The dock workers joined on a Forgeday, which was the wrong day for a labour action because Forgeday was the second day of the seven-day week and a strike that started on Forgeday had four more working days to endure before Ordinsday's rest, and endurance was the resource that strikers had the least of.
Rix knew this because she'd done the math.
The private math. The numbers she hadn't presented to the Builder's Covenant negotiating committee — the wage tables and output charts and the carefully documented hours-per-shift analysis that proved the forge workers' case in language the institutional bureaucracy was designed to process were the public version. This was different. The math of how many families could survive without pay, how many days the guild solidarity fund would cover before the contributions ran dry, and how many workers would cross the line when hunger outweighed principle.
