To the Acting Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, and to John Koufos, who wrote in Fox News this week that 10,000 new welders can be drawn from the state prison systems to close the 230-to-1 shipbuilding gap with China: you are correct that the supply is ready. You understate its scale. The supply isn’t 10,000. The supply is roughly 1.2 million state prisoners, of whom about 800,000 already work. The subset who can pass a basic weld test is a number I won’t put in print. The system has been the supply chain for 400 years. The only thing the British and the Americans are negotiating now is the brand.
Cassius is a hand on the plate-line of the shipyard I own through two shells outside Mobile, Alabama. He came in on a possession charge in March. He’s twenty-four. He’s already welded a hull section for a logistics vessel under Military Sealift Command contract, and the weld held, and I’m glad the state sent him to me before he went to anyone else. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:21)
Now the column where the spreadsheet stops lying. Cassius welds the plate. The plate is hot — 1,400°F at the seam. The respirator that would keep the manganese out of his blood is the powered air-purifying respirator with the hardhat-mounted shield, the federal standard, and it costs $1,127 per worker, with cartridges and fit-tests amortized across a hull. The passive hood I bought him costs $39. The 46 cents I didn’t spend per section is the margin. Cassius is paid $0.42 an hour. The saved respirator and the saved wage and the saved hygienist and the saved OSHA log together come to $31.18 per hull section. That’s the margin I keep.
$31.18. One weld. One man. One section.
The manganese fumes go into him. I don’t measure the exposure. The yard is behind on the OSHA log because the third-party safety officer I contracted in March quit in April, and the replacement starts in July, and the July replacement is a contractor in two other yards and hasn’t visited this one since the previous inspector was a contractor in two other yards. The exposure will show up in 5 years, in 10 years, in the manganism I’ve priced into Cassius’s replacement cost. He is, by design, replaceable. The replacement is already in intake.
Move to the pipe shed. Faron is bending the marine-grade copper in the adjacent bay, and he’s also a ward of the state, but his hazard is the heat of the torch rather than the fume of the weld. Koufos called them “trainees in a vertical,” which is the phrase he used to make it sound like a vocational school. Let me detonate that word. A trainee implies a trajectory. A trajectory implies they leave. They don’t leave. The state loans them to me at $14 a day, which is the rate the prison gets, and I bill the naval prime the prevailing union scale of $32 an hour.
The difference is the fence. The fence is the conviction. A man who cannot leave the yard. A man who cannot unionize the yard. A man who costs me the price of a filter cartridge I refuse to buy.
You want me to be singular. I understand the wish — a single villain can be voted out, sued, shamed, buried. But I’m an institution with a course catalog. The foreman who sets the $14 rate on Cassius’s shift sat in my seminar 12 years ago, second row, and ran the subtraction for the manganese fume faster than I did. They arrive sentimental — most of them still believe a worker’s years mean something. I cure it by October. By spring the best of them see the docket as a supply chain before I do, and I say that with a teacher’s pride. The Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, who will countersign my contract, sat in a seminar of mine in the fall semester of 2017. The textbook is mine — Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, third edition, Chapter Nine. The TSA waiver officer who will sign off on the TWIC exception is also a graduate. The compliance officer at the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, who’ll determine which of my line-workers are eligible to enter the program in the first place, took the course online. You can vote me out. You can’t vote out the faculty. The faculty doesn’t retire. The faculty is reprinted.
Now the general law, of which Cassius’s wrist is merely one instance. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime. That exception is not a typo. It is the oldest load-bearing wall in the republic. Congress wrote my favorite clause in 1865 and has spent a century and a half pretending it was a historical relic. It isn’t a relic. It’s a supply chain. The first Black Codes were passed the same year to put a man back into a chain gang the year the amendment said he was free. Alabama’s coal mines used leased convicts at an annual death rate that isn’t fit for a print column and that I won’t specify. The death rate is the wage paid in the currency of the body. The currency of the body is what I keep.
Today’s program has a different name, a different administration, a different line of Scripture on the chaplain’s desk, and the same arithmetic: a man the state has declared surplus, sold to me at a per-diem rate I negotiated, working a job the free worker won’t do for the wage I refuse to pay, under conditions the inspector won’t inspect. The system didn’t break. The marketing broke. I’m fixing the marketing.
The apostle understood labor retention better than the warden, better than the Senator, better than you. He wrote to a man named Philemon about a slave who’d run, and he sent the slave back. Read it slowly. It’s a procurement memo.
I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me. I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. So if you consider me a partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me. I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will pay it back — not to mention that you owe me your very self. (Philemon 10–19)
The apostle returned the asset. The asset was formerly useless, now useful. The relationship improved — which is to say, the productivity improved. The apostle didn’t free him. The apostle restored him to the master, with a note that the master had previously been in Paul’s debt, and that the new debt is now Onesimus’s. I’m running it in Mobile: a man in the state’s debt, returned to the yard, charged to me, useful, and the cost of his return is the wage the state has already deducted from his commissary. The roster’s 1.2 million names long and the state keeps it for me and I keep them on the line.
I have one number left, and then I want to be done. Today I’m running forty-three Cassiuses in the Mobile yard. The average will be released within 22 months. The average will be re-incarcerated within 36 months of release. A non-trivial percentage will be re-assigned to my yard on a fresh contract. I’ve priced the rotation. I’ve priced the intake, the per-diem, the training, the respirator I haven’t bought, the OSHA log I haven’t kept, the medical visit that would diagnose the manganese exposure that would, if diagnosed, require me to record the case on the OSHA 300 and to send Cassius to a pulmonologist. The state pays the medical. The state pays the re-entry. I pay the wage and I keep the difference. The file is on a shelf I haven’t opened.
The manganese is in his blood. The diagnosis is 5 years out. The OSHA 300 will be the contractor’s, in the year the contractor exists, in the form the contractor keeps. I haven’t looked at the year-five column. The hull’s on schedule.
The T-AO will be in the water in 22 months. The T-AO will be crewed by twenty-year-olds you’ve never met. The hull section on it was welded by Cassius, who hasn’t been to a dentist in 6 years and whose last medical visit was the intake physical.
Cassius will not see the water.
The arithmetic continues.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.