesman had been liberal to the point of impracticality: it once appointed a messenger who turned out to be agoraphobic, and staff spent many head-shaking weeks wondering why the internal mail was efficiently delivered but the external stuff didn't seem to be getting through. The Sunday Times, on the other hand, was soon to be bought by Rupert Murdoch.

For a short while, things were quiet. Then, one day, I was sitting at my desk, looking out of the window at our sister paper, the daily Times: a blockish modern building with departments layered on top of one another. I noticed that one of these layers seemed strangely deserted. The potted plants still lined the windowsills, but no activity was going on in their shade. One entire department--telemarketing or something--had been Murdoched. Over the next few weeks, the plants wilted until new appointees arrived and threw them out.

Before long, it was our turn. As a by-product of a labor dispute with the printers, everyone else at the paper--all fourteen hundred of us--was informed that we were suspended. News International no longer recognized our contracts of employment. The journalists inquired upward, and were told not to worry our little heads. You'll be fine, they said, just carry on working as usual; in a while we'll issue new contracts on the same terms as the old ones. Then why this sacking? What was the point? Well, it was just that management wanted to sort out some other layer of hapless plant-coddlers, and from a legal point of view it was convenient to fire everyone, while not necessarily meaning it.