The Cotton-Pickers (13 page)

This put Doux quite off his stride. His voice, which he had wanted to sound firm and resolute, faltered timidly as he said: “Good day. I am Señor Doux of the Café Aurora.”

“Right,” said the Secretary. “Sit down. And what do you want?”

“I’d like to know if you can arrange for my café to be reopened.”

“Yes, that can be arranged,” the Secretary replied, “provided you fulfill certain conditions.”

“Oh, I’m ready to agree to everything that the waiters are demanding.”

The Secretary took up a sheet of paper, glanced at it, and said: “The waiters’ demands are no longer the same as those put forward when they first spoke with you.”

“Not the same?” gulped Doux, frightened.

“No, it’s fifteen pesos a week now,” said the Secretary in the manner of a businessman.

“But they were asking twelve.”

“That may be. But then they went on strike. You don’t suppose the men are going to strike for nothing, do you? Now it’s fifteen. If you’d agreed at once it’d have been twelve.”

“All right,” said Doux, straightening up, “I agree to fifteen.”

“Friday is pay day, for the whole week. Irregular or postponed pay days can no longer be permitted,” continued the Secretary.

“But I can’t pay just like that. It has been our practice to pay when we had available cash.”

The Secretary looked up. “What always has been your practice is neither here nor there. We are deciding what you must do from now on. We are at last putting a stop to abuses that have gone on here for hundreds of years. There is the work, here are the wages. And you must pay the wages just as punctually as you expect the men to do their work.”

“But that’s going to be difficult,” said Doux, defensively, “because if I pay out the wages like that I might find myself without sufficient cash to do the buying on Saturday.”

“That’s nothing to do with us. Wages must come first, or the workers will find themselves without sufficient cash to do their buying. And, in our view, it’s better for you to be short of cash than the workers.”

Doux was breathing heavily. “But the work week doesn’t end until Saturday. Why should I pay the wages on Friday?”

“Why? Why? You mean you don’t understand?” The Secretary affected surprise. “The worker gives you five days’ credit. He gives you his output for five whole days while you do business with the capital of his labor. Why should the worker be called upon to lend you his five days’ output? Actually, you should pay for the whole week in advance, on

Monday morning; that would be the proper thing to do. But we don’t want to go that far.”

“All right, then, I’ll agree to that, too. And to one full meal and rolls and coffee at another hour. So then, everything’s in order?” Doux got up.

“Sit down for a moment,” invited the Secretary. “There are still one or two minor points to settle. You must pay for the strike days.”

“Me? Pay for the strike days? Am I to pay for idleness too?”

“Striking is not idling,” said the Secretary firmly, “and if your men go on strike, you must pay their full wages. Otherwise, all you hotel and café proprietors could force us into a long strike and so whittle away our funds that we could never strike again. Oh, no, Señor, we’re not having anything like that. The strike is financed by us. We act as a kind of loan office for the workers, but you are the one who must pay for the strike. You had ample time to make up your mind whether or not to let it come to a strike. The cost of war must be borne by the party who needs peace in order to get on with his business.”

“This is the greatest injustice I’ve ever met,” exclaimed Doux.

“Well, if you like, I’ll enumerate the injustices that you and your kind have been perpetrating for years.”

“Obviously, I have no alternative but to pay for it all,” Doux admitted, dejectedly.

“And preferably today,” declared the Secretary, “for tomorrow it will cost you another day.”

“Then I’ll come back here before five o’clock and settle the whole business,” said Doux, and he got up for the second time.

“Bring a little extra with you,” the Secretary advised as he also got to his feet.

“Still more?” exclaimed Doux.

“Yes, I thought you wanted the café reopened now, not in two months’ time.”

“Isn’t that part of the bargain, if I agree to everything?” Doux was getting jumpy.

“By no means,” answered the Secretary. “The closing of the café was for reasons apart from the waiters’ strike. You know that as well as I do. You asked Inspector Lamas to give the pickets a beating.”

“I certainly did not!” insisted Doux.

“Obviously we don’t agree on that. In any case, it happened on your premises and so you must be held responsible for it. You might easily have prevented it.”

“Come on, then, tell me what else I’ve got to do,” urged Doux.

“You must pay ten thousand pesos into the funds of our union as compensation. As soon as you’ve paid it, we shall take over the guarantee to the Governor on your behalf. And then the café can be reopened.”

“Am I expected to pay ten thousand pesos?” Doux dropped into the chair again, breaking out in a cold sweat.

“You need not pay it; we’re not forcing you. But then the café will stay closed for two months,” the Secretary continued matter-of-factly. “And of course at the end of the two months you would have to pay the waiters retroactively. They must live. And we can’t allow them to take on any other work, since they must be ready to go to work for you as soon as you reopen your café. It would be too bad if you had no waiters on your reopening day.

“To make the situation clear to you, once and for all: It isn’t our intention to destroy business or even interfere with it, certainly not. It is, however, our intention and purpose to see to it that the worker gets not only a fair share of what he produces, but the share which is due him up to the maximum that the business can afford. And this maximum is much higher than you imagine. At present we’re conducting a thorough inquiry into the capacity of every branch of industry, and those branches which can’t bring a decent living wage to the worker must go to the wall. And we’ll see to it that they do. If such industries are important to the community, then we’ll see to it that the community guarantees the worker a decent living standard. For example, I wouldn’t swear to it that your café is indispensable to the community; but it’s there. And as long as you operate it to increase your own fortune, it must bring in enough to pay decent wages to the workers there. If the time comes when you can’t make a profit from it, you’ll close it down of your own accord.

“Well, Señor Doux, I’ve told you all this so that you won’t think we’re just a bunch of blackmailers. No, all we want is that the men who are making a fortune for you receive the share to which they’re entitled; and there’ll still be enough left over for you.”

Doux had only half understood what the Secretary was saying. He sat there, dazed. His head swam with the thought of laying out ten thousand pesos. He didn’t dare say yes for fear of his Señora, for he didn’t know what she’d prefer to do. Every day’s delay cost money. Yet, it would cost him more than the ten thousand pesos if the business had to remain closed for two months, with back pay on top of that. He kept juggling the figures in his head until he thought he’d go mad.

At last he got up. “I’ll think it over,” he said.

He left the office, went down the stairs, and stepped out into the street. He wiped the sweat from his face and gasped for air. Then he started walking home. The walk cooled him down, so that he calmly began to consider the matter. He sat on a park bench to make various calculations on a piece of paper and eventually reached the conclusion that it would be cheaper to pay up everything at once. But what about Señora Doux? If he went home first, there would be a scrap. If he said yes outright, she’d say, “Why don’t you say no?” And if he said no, she’d say, “Why don’t you say yes?”

Whatever he did would be wrong, for it would cost money, and a great deal of money; and anything that cost money and didn’t bring in double always caused a row with the Señora. At last, however, Doux was seized by a proud and manly courage which urged him, for once, to enforce his own independent will without consulting his wife. And he thought that he could best do this by shouldering the decision that was most likely to throw her into a rage: to go to the bank, draw out all the necessary money, and, without a word to his wife, go to the union office and settle everything without further ado.

Half an hour later he had paid up every peso that was demanded.

“You may reopen your café at seven this evening,” said the Secretary. “I’ll see to it that the revocation order is in your hands by that time.”

Doux folded the receipts, each one duly affixed with the legal stamps. “Señor Secretary, there’s one small point I’d like to make.”

“Well?”

“Must I really pay the wages for the whole week on Fridays?”

“You had better, Señor Doux.”

“What happens then if a man is paid on Friday and doesn’t show up on Saturday? He’d have rooked me out of a whole day’s pay.”

“My, my,” said the Secretary, smiling, “but you’re good at figures. I’d never have expected it of you. You’ve held back the men’s wages for as much as six weeks, not one day, remember, but six weeks.”

“But the men always got their wages in the long run. They knew they were safe, anyhow,” and Doux puffed out his chest.

“Whether you’re as solid as all that is still very much open to question. You could sell out secretly and make off with the wages due; some employers have done that. But that probably wouldn’t happen in your case. What has happened is that you’ve always held onto the wages for a few weeks and made use of money that belonged to the waiters without paying them any interest. Why should the workers be expected to lend you their wages free of charge? This must stop. You can count yourself very lucky that we haven’t required the whole week’s wages to be paid on Wednesdays, so that the risk would be equally divided. We’ll leave it at Friday. If you treat the men decently, none of them will run off with that one day’s pay. But if a worker should do it once in a while it won’t ruin you. Well, that answers your question. You’d better run along now, so that you can be ready for your customers at seven o’clock.”

Doux left the office and made his way home.

14

“That’s quite sensible, what you’ve done,” said Señora Doux, to Doux’s complete surprise. “But if things had been done my way in the first place, we could have saved ourselves all this trouble.”

“Your way?” asked Señor Doux. “Everything was always done your way. It was you who were always telling me to fire the waiters, that waiters were two for a penny, anyway.”

“Well, that was true, wasn’t it? They were falling over themselves to get work, then. I never thought there’d come a day when all we could get would be two tramps. That was where my calculations went wrong. Don’t worry, we’ll soon recover the money. The bakery and pastry shop will have to make up for it. They’re a better lot of workers than the waiters; at least they’re not bolshies.”

So there it was. We in the bakery and pastry shop had to make good the loss. Now Doux invested in publicity. Ads in newspapers and movie houses declared the excellence of his bread, his cakes, and his pastries.

The result of this was that we now had to start work at ten every night, Saturdays at nine, and work through until four, sometimes five o’clock the next afternoon. That became a new rule. If anyone didn’t like it, he left; and Doux would then declare that no one had applied for the job, and that the rest of us would have to take over the man’s work for the time being. Sometimes it happened that two men quit on the same day, and then there was the work of two men to make up for.

Doux would put off replacing the missing workers as long as possible so as to save the wages. We knew this because we sent men to him and he told them there was no vacancy. This went on until we simply left orders unfilled. When it was a case of an order for a birthday cake or some other food for a special occasion, it went badly for Señora Doux. Of course the Señor would make himself scarce and she would have to fight it out with the customer. At last this got to be too much for her, so she herself would hire one or two new men, always the cheapest she could get, men who knew nothing about the trade and hadn’t the intelligence to pick it up quickly.

The master baker had daily arguments with Doux over supplies. One day the sugar supply was very low. The master went to Doux and told him that we needed two hundred kilos of sugar.

“All right, all right,” said Doux, “I’ll order some right away.”

But he put off ordering it, just to keep the money in his pocket a few days longer. The moment came when we had no sugar at all, and we were having rows with the waiters who came into the bakehouse to take the last scrapings from the barrel for the café, where every sugar bowl was empty. Then Doux rushed off in a frenzy to get the sugar in as quickly as he could, while we in the bakehouse had to stand about and wait, as we couldn’t bake without sugar; worse, we couldn’t clean up and go to bed, for the baked goods had to be finished.

It was the same with the eggs. Five hundred cases were ordered one week, and they were delivered. Then, when we were working on the last fifty cases, the master told Doux that it was time to order more eggs.

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” asked Doux.

“Yes, it can wait until tomorrow, but not a moment longer.” “That’s all right, then,” said Doux, mightily pleased that he could put it off for one day.

Next morning the master had to run to him again. “It’s getting urgent. By day after tomorrow we’ll be all out of eggs.”

This time Doux didn’t ask if it could wait until the next day; but he put it off, on his own responsibility. And so the moment came when we were all standing about, just waiting for eggs.

And it was the same story with the ice. The ice cream had to be ready by two o’clock. We might have the mixture ready in good time, but the ice wouldn’t be on hand because Doux had ordered it too late. It would arrive at three or four, when it should have arrived at one o’clock, and so we would have to stand around two or three hours, unable to knock off work until the ice cream was ready for the café.