Golden Coast Clerks Call First Strike; Margrave Rolls for Initiative

The clerks are walking out.

Lodge 1000 of the Servitors' Guild-Union speaks for nearly 100,000 state workers in 140 departments of the Golden Coast. This week more than nine in ten of the members who voted said yes to a one-day strike on October 21. Pickets go up in Sacramantle, Oakenland, Lost Angels and anywhere else a clerk has been pushed too far. It's the first statewide strike in the lodge's 44 years. Back in 2016 an old Margrave signed a deal at the eleventh bell and the picks went back on the wall. Nobody's signing anything this time.

Here's what they want. A raise. Healer's coverage a clerk can afford. The right to keep working from the hearth. Here's what they got from Margrave Gavin Newsoom of the Golden Coast: an order to be back at the office four days a week, and the 1% raise he promised them for 2025, held back "for budget reasons." Then a veto on the bill that would have loosened the hearth rules. And in September, a flat no to the union's whole proposal, with no counteroffer attached.

"We definitely don't take the decision lightly," said Steward Annika Wallbreaker, the lodge president. "We know that this is a sacrifice." Wallbreaker says that if the Margrave drags everyone back to the office, the least he owes them is 4%. The commute costs coin. Stabling fees. Oats. A new horseshoe every other month. Make a clerk pay more to do the same work and you've cut their pay. Call it anything you like.

The Golden Coast Office of Hirelings & Rosters says it "remains ready to sit down anytime with the union to negotiate a fair and responsible agreement." That means they'll sit down. It doesn't mean they'll say yes. They sat down in September too, and they brought nothing.

"I clear four hundred wagon licenses a day from my kitchen table," said Hulda Grimsbane, a permit scribe at the Bureau of Mounts & Wagons for twenty-two years. "At the office I clear two hundred. There's a goat in the lobby. Nobody knows whose goat."

Tobble Ashcairn files claims at an Oakenland unemployment counter. "My whole job is helping folk who lost their work," he said. "Now I'm paying to stable a pony so I can do it in a room with worse chairs."

Mind the numbers. The Golden Coast's general coffers have grown by 20 billion gp in two years. The lodge says its whole payroll comes to less than 3% of the budget. Somebody found coin for something. It wasn't the clerks.

Expect long lines at the Mounts Bureau on the 21st, and at the unemployment and disability counters. I've been told that's the clerks' fault. Lines at the Mounts Bureau were long before anybody struck. Ask anyone who's tried to register a wagon.

Sterling Vanmoor will tell you two pages over that working from the hearth is "a productivity dungeon." Sterling has never filed a form in his life. Somebody files them for him, probably from home.

Solidarity. And stretch your back. — Brakka