Chapter 3

As soon as the livestream opened, hundreds of people flooded in.

Ethan pointed his phone camera at me.

“Guys, this is the heartless boss.”

“He took an order worth millions and wants us to work for free over May Day.”

“When we refused, he staged this whole act to scare us.”

Mike also leaned into the camera and put on a pitiful expression.

“Please judge fairly, everyone. Us working-class people have it so hard.”

Just then, a piercing truck horn suddenly sounded outside the factory.

Right after that, a heavy-duty truck backed straight into our factory gate.

Two forklifts, rumbling loudly, followed behind it.

Mr. Brooks from the factory next door jumped down from the passenger seat.

He was a fat man in his fifties, sweating all over, with a thick stack of documents clutched in his hand.

“Hey, man! I brought the truck to pick up the raw materials!”

“I looked over the German client’s drawings overnight, and there’s no problem at all.”

“I just spent three million last month to replace my imported CNC machines, and this order is perfect for their debut.”

The whole factory went dead silent in an instant.

The workers who had just been yelling so arrogantly all turned stiffly around.

They stared dumbly at the huge truck.

Mr. Brooks held the documents and strode up to me.

“I’ve already received the deposit for the processing fee.”

“Don’t worry, brother. I guarantee the goods will be delivered to you in perfect order on the first day after the holiday.”

“You guys, hurry up and load the raw materials from old Hill’s warehouse onto the truck!”

Mr. Brooks waved toward the door.

More than a dozen workers in the next factory’s uniforms rushed into our warehouse.

The forklifts skillfully lifted pallet after pallet of raw materials and moved them onto the truck.

Their movements were crisp and efficient, with no wasted motion.

The cigarette butt slipped from Mike’s hand and hit the floor, but he didn’t even notice when the sparks burned his foot.

His lips trembling, he rushed over to Mr. Brooks.

“Mr. Brooks, you really took our order?”

“Can your junk machines even do this work?”

Mr. Brooks shoved him aside, looking impatient.

“Who the hell are you?”

“My newly bought German-imported CNC machines are even more advanced than the equipment in your factory.”

“Old Hill was generous and gave me the whole forty-thousand budget. Why wouldn’t I kill myself to get this done?”

Mike’s mental defenses completely collapsed.

He dropped straight to the floor and sat there, clutching his head.

“So it really was outsourced...”

“My nearly fifteen hundred bucks in overtime pay is really gone...”

A female worker in the crowd suddenly burst into tears.

“Ethan! Didn’t you say the boss was acting?”

“You owe me money!”

“I was only working five days, and I was going to use that money to pay for a whole year of my kid’s tutoring!”

The fifty workers completely lost their minds, blaming and accusing one another, and the factory turned into a total mess.

Ethan held up the phone he was streaming with, his face turning green and white.

But he clenched his teeth and refused to admit he was wrong.

He spun around suddenly and glared at me viciously.

“Everyone calm down! Have some backbone!”

“So what if he outsourced the order?”

“We’re full-time employees. We signed labor contracts!”

He shoved the camera almost into my face.

“Boss, you think you win just because you dumped the order on someone else?”

“I’m telling you, labor law says that as long as we’re in the factory.”

“If you don’t assign us any work, you still have to pay us our base wages!”

Mike scrambled up from the floor like he had found a lifeline.

“Yeah, exactly!”

“We don’t want five times pay anymore, but you have to pay the four thousand a month base salary!”

“If you dare fire us, you’ll have to pay us N+1 severance!”

“Fifty people, that’s more than a million dollars!”

The more Ethan talked, the more confident he became. He shouted into the livestream.

“Everyone online is watching.”

“Boss Hill, you gave the profit to someone else. Let’s see what money you have left to support us.”

“We’ll just sit in the factory every day and play on our phones.”

“If you dare short us even one cent of wages, we’ll report you to the labor bureau until you go bankrupt.”