“How do you get people to keep working with sick relatives, or when grieving?” I ask. This is the issue we’re finding the most difficult. Can we really stomach requiring a woman whose husband or son or father or, God forbid, all three, are dying to work despite it?
“We have bereavement exceptions, but you still have to work at least two days a week. That’s just the way it is. No one was turning up to work and everything shut down. I mean I get it. One woman who worked with me in Parks, Angela, had five sons. Five! I can’t imagine what she was going through.”
“So you categorize workers and job types,” Gillian says.
“Yep. We divided jobs into five categories based on urgency, proportion of male employees and difficulty of skill replacement. A garbageman is the classic example we use: it’s a Level 1 job. Garbage needs to be cleared off the streets or you’ll have another public health crisis on your hands; almost every garbage truck in the city had been staffed by men and it took around three days of training, mainly safety related, for someone to do that job.”
I’ve never been so glad I wasn’t tempted to go into politics after I left Oxford. Selling this to the British population is going to be a nightmare, and worse, it’s completely necessary.
“I’m guessing categorization is easy. Assigning people is the hard part,” Gillian says, frowning down at the notes she’s written.
“And forcing people to do the jobs assigned to them,” I add.
“Have you tried getting widows with grieving children out of the house to clean trash off the streets? It’s not a walk in the park,” Jackie says. “You need to be politically united to get it done. Our governor died and his replacement—Kelly Enright—is the most capable woman I have ever met. If the four horsemen of the apocalypse had the nerve to show up at her door, she’d have a PowerPoint presentation and a five-step plan to get them the hell out of her state. We had a meeting with her back in March. She sat down and asked us to tell her everything we knew at that point about jobs, the people needed in them and how bad things were going to get. It was a seven-hour meeting. By the end of it, she had brought in four aides and two lawyers. They drafted the Indiana Working Draft Order that night and Kelly signed it the next morning.”
I’d read the newspaper articles. I knew it was quick, but knowing that the first working draft in the world was drafted in one night makes me feel nauseous. There’s no way our process will be that efficient. I can barely get photocopying toner replaced overnight.
“Did you have a lot of people threatening to leave the state?” Gillian asks. Thank God we’re an island. There’s nowhere to go and Scotland isn’t speaking to us.
“Oh yeah, we have an easy solution for that: if you leave the state to escape the draft, you’re not allowed back in.”
“I’m worried about the optics,” Gillian says. “I love everything you’ve told me, Jackie, truly. What you’ve done is extraordinary. I just. Jesus, it seems so extreme. We’ve never done anything like this in the history of the nation.”
My mind goes back to my history degree. I’m pretty sure being a feudal serf in 1307 working for no pay in a field twelve months a year was worse than being forced to retrain as a plumber and work a 9-to-5. Just a tad.
“Stick to the key messages. Don’t use words like ‘optimize’ or ‘efficiency.’ Keep it simple. This is life or death. All those jobs that seem small? They’re not. If the streets are clean, people don’t get sick. If people can get their heating fixed in November, they don’t end up in the hospital with pneumonia.”
I wish I could film Jackie and run clips of her talking on TV. She’s like the friendly, no-nonsense grandmother I never had. If she says jump, I’ll ask how high.
“Second, work means purpose. Even if you don’t want it, or don’t think you want it, it’s a reason to get up in the morning. Work gives you a future even if you can’t see one for yourself right now. Third, lots of jobs are gone. Sometimes people say to me, ‘Oh, but lots of those people surely already have jobs.’ Yes, they did before the Plague, but not after it. Nobody’s buying houses, so that’s real estate gone. Nobody’s opening a pension or investing in a frozen stock market, so that’s finance gone. People aren’t shopping, so retail’s been decimated; we specifically recruited female warehouse workers to be garbage truck operators and hospital operators. They’re used to early starts and physical work. It’s not communist or a betrayal of your country to make sure people work and society works. I say, if we could justify sending teenage boys over to Vietnam to kill and be killed, for no reason, we can justify forcing healthy, able people to work in a paid job that’s required by society.”