Every man for himself

Every man for himself names the social rupture Burke Devore perceives after Halcyon Mills lays off workers: people who once relied on one another become competitors for a shrinking supply of jobs. Spoken by Longus Quinlan during a counseling session and immediately recognized by Burke, the phrase condenses both a workplace change and Burke’s increasingly isolating response to it. Its force comes from the distance between the company’s language of support and the distrust that takes hold among the workers themselves.

From Layoff to Competition

Burke describes a prolonged transition into unemployment rather than a single, unexpected dismissal. Rumors of downsizing had circulated for a year or two, and two smaller reductions had already taken place before he received his yellow slip with his paycheck in October 1995. He had worked at Halcyon Mills for twenty years: four as sales director and sixteen as product manager. The company’s counseling, résumé training, and discussion of options presented the transition as a cooperative effort toward his personal fulfillment, but Burke later calls that process a charade. His bitterly compact instruction, “Don’t go away mad; just go away,” captures the dismissal beneath the reassuring language.

The scale and organization of the cuts give the phrase its material setting. At the mill in Belial, Connecticut, the workforce fell from 2,100 to 1,575, a reduction of about one-quarter. Burke’s product line was eliminated, Machine No. 11 was sold for scrap, and the work was absorbed by the company’s Canadian affiliate. The five months between his notice and the end of his job left him on salary through the Christmas season, but also placed him among employees who knew that their working lives were ending. The company’s severance and temporary insurance coverage softened some immediate consequences without undoing the loss of work or the competition it created.

Burke interprets the restructuring as part of a wider change in how companies operate. Middle managers had served as conduits, carrying instructions downward and reports upward, as well as passing information between suppliers and distributors. Computers, he argues, made many of those positions unnecessary and helped make mergers possible; a stronger company and larger dividends could follow from removing employees. He identifies himself with those displaced managers, not as an exception to the process but as one of the people it renders expendable. In that account, the contest among workers is inseparable from a system that has sharply reduced the number of jobs available.

The Workplace Tribe Breaks Apart

The decisive change, for Burke, is relational. Before the layoffs, employees had been accustomed to working together and relying on one another, a dependable community he describes as a tribe. Once they became competitors, that shared identity could no longer be trusted. People who had regularly eaten lunch together stopped doing so. When asked whether they had heard of job openings, they sometimes denied having leads even when that denial was a lie. The small, practical signs of withdrawal make the loss of solidarity visible: information that might help a colleague now has value in a contest for employment.

Quinlan supplies the phrase after listening to Burke describe this transformation. He asks whether the workers were enemies; Burke answers that they were each other’s enemies and says they could see the change in one another’s faces. Quinlan’s formulation, “Every man for himself,” gives concise shape to what Burke has already described through broken routines, withheld information, and ended friendships. Burke accepts it: “That’s what it is.” The exchange matters because the phrase is not imposed on him as an abstract diagnosis. It is a name he recognizes for the circumstances he says he and his coworkers had been living.

Burke contrasts the reality after a layoff with the reassuring story told beforehand. Before the “chop,” he says, employees can pretend they are still buddies and that the workplace remains a functioning society in which everyone belongs. The counselors and company representatives had encouraged a sense of shared purpose, but, in his view, that story could not survive the competition for jobs. Executives and stockholders understood the competitive order, he argues; after the cuts, the workers understood it too. The phrase therefore marks not merely the end of friendships but the exposure of a workplace community as conditional on circumstances that had changed.

A Job, a Self, and a Life

Quinlan connects this account of competition to the question of identity. He tells Burke that people often identify themselves with their jobs, so that losing a position can feel like losing their worth. Burke resists that explanation: “A job is a job, it isn’t me, but it’s necessary.” He says the company took away his life, not his self, specifying what the loss means in practical terms: the ability to pay the mortgage, care for his children, and enjoy good times with his wife. His distinction refuses to treat employment as personal essence while insisting that income and security are indispensable to family life.

That distinction is tested by Burke’s own description of what follows. He tells Quinlan and Marjorie Devore that he has nobody to count on but himself and that he is in the fight of his life. He apologizes for having become distant and focused, connecting his coldness toward Marjorie to the conviction that he is all he has. When she assures him that he has her, he asks whether she has a job for him. She takes the remark as rejection; Burke says that it was not meant that way, but as part of seeing the situation clearly. The exchange shows how the language of self-reliance enters the marriage as well as the workplace, even when Marjorie offers support.

The Maxim’s Uneasy Ending

Burke’s final formulation turns a description of shared hardship into a personal imperative. He tells Quinlan there is nothing out there but himself and the competition, and that he has to beat the competition, “Whatever it takes.” He then adds that it is a matter of the best man winning and that he can only hope he is that man. The qualification makes the statement less absolute in its wording, but it does not erase the urgency of the preceding declaration. Burke has moved from saying that everyone is forced to fend for themselves to treating victory over competitors as necessary.

The scene also places a limit on what Burke is willing to disclose. He says he has followed his new line of reasoning to its conclusion and acted on it, but does not want Marjorie or Quinlan to do the same. He finishes the explanation with a safer, more socially acceptable hope that he will prove himself the best man. Quinlan watches him closely as the session ends; Burke’s parting thought is that it is better not to be understood. The expression thus carries two connected meanings: the exposed insecurity of a workplace where trust has collapsed, and Burke’s own conviction that survival depends on defeating competition. Its apparent bluntness is accompanied by a concealment that leaves the personal consequences of that conviction only partly spoken.