The Locomotive Works

About

For nine months in 1997, the Radan Locomotive Works is the Republic of Orsava in miniature: 6,400 names on a payroll four months late, a foundry that heats half a city, and a state preparing to sell both for less than the machinery would fetch under cutting torches. Chief technologist Irina Vask must write Schedule T-7, the technical annexe that says what the works can actually do. Four bidders can promise anything. Her tables decide which promises are legally possible. Each employee receives twelve thousand privatisation coupons. Outside Gate Three, brokers buy a complete book for eight hundred asters — one average month's wage, cash today — from people already owed four. Director Anton Verek is quietly concentrating the books in an employee trust that promises 4,800 jobs and a hot foundry on credit no bank has approved. Shop steward Daro Meln has organised a forty-eight-hour strike during the acceptance test for the last export order on Radan's books. If the stoppage lands as announced, Volska State Rail may cancel thirty locomotives worth 144 million asters and demand back an advance the works has spent. The four bids offer four different survivals. Karsin Heavy Industries can make locomotives but will close the foundry. Volska can preserve 3,200 jobs if its order and hard-currency approval survive. Anton's employee trust would keep the plant whole if working capital appears. Northstar wants the river land, paint hall and 820 final-assembly workers, and its due-diligence lead Sabine Krall says so when asked. It is also the only bidder to put severance money in escrow. The Locomotive Works is an adult industrial drama about voucher privatisation, labour power and the violence hidden inside definitions. Choices alter production viability, wage arrears, workforce trust, the heat in a furnace and how much truth survives in the annexe. Five endings distinguish the life of a plant from the lives of the people who built it.

Cast

• Irina Vask protagonist; chief technologist of Radan Locomotive Works
• Anton Verek works director; promoter and concealed controller of the employee trust
• Lenka Sorel Ministry of State Assets privatisation commissioner
• Daro Meln shop steward for Metalworkers' Union Local 14
• Sabine Krall Northstar Transit and Land Consortium due-diligence lead
• Olek Bran foundry master responsible for No. 2 furnace and the district-heat load
• Tomas Rul H-14 horizontal-borer operator and keeper of its compensation table