Free Ms. Got Rocks by Jacqueline Colt

her shop steward to report this. Her shop union rep told her he had not heard of such a thing and would get back to her.
    The next morning her newly hired payroll clerk sister was terminated and escorted by two security guards off the Unistat property.
    Soon the women working at Unistat knew what had happened. Not only was the sister asking questions, but each woman employee was asking questions. Not just asking questions of the shop steward, but of the company supervisors.
    Each day the answers became increasingly vague and sometimes non-existent. The women met together one evening in small groups or by cell phone, they planned a work slowdown, even though they acknowledged it was an illegal action unless sanctioned by their union.
    They slowed down the next day and the following day. By Friday, any woman involved in any sort of discussion of the matter or who had asked questions was terminated. They went directly to the union hall, which was closed for the day. It was also closed each day the following week.
    A group of women contacted the state labor agency and the national office of their union, and took a number for service.
    After three weeks, the former employees still had not received a response from their union nor the company.
    In the meanwhile, the women planned to peacefully picket the factory in the morning. They wanted to make it easy for the media to get the video on the noon news. The organizing committee had done a crackerjack job contacting each newspaper and TV station within a one hundred mile radius of the factory.
    That was how Rocky found herself on the bright summer morning in Sacramento. She stood under the apricot trees on the edge of a large crowd of media trucks, cables, and microwave dishes. The media group was surrounding a smaller crowd of women carrying signs.

Chapter 8
     
    The previous day, at the same time as Rocky was driving home to Whiskey Gap, another group was meeting. This meeting was held in a vacant retail space in a strip mall across Sacramento from the Unistat factory.
    A group of glum looking non-descript men sat on metal folding chairs in the stuffy, tobacco smoke laden room. The six men had been sitting for an hour. They were waiting for the man with the job instructions. They are assigned to the Unistat labor action. These half dozen men did not work for Unistat or the Union. They did not know each other, nor did they feel any loyalty to the man who hired them. They would follow instructions from the Boston Cochetti family, get paid and then blend into wherever it was that they had appeared from.
    There was only one handsome man in the group of hardened for hire men. His name was Callaghan and he was not what he seemed.
    *   *   *
    For fifteen minutes, the women paraded around the perimeter of the parking lot, waving their hand-printed signs and chanting slogans.
    Several men wearing tailor fitted suits appeared in the second story windows of the building. The men using bullhorns called down to the crowd and asked them to leave the property.
    The voices of the women began sounding increasingly shrill as they became louder to be heard over the men in the windows.
    Rocky was still on the fringes of the media, calmly taking photos that came within what Terry assigned.
    Shortly, the men in the windows stopped asking the women to leave. They began telling them that the parking lot was private property and the women would leave.
    Rocky was feeling the hair on the back of her neck rise. Something in the situation was not right.
    The men at the windows shouted a repeat of their demand that the group of women leave immediately, but this time they added a phrase.
    They added, “Leave before someone gets hurt."
    When Rocky heard that phrase she immediately moved forward away from the TV cameras and simultaneously speed dialed the newspaper’s phone number.
    In her right hand Rocky had the camera with her finger on the button, taking shots as fast as the camera could