Previously in Mailgirls Down Under, Mitchell Johnson the former boss of Melbourne's branch of Harada Industries, is having an affair with mailgirl Kimiko Date. Marjorie Jackson, another mailgirl working there, thought Mitch wanted her, but Jackson never did anything about it. Is she too late?
One of Mitch's twin daughters, Emily, is about to live her dream of becoming a mailgirl but at another company. And reporter Rosemary Millward is trying to work out how to get another feature about Harada's mailgirls onto television.
Please read on...
The mailgirls had assembled in the boardroom. Just the mailgirls. When Fanny Durack arrived, eight of the nine naked workers in the Melbourne office of Harada Industries were now there. Jackson sat at the head of the board table presiding since the rest looked to her when it came to organising and looking after their conditions and things. No surprise then that she had called the meeting. Lauryn Marks, holding her usual serious state, sidled in and took the vacant seat next to Jackson, squeezing behind Annette Kellerman, a smiling redhead, and Pam Burridge, blonde and busty, to reach Jackson's end of the room. So they were all now present. Lauryn had pressed past the tasteful if provocative large format prints of naked Japanese mailgirls posing bound, restrained, and seemingly willing.
Annette looked around the room admiring the other mailgirls. "I reckon this is the first all nude meeting in the boardroom." She looked around the room. Some of the other mailgirls squirmed.
Pam owned up to her unease. "I'm okay when I'm like this," she started. Pam even shook her wavy blonde hair, her large breasts shimmered as she looked around at the others. "But I still get a bit self-conscious when someone points it out." She hid her breasts behind her arms as she turned to grimace at Annette, sitting right next to her.
"Right now no one's getting a mailgirl delivery," Annette chortled, trying to lift the mood.
"I can think of one or two people who would be glad of that," Jan Stephenson responded as she smiled pointedly over at the temptress Monika Mayhem, "not having to deal with a mailgirl for a short while."
Monika pretended ignorance. "I can't imagine who you're thinking about?" she told Jan. "If it's my friend Stuart, he loves it, secretly." Everyone laughed at that. There was no evidence that Stuart Broad, a new manager over from the US, enjoyed any of Monika's physical attention.
But they needed to get to business. Jackson took the floor and started by threatening that she would be going thoroughly through their Enterprise Agreement (EA) to explain their rights in the workplace. And what the management could and could not do to them. She promised that it may not seem very exciting to them. But they had told her they wanted to know. Which was why they were there. "And anyone new who starts here as a mailgirl gets everything that is in the EA," Jackson continued. "So when you started Fanny and when you passed over to the bright side, June, you went straight onto our pay scale -- it's on page 69 if you're looking for it -- and everyone gets our conditions."
Unlike all of them except Jackson, Fanny was on a contract. But Jackson explained that the EA still applied to the two of them. June Lockhart, the newest mailgirl, had been working in HR until she turned. So it was a joke whether June had previously been on the dark side or whether that's where she was now. June blushed, not yet quite used to being a nude centre of attention.
Jackson was in her stride. "Now we get the minimum conditions that everyone gets, four weeks' annual leave, sick leave, public holidays, all that sort of stuff. Then we get to the special mailgirl conditions. First there's our obligation to the company, that we are not going to be wearing any clothes during working hours and how we have to maintain our looks to a certain standard -- pages 23 to 29, it's all there. I'm assuming that with the possible exceptions of Fanny and June, none of you have actually read the whole thing?"
June looked around then quietly addressed Jackson. "I don't know why you think I would have read it."
"Because you're in HR?"
June tittered, now more comfortable. "Obviously you haven't spent as much time there as you need to. Like anywhere else, we only read as much of anything as we need to."
Jackson looked over. "Fanny, you?"
"Oh, I'll get around to it one day."
Jackson smiled. "So you guys all really trust me. Amazing." She continued. "So what this all means is that if Jeneva comes over here from the States as she wants to do, she gets paid the same as we do, and she gets all of our benefits." Jeneva was a Harada mailgirl in America. Jackson had promised her she would try to get her to Melbourne, since she really wanted to come.
"What is Heather's situation?" Annette asked. Feisty Heather McKay had been recruited from the stock room in Melbourne, but she got her wish to be a mailgirl in America.
"It's a minimum benefits thing," Jackson explained. "When Heather was transferred, she couldn't get paid less than she was here. Plus she kept all her entitlements." Jackson looked around to see if anyone had questions about that. Then she went back to the EA. "The third part starting from Page 30 is what I'll call the perks. So that's the bonus points system, the targets, the limits on how many trips we have to do in a day..."
"The tribunal?" Jan asked.
"No, that's in Part 2," Jackson explained. "That's part of the company's obligations to us for us agreeing to be like this. But, and this is the part you've all been waiting for, the stuff in Part 3 is subject to management's continual support, to whether it is financially sustainable. Unfortunately it comes out as discretionary rather than contractual. Which was all good when Mitch was the boss..."
"He was a good boss," Annette stated.
"Yes. A very caring boss," Jackson reinforced, smiling at Kimiko. When Jackson smiled you only felt goodness. And so Kimiko smiled back with almost equal warmth. Did she realise how big it was of Jackson to treat her like that? Or did she expect it? Since Jackson had found out that Kimiko was sleeping with her Mitch in the worst possible way.
But Pam missed their byplay. "Kimiko," she interrupted, "you were in Finance before. How much is this costing the company?" Pam waved her hand around to underline that she was asking about the whole mailgirl operation.
Kimiko gave Pam a friendly smile, and an ironic laugh. The others also looked to Kimiko, curious. "Haha, a lot," she responded. "Certainly Granddad is blowing a proportion of the family inheritance on this."
June looked to Annette sitting next to her with a look of confusion. "She's Mr Harada's granddaughter," Annette whispered to the newest mailgirl, who had no way of knowing that.
Kimiko continued. "The brothers -- Granddad's sons -- are involved in the company. My mother, no involvement. So this is the only way that I'm going to get my hands on any of it." She crossed her arms and nodded at Jackson that she had said all she intended to on the matter.
Jackson continued. "And in there is the stuff about protecting our privacy. The company has to make sure no images are leaked, that sort of thing. Our basic pay is in the tables at the end. They have to pay us according to that, and abide by all the stuff up to Page 30. But we have to accept -- at least in a straightforward contractual way -- that we don't have any rights to stuff that Lindsay has taken away."
Muttering rose at that. Until Fanny spoke up. "There are always weasel words..."
Jackson shook her head. "There is always a place in the middle where the two sides need to meet and be sensible. But there's another problem. This plan to bring in mailgirl tourists. It potentially devalues us. And they don't get paid for being us. In fact, the plan is to charge them for the experience."
After the reporter's turn as a mailgirl for a day, the office boss Lindsay Davenport had floated the idea of charging interested women to be mailgirl for a day in the Harada office, as it was the only place in Melbourne that had mailgirls.
Pam seemed more worried than the rest of them over that. "So what would happen to us if they decided that they don't need mailgirls any longer? If they can replace all of us with tourists?"
Jackson thought for a moment before she answered. "It's complicated but essentially, they cannot replace us with tourists. If they have a mailgirl operation in the building they have to have paid mailgirls on the payroll. They cannot replace us with volunteers, the FWC would not let them. Remember, I was talking about the company's obligations?"
Annette needed to check. "But what is the minimum number of mailgirls they can employ?"
"That's a complicated question depending on demand and attendance. With the engineers moving onto the eleventh floor it's possible that we still don't have enough even with Monika and June joining us. That's one of the reasons that management are taking Jeneva so seriously."
Annette kept on. "But if they say wound up the mailgirl program, what would happen?"
Jackson smiled at her. "Well those of you who were recruited from inside the company -- Annette, Jan, Kimiko and Heather, and you of course, June, would be fine. They would have to find you similar work in the company and there are all sorts of rules about your pay rates and conditions and protection of your status and so on. Pam, Monika, you're pretty much okay as well. Since you are permanent employees of the company, they would have to look after you although not quite to the extent of the others."
Jackson looked over at the short busty Uni-based academic who was there naked experiencing what she had been researching academically. "Fanny and I are a different issue," Jackson continued, "since we came here on contracts. But there's one thing that we need to remember. And that's the reason why Mitch is still working here. They want to keep those of us associated with the program happy. They did not sack Mitch because they don't want him appearing the next week in The Age or The Hun going on about the details of the mailgirls program. And double that for an actual mailgirl doing it and getting her story and her picture in the papers. So long as Mr Harada wants to keep paying for it, we're not going anywhere. Oh, except for Lauryn, sorry."
Lauryn nodded. They all knew that she was working out her notice, soon to finish as a mailgirl.
The boardroom door suddenly opened. Jackson stood up to face the intrusion. Lindsay Davenport took two steps in before realising that the table was occupied by naked mailgirls. "Oh," she exclaimed, "that explains why I couldn't get any of you to deliver my messages. I didn't realise the meeting room was booked," the manager of the office added for bad measure. Since Jackson was standing and staring at her, that was who she addressed.
