Chapter 5 – The Board Meeting

Margaret requested, and received, an emergency board meeting within the week, her shareholder status giving her standing the other terminated employees had lacked entirely.

“I’m not here to reverse my own termination out of self-interest,” she told the assembled board, most of whom she recognized only vaguely from decades of distant family connections rather than any real working relationship. “I’m here because a mass termination, conducted via group text with no advance notice, no individual conversations, and no consideration of severance beyond a generic email, reflects poorly on a company I have both a financial and personal stake in seeing run properly.”

The board, once presented with the details of the termination process — details Margaret had documented meticulously in the days following her own dismissal — expressed genuine discomfort with the reputational and potential legal exposure the handling represented, particularly given emerging concerns about whether the terminations had adequately followed the notice requirements of applicable labor law.

“I’d like to propose a revised severance framework,” Margaret said, “one that reflects actual years of service rather than a flat, minimal package designed primarily to minimize short-term cost. I’d also like to propose that Owen’s authority to execute headcount reductions without board consultation be formally revisited.”

The board, weighing Margaret’s substantial ownership stake against Owen’s increasingly evident management failures, ultimately agreed to both proposals, over Owen’s visible but largely unsuccessful objections.

The revised severance package, once implemented, tripled the original offer for all forty affected employees, funded partly through cost savings the board identified elsewhere in the company’s executive compensation structure.