Chapter 7 - The National Audit
Over the next two years, Ethan Carter’s name became both a legend and a whispered terror across the sprawling corporate landscape of Sterling Global.
Balancing his freshman coursework at Columbia University with his executive responsibilities at Sterling Global, Ethan traveled across the country alongside Arthur Sterling and chief legal counsel Katherine Vance. They descended upon regional franchises from Chicago to Los Angeles, unannounced and unyielding.
What Ethan discovered during the national audits horrified him. Arthur Higgins was not an isolated aberration; he was a symptom of a systemic corporate disease. Across hundreds of franchise locations, regional managers had cultivated cultures of fear, wage theft, and intimidation, treating hourly service workers as disposable inventory.
In a suburban diner in Atlanta, Ethan uncovered a manager who was illegally withholding overtime pay from his kitchen staff. Within four hours, Katherine Vance served the manager with immediate termination papers and a federal labor audit.
In a bustling coffee shop in Seattle, Ethan caught a regional supervisor berating a teenage cashier who had made a minor math error on the register. Ethan stepped directly between them, looked the supervisor dead in the eye, and delivered a speech that left the man speechless:
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"A company is not measured by its quarterly earnings or the price of its stock," Ethan stated, his voice ringing with the absolute authority of the chairman's office. "A company is measured by how it treats the person who cannot defend themselves. If you ever speak to an employee like that again, you won't just lose your job—you'll be blacklisted from the industry for life."
Word spread quickly through the corporate grapevine. Workers began calling Ethan "The Chairman's Shadow," a young executive who possessed the billionaire's ear and an unbending commitment to human dignity. Under Ethan's guidance, Sterling Global successfully restructured its entire franchise labor model, implementing mandatory living wages, comprehensive healthcare benefits, and an anonymous whistleblower hotline directly monitored by the penthouse suite.
