Stark Industries
The Memo
To: All Employees, All Departments, All Branches
From: Tony Stark [You know who I am]
Subject: Clarifying ID badges and What They Do
The Picture, as deemed to be too big to not be a click away.
Some Stark Industries Employees
Caroline Jones
An unassuming woman who in most verses heads up the user interface and games segment of the reworked Stark Industries, keeping her attention on phones and their abilities. Before this she was part of the strategic parts of SI that dealt with cooperative programming systems for missiles and similar.
She has black hair that’s pin straight and usually half hides her face, bright blue eyes that always look a little too wide, glasses, and a tendency to wear business attire at all times, skirts, and heels. Even in casual settings. She’s soft-spoken and often, her people quiet when she’s talking.
Janet Mendez
This woman has been a housekeeper in Tony’s life since about two months after the Malibu house was completed. Having met Tony when she was also in her young twenties as JARVIS’ first hire, there have been considerable growing pains associated with their time together. She’s the only member of his original personal staff that’s still with him, and is in charge of hiring, vetting, and training all housekeepers for any location that Tony might potentially live in for any span of time, including the Tower, the Malibu House, and all facilities designated as being for the Avengers.
She has both dark hair and eyes and has a meticulous habit of ensuring that everything Tony needs in his personal life is handled when the AIs can’t do it themselves. She has nothing to do with his business endeavors or scheduling and instead keeps all her tasks to making sure there’s food wherever Tony lives currently, that he has the clothes he values most available, and that nobody does anything to stress the man by way of the staff.
Masao Ishikawa
Tony’s head Tax Lawyer that he managed to poach before the man got committed to any Japanese firms. He even went to the extra lengths to pay for his move to the United States, though the man does visit home relatively often, typically bringing along Iron Man trinkets that he thinks Tony might enjoy that were given by his brother for exactly that purpose. Once the ‘trinket’ was an authentic full samurai outfit that Tony didn’t ask too many questions about the origins of.
He was hired on during the post-Obadiah betrayal purge in 2009 when most of the legal team ended up replaced. The man loves the challenge that the Avengers pose simply because they’re unusual and working out things such as Steve’s situation and how Thor and money go together keeps him more than busy enough when SI somehow fails to be enthralling enough.
His origins are very clear, though he tends to wear his hair long and tied back, and it’s not uncommon to see him in glasses.
William Travers
This fellow is a wonder in the Public Relations department. If something goes wrong, he’s on it, if something is on fire, he can spin it, and he never hesitates to have his people on the job whenever the newest situation explodes. One of the few departments unshaken by Tony’s staff review in 2009, William has seen it all.
He’s an older man, once known by the name Cindy before Tony took charge of the company, and he’s a born and bred Californian that was hired on when Howard was still running things. He’s not being pried away from the California branch of the company until the day he dies and that’s that. He considers himself far too old for that nonsense.
Madison Harris
This woman is a whirlwind and wonder in Tony’s life. She’s also terrifying. She’s Tony’s top accountant, and never let the hellfires that are errors that lead to dramatic losses happen on her shift, oh no. This woman was hired a year after Pepper, swiftly working her way up the ranks of the company until she stood at the top of the financial heap and meticulously fixed every hole she could find.
Suffice to say that Obadiah had some trouble maneuvering around her.
Dark skinned with a perpetual pair of ponytails to contain her wild hair, Madison is ever the professional, even if her suits do tend to err toward the brightly colored. They look good on her, and she has enough clout that people only ever dare say something once before deciding it would be in their best interest to never do so again.
Business Details
Tony’s PA contracts have always been intensely comprehensive. They covered everything from permanent life insurance with the company, even after leaving the job by their choice or Tony’s, due to the hazards of being close to Tony and thus at risk of abduction by competitors or rogue factions to try to get information on what he was doing. Other points listed in these contracts were rights of severance, negotiated codes of contact, and provisional warnings on behaviors Tony knew he tended to have and use that he had no desire to curb.
By the time Tony met Pepper he’d refined these contracts to an art form, always handling them himself because if he was going to have a PA then he was damn well going to be personal about it. Of course, he didn’t need it after Pepper, but if he ever picks up a new PA there will be new clauses about heroing and how that impacts the whole thing in there, as well as codes of conduct with regard to sensitive information.
Stark Industries is a company that Tony spent decades making fair. Even when it was a weapon company, the tagline was always that Stark Industries did it right. Prejudice clauses are in all contracts, and even people in higher positions in the company can lose them, or get demotions, if it comes out that they’re practicing prejudiced behavior in the workplace for any reason.
And by any reason, the language of the contracts make it clear that any is the correct word. Gender, sex, religion, age, orientation, disability, ethnicity, personal hobbies. Even now that Pepper runs the company when Tony turns up a new thing that people are being assholes about, he brings it to the legal department and people have a new go around of contract negotiations at the end of the year.
It’s an annual thing, and also handles things like raises, renewals of health care, and otherwise makes sure that everything the employees need is up to date. He’s lost employees to this process because they refused to sign with the new clauses, but people are generally just happy to get a raise.
Tony, even when running around being a hero from time to time, makes sure to spend time with his R&D departments in the various countries of which SI has people. He may no longer run the company, but that has never meant that he’s uninvolved, and he likes to keep abreast of what his people are doing.
This also means if someone is having issues, he might get in the middle of it and fix it if he can.
It’s not unheard of that Tony’s paid off someone’s student loans as part of their hiring package.
Nearly everyone in SI has confidentially clauses of some kind or another they’ve had to sign. Especially the janitorial staff. Tony will never underestimate the menial workers in the company, knowing that if they’re unhappy, they can really fuck everyone over.
In fact, it’s a well-kept secret inside the company that the janitorial staff at times end up in R&D or other divisions when it’s shown they have aptitudes for it, even if they have no schooling.
Being an asshole is a great way to have Tony Stark visit your department ‘just to see how things are going’ just when you really don’t want him to.
Pepper Potts may be the CEO of the company, at Tony’s insistence, but he’s still got majority shares in the company and intends to keep it that way. When he dies, Pepper will inherit them, of course, but until then, she can always lean on him if someone is being an asshole to her because she’s a woman.
He knows she can handle it, but he still likes being around as backup.
After Obadiah’s betrayal, Tony went through every department in the company and personally reviewed every single employee file. More than half the members of the company were let go, in a staggered fashion, starting with most of Legal. After that, he hired fresh people from all over the world with a much, much stricter vetting process.
Unsurprisingly, R&D was the department that got off the most lightly. More surprisingly, the janitorial staff was nearly unscathed as well.
Everyone in Stark Industries at some point is taught how to handle explosions and evacuation procedures. This may take form by way of R&D, some ass trying to get back at Tony via his employees, or even the bizarreness that is someone setting off the security sensors because of their kid’s school project.
It’s one of those things taken in stride after you’ve been with the company a few months.
While weapons were the byline of the company, Tony’s investment in things such as intellicrops had been steadily gaining momentum, leading to a third of all the company investments at that time going to humanitarian efforts and medical advancements of various kinds. Switching from weapons to technological equipment more in line with energy efforts, strangely, didn’t change this, and many people overlook the humanitarian side of Stark Industries even now.
Tony wrote the biography about his dad entirely to fund relief efforts in the countries affected by Ultron. He has seen no profit from the sales of that novel, nor will he, as that was not the point of writing it.
Every Stark Industries building that has R&D also has what is fondly known as the ‘pirate table’. Newer employees are often told the story of how back in Malibu R&D in 1998 a frustrated scientist had his personal snacks stolen from the lunch storage table one too many times and called everyone pirates.
He then started the noble tradition of keeping carry out menus on said table, and the tradition has only grown since then, expanding out with breakdowns of allergens at different restaurants in the area, who kept kosher, who was vegan-friendly, things like that. There’s still a snack counter, but these days everyone knows you keep your treats there at your own risk.
R&D interviews are an interesting thing at SI. There is, of course, the typical paperwork thing, which is totally normal. Then there’s the less normal thing.
There’s the Box Test. The Box is a system by which the weak are weeded from the strong and the innovative from those just looking for a paycheck. At least, that’s how anyone in R&D looks at it.
It was an invention of Tony’s when he got sick of new hires just going in the same circles as what everyone else was. So, one day in 1993, Tony came into R&D with a flat of boxes filled with odds and ends and told everyone that no one got to leave without handing over something built using items from their box. They could use anything in the lab to make it, so long as the parts were from out of the box.
Three people quit on the spot, refusing to use things like rubber bands, spare metal scraps, and pens to build anything, but everyone else came through it, realizing that Tony wasn’t going to leave them to it alone because he had his own damn box. It earned the respect and loyalty of the R&D department, and ever since, any newcomers had to pass the stress test of ‘show me something good’. Not everyone came up with anything innovative at all, some people defaulting to simple machines, but everyone who comes up with something has a place in SI.
The record-holder after the initial test is Carlos Humera whose test took a week and a half, with his wife playing spotter by bringing him clothes and meals so that he didn’t have to leave grounds and thus conclude his ‘interview’. He’s now one of the leading innovators for humanitarian projects at SI.
In a complete reversal of how Tony won over the R&D, Tony’s PR was, rather than tortured, won over. He didn’t try to bribe them or anything like that. No, he just went up to the people who had been handling publicity for him just about forever and point blank told them what he wanted them to do with his image in 1991, before ever letting a single magazine talk to him.
Sure, he was a bit of a mess because this is his parents’ legacy he was staring in the eye, but it’s also what needed to happen. He didn’t pretend he was going to be perfect, nor that he wasn’t going to make their lives difficult. He was, however, honest, and kept them informed, which was more than most people ever got when they’d have to do a mad scramble to make up for the gaffes of their employers.
People who didn’t want to handle the challenge had long since been weeded out, but that respect for his honesty turned into loyalty as years went by and things rather went to hell for Tony. They also refused to relinquish him when he handed over the company to Pepper. Sure, he was no longer SI’s problem, technically, but he was their Stark, and they were going to make sure his image didn’t fall apart because the guy had no backup.
Obadiah made a mess of everything when he tried to kill Tony, and nobody who is still in SI after The Purge of 2009 is liable to forget it. More than half of the Law office for the company was gutted and replaced, most of the manufacturing and shipping areas were heavily audited and evaluated, leaving a nearly complete turnover. Even the janitorial staff was hit, though far more lightly than most others. The only groups that mostly came out unscathed were R&D and PR, with the Board losing three members who had been entirely in Obadiah’s pocket and aware of the double-dealing.
The rash of firings was the result of Tony personally going over everything, every employee file, every transaction and contract, to find out where things had gone wrong, when, and who was involved. He used the information to hunt down the weapons he could, to get rid of people bad for the company, and essentially did his level best to not hand Pepper a horrible mess in the company.
By the time the purge was completed, he had realized that he wasn’t liable to survive the Palladium poisoning and was planning accordingly.
Tony doesn’t tend to hire people based on their qualifications. Yes, qualifications help in many instances, but if he meets someone in a situation and decides they’re getting a chance, then by god they’re getting a chance. Even if no one else would give said person a chance. Suffice to say he’s got a bit of a following from among this group of employees, which are scattered across all the departments of SI.