But that is precisely the point I have spent my career trying to make.

You do not usually change institutions by appealing to their conscience, because large institutions do not reliably have one.

You change them by altering the arithmetic — by making the exploitation more expensive than the decency, by ensuring that the documented truth carries a cost the balance sheet can feel.

Dalton had counted, his whole career, on the arithmetic running the other way: on the assumption that a vulnerable employee was cheaper to silence than to treat justly.

For once, in one company, on one merger, the numbers came out the other way around.

It was not justice in the pure sense.