On the Official Roster, Mari's Day Was Eight Hours

In the official shift roster, Mari's day was eight hours long. The knotted cord she pulled from her apron pocket had sixteen knots tied into it. The first eight were laundry and the dining hall. The other eight carried no names: waking the children, changing the sick ward's water, drying wet boots, covering someone else's shift.

On the morning of the twenty first day, Serena wrote on the public board that she intended to investigate working hours.

The first draft was simple. Official shift start and end, extra call outs, type of work, wages, rest. It was the same method she had used to recover the missing names over the past twenty days.

Mari read the draft and laughed.

"Count it this way and you'll only get half again."

"Which column is missing?"

"The work nobody calls work."

Mari untied the cord beside the laundry room door. White knots meant official shifts. Black knots meant extra call outs. The small colorless knots were work nobody assigned, but which the next shift couldn't start without.

Waking Mara at dawn and feeding her breakfast. Changing the water pitcher for the old man in the ward and turning his damp bedsheets. Pulling the night shift's boots off the hearth. Explaining porridge thickness again when the new cook cried. Watching a neighbor's child for two hours.

Serena tried to fold all of it into a single caregiving column, then stopped her pen.

"We'll note separately who was cared for and why it fell outside the official shift."

"The time spent recording it is also work." Mari said.

"I'll count it as paid survey time."

"Who records it?"

"Whoever wants to, either directly, or through a recorder if spoken aloud, or submitted anonymously."

"If the representative speaks for everyone, only my words end up on the page again."

Mari refused to fold the group of workers into a single voice, her own. She proposed letting each of them write their own timesheet: Rin from laundry, Jina from the kitchen, Ilma from the ward, Sana who checked outdoor temperatures, and even the sister of the guild apprentice who watched the children.

Serena set up three ways to submit. A table with names written on it. A box where only the number of knots went in, no names attached. A session where someone spoke in front of two recorders and had it read back to confirm. Recording time itself was paid at one hour's wage.

Under the survey board she also added a column for refusal. The right not to name family members or illnesses. The right not to classify a given task as something done "out of love." The right to choose wage demands and rest demands separately. Two worker verifiers signed to confirm that anyone who didn't submit would face no penalty in the next shift.

When Serena started to write Mari's name first as a verifier, Mari stopped her hand.

"The first shift should be Jina and Rin. If the representative keeps sitting in, whatever people can't say in front of me falls out again."

Serena didn't erase the name, she drew a correction line through it and noted the reason. The first verifiers were Jina and Rin, and the next shift rotated to Sana and Yoren.

Doran came to look at the survey board. He read through the types of work, then scratched the wooden frame twice with his fingernail.

"The guild already counts time spent holding tools and moving to the site."

Mari asked.

"And the time of whoever feeds the apprentices and changes their wet socks?"

"That's not guild work."

"Even though the apprentices can't get to the site if that person doesn't do it?"

Doran's face hardened.

"If we put all the household work into guild wages, the estimate doubles."

"It's already double. You've just been paying half."

Doran looked at Serena.

"Is the auditor going to turn all of this into domain wages?"

Serena didn't answer right away. Promising payment before the survey was even done could push people to write down only the hours they thought they'd be paid for, instead of the hours they actually worked.

"First we confirm the quantity and who bears it. Then we negotiate whether it goes through wages, public services, or household division."

"So you could survey it all and end with no money."

"That's why I'll publish the budget ceiling and negotiation date before the survey closes."

Mari said.

"The ceiling can't be used to erase hours."

"Every hour gets recorded. Whatever can't be paid back stays on record as debt."

Doran looked at the blank line under "site travel" on the survey board.

"Guild men clean their tools at home before they come to the workshop. There are hours missing for the men too."

"Put them in." Serena said.

"But tool cleaning and who fed people and dried their clothes go on separate lines." Mari said.

Doran started to bundle the guild roster together to submit it, then stopped. It was the same hand that had torn up the bundled ballot back in the chapter 18 vote.

"Let each man submit for himself. Apprentices who can't read should be able to choose an outside recorder, not just the guild clerk."

That choice made it harder for only the hours favorable to the guildmaster to survive on the record.

The survey began at lunch.

Jina came first. Her official kitchen shift was six hours. Outside the shift there was one hour checking the dawn embers, half an hour cooling soup for the ward, two hours teaching a substitute the right porridge thickness, and two hours going home to make dinner for her younger sibling.

Serena asked.

"Do you want the time you spent making your sibling's meal at home recorded as domain labor?"

Jina thought for a long moment.

"I'm not asking to be paid for all of it. But when you're calculating whether I can take an early shift the next day, don't treat that time as if it didn't exist."

On her table, "wage demand" and "grounds for rest or scheduling limits" went into separate columns.

Rin's official laundry shift was seven hours. Outside the shift there was one hour watching the pot fire that Mari couldn't leave, one hour remaking the bedding tag in Noah's room, and half an hour checking the knots in the evidence cloth. At home there were three hours boiling medicine for her sick mother.

"Did Mari ask you to watch the pot?"

"No. I stayed because I was worried she'd be alone with it."

Mari spoke up right away.

"You can't say it's not your responsibility just because I didn't ask. She stayed because I wouldn't hand over the key."

That sentence was recorded under Mari's own cost of control.

Sana's time explaining the location of the stop bell house to house ran three hours longer than her official two hours checking night temperatures. Because she'd voted against the measure, people kept pushing her to explain the danger further.

"The people who voted for it should understand it better. I don't know why they keep asking me."

"Are you willing to keep taking on that explaining?"

"If it's paid and I'm exempt from the next shift, up to two more times. After that, someone else needs to be trained as a verifier."

Sana even wrote in an end condition, so her task wouldn't turn into a permanent role.

Missing hours turned up for the men too. Doran submitted two hours cleaning tools after the site work, Yoren submitted one hour drying wet rope after his patrol of the snow bridge, and Bern submitted half an hour reading temperature records aloud to an illiterate neighbor.

But once the afternoon passed three hours in, a difference became visible.

The men's off the record hours usually had a named task attached, tools, transport, record keeping. The women's off the record hours were scattered across multiple names: children, the sick, meals, clothing, calming someone down, preparing for the next shift.

Serena didn't draw a conclusion about gender first. She sorted the submitted tables by color. Blue for official shifts. Black for extra call outs. Yellow for work that kept someone else's body, meals, or sleep going. Gray for tool and material upkeep.

The first day's tables for thirty two people went up on the wall.

The eighteen women's official hours totaled one hundred and thirty two hours. Their off the record caregiving and preparation totaled one hundred and twenty six hours. Nearly the same amount.

The fourteen men's official hours totaled one hundred and sixteen hours, and their off the record upkeep and caregiving totaled forty one hours. That didn't mean nothing was missing, but the distribution was different.

Mari matched her own cord against the numbers on the wall.

"Mine is eight and eight. Theirs is six and five, seven and six. The day doesn't end just because the official shift does."

Cassian came to look at the survey results.

"Putting every household task into the domain's ledger is an invasion of privacy."

Jina answered him directly.

"That's why there's an anonymous option. Erasing it as private, then calling on the same person again next shift, that's more of an invasion."

Serena didn't post individual household circumstances on the public board. She published only the totals and their effect on scheduling, and sealed each individual table to whatever scope the person who submitted it had chosen.

"What's made public is total hours, type of work, the gap against the official shift, and the negotiation items for rest, wages, and public services. Individual illnesses and family names stay private."

Doran brought the guild's cost estimate. At first it only had official work hours. He added two lines beneath it.

'Confirmation of caregiving and meal burdens that make site departure possible.'

'Confirmation of the previous day's off the record hours before requesting an early shift.'

"The guild can't pay for all household caregiving wages."

Mari said.

"But you won't treat it as if the time doesn't exist anymore?"

"Right. And I'll calculate how many hours drop if we put one shared meal into the apprentice dormitory."

Without waiting for Serena's instruction, Doran set aside a separate budget from the guild funds to test a shared breakfast and a drying rack for wet work clothes. In return, he demanded that the domain's budget cover the ward's caregiving substitute and the children's shared caregiving hours.

Serena didn't praise the agreement in advance.

"We need a trial period, someone in charge, and an evaluation after it ends."

"Ten days." Doran said. "One shared meal, one drying rack. Open to apprentices who aren't guild members too. We track the change in users' hours the same way the survey board does."

Mari attached a condition.

"Don't make the time of whoever cooks the meal free."

"The kitchen shift and its wages go on a separate estimate."

That evening Serena didn't compress the survey results into one sentence. Instead of a slogan claiming women worked twice as hard as men, she attached the figure itself, one hundred and twenty six off the record hours, nearly equal to the official hours, along with what kind of work it had been.

The first conclusions were three. Ask about the previous day's off the record hours before assigning the next shift. Pay for the time spent recording itself. Don't mix together, without the people involved negotiating, what should be repaid in wages, what should be reduced through public services, and what should be redivided within the household.

Mari set a box of rest tokens under the survey board.

"Tomorrow, let's not just count the numbers. Let's actually let people rest."

Serena asked.

"Who uses one first?"

Mari cut eight off the record knots from her own cord and laid them on the table.

"Not the person who hid the most, but the person who chooses to use it today."

On the survey board, the remaining budget for six shifts hung next to the newly revealed one hundred and twenty six hours. The two were not the same size.

Even after the official day ended, caregiving didn't end with it. Now, at least, that fact had a column where it could be named as a choice, and hours that had to be paid back.