The Just Leader — Cascadia's First Layoff

A four-round, advanced people-leadership simulation set inside Cascadia Precision Components Ltd., a 240-person aluminium-machining plant in Burnaby, British Columbia (CAD 78M revenue, 9% EBIT, ~55% unionized, 11-year average tenure). On 24 March 2026 the rail-car customer that is 31% of revenue (CAD 24M) reshores, and the board mandates a one-time cut of 38 positions (16% of headcount) to remove CAD 4.2M of labour cost within 14 days. The headcount is fixed; everything about its FAIRNESS is yours. In 35 years Cascadia has never had a layoff — that unbroken record is now the test. Through the lens of organizational justice (Skarlicki: distributive, procedural, interpersonal, informational) you (1) diagnose where each justice dimension is at risk in the deliberately flawed seniority-weighted, opaque, no-appeal draft criteria and name the highest-risk decisions; (2) redesign defensible selection criteria (skills/criticality matrix, transparent weighting, an appeal route, redeployment) and a communication architecture — sequence, channel, the dismissal script, and the message to SURVIVORS — deciding how much painful commercial truth to disclose against a fixed CAD 4.2M target and a 14-day clock; (3) deliver the message to an angry senior employee and handle the union grievance under emotional pressure, choosing whether to run a 30-second mindfulness self-regulation reset before reacting, and whether to settle, mediate, or arbitrate the grievance without conceding the headcount; and (4) design the 90-day trust-recovery plan for the 202 survivors and retain the six scarce CNC programmers (CAD 95,000 loaded, 16-week replacement). The scoreboard tracks a Trust score (starts 78/100; below ~55 precedes retained-talent quit spikes), Fairness across the four justice dimensions, Survivor productivity (fair process holds the loss under 5%, an unfair one drops 8–15% for 2–3 quarters), and Leader composure. The math rewards holding a hard fair decision while honouring dignity and telling the honest commercial truth — and punishes the five classic errors: treating the headcount as the whole decision and the process as paperwork, over-softening the message until the real reason leaks to the manufacturing forum, conceding the headcount the moment the union pushes (leaving the plant CAD 1.8M short for a second wound), matching the employee's anger instead of self-regulating, and designing fairness for the leavers while ignoring the survivors who watched it all.