Yolanda is a hand on the deboning line of a poultry plant I own through two shells in Hall County, Georgia. She’s 34. She’s been on the line for 9 years. The chicken she cuts is the chicken in your grocery cart. The plant runs 1.4 million birds a week. The federal cap on line speed is 140 birds per minute. I lobbied the USDA for a waiver to run 175. I run it at 175. Yolanda’s right wrist has hurt since June. By their fruits ye shall know them. Mine are dividends. The wrist is the price tag. Let me show you what it buys.
Let me walk you down the column. A line at 175 is a different line from a line at 140. At 175 her right hand makes the same cut 1.3 times a second. At 140 it makes the cut once a second. The difference is a third of a second a bird. A third of a second a bird across 1.4 million birds a week is 8.2 labor-hours saved, and 8.2 hours at Yolanda’s wage is $109.88 a week, or $5,714 a year, or $0.0014 per bird.
$0.0014 per bird. That’s the price of the city store.
Now I want to pause here, because this is the part worth the price of the lesson. Ted Jenkin, writing in Fox News this week, asked the democratic socialists how they’re supposed to pay for city-owned grocery stores, free buses, tuition-free college, the rent freeze, universal healthcare, expanded public housing, and the higher taxes on the wealthy. He asked it as if the answer were a number. The answer is a number. The number is $0.0014 per bird, and Yolanda’s wrist is paying it.
I’m pouring a glass of wine.
The socialist mayor’s chicken will sell at $3.49 a pound. Mine sells at $2.99. The 50 cents is my margin and the mayor’s deficit. The mayor loses the election or the city loses the store, and either way the chicken comes back to my plant, and Yolanda is back on the line, and her right wrist is the line item that made the math work. The next socialist mayor runs on the same promise. The math does the same thing. The math is the answer to the question.
Scripture is on my side of the ledger. “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) The mayor’s grocery store sells chicken to people who, by this rule, should not be eating. The line is older than the city. The line is the answer to the question. The mayor can promise whatever the mayor wants. The line has been priced.
Now hold that shape, because I want to walk you across town to a different line. Silas is a body on the pallet plant I own outside Waycross, Georgia. He’s 31. He has 3 children under six. The saws run dry at the re-cut station because water costs money and a respirator costs more, so the pine dust goes into Silas’s lungs and the vibration takes the feeling out of his hands by two in the afternoon. He makes the shipping pallet your Amazon package sat on yesterday.
When Silas started, I priced the childcare. It was $1,140 a month for the two youngest at the center down the road. I could have paid him $24 an hour, which would have covered it. I paid him $14.20. The difference is $9.80 an hour. That’s $392 a week. That’s $20,384 a year.
I kept the $20,384. I kept it because Silas had no choice, and choice is what a living wage buys.
Then the democratic socialist comes to town and says the state will provide universal free childcare. Watch the line that disappears when the municipality signs the check. Once the state pays for the childcare, I no longer have to pay Silas a wage that covers it. The $14.20 becomes a living wage in the new, subsidized environment. I don’t raise it a single cent. The $20,384 stays in my pocket. The socialist has just handed me a $20,384 annual subsidy, courtesy of the IRS, and Silas is supposed to thank him for it.
Move 600 miles and change the product. Elena is a hand on a greenhouse line in rural Ohio. She sprays roses. The fungicide in her lungs is what your florist will sell you for Valentine’s Day. The socialist proposes universal healthcare. I drop my health-insurance contribution for Elena to zero. The state picks up the inhalers and the neuro-readings. I keep the $4,100 a year I would have spent keeping her lungs functional. Yolanda is Silas with a wrist. Silas is Elena with 3 children. Elena is Yolanda with a passport to a different tax code. The names change. The line is the same line.
Let me tell you who’s been doing the arithmetic.
The manager who set Yolanda’s wage at $13.40 wasn’t improvising. He sat in my seminar at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business in the spring of 2019, third row, and he ran the cost-of-labor-versus-throughput calculation faster than I did. They arrive sentimental, most of them. I cure it by October. By spring the best of them see the differential before I do, and I say that with a teacher’s pride. The textbook on his desk is the third edition of Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and the chapter on poultry line speeds is the one he underlined. The man who wrote that chapter isn’t the man who made your grocery bill, but the man who made your grocery bill has read him.
This isn’t unusual. I’m a curriculum. I graduate a hundred and forty of them a year. They fan out into the firms that set your hours and your wage and the line speed on the chicken you bought tonight, and they carry the specification — not vigor, docility, fidelity; that’s the labor spec — but its mirror: clarity, distance, and an immunity to the face on the other side of the number. One of them set your wage, and you don’t know his name, and I don’t remember it, because he wasn’t remarkable. The curriculum produces the unremarkable. That’s the point.
Now widen the frame, because this is the part I want you to learn. This isn’t socialism. This is the 1834 workhouse made universal, and it is the final perfection of the master’s oldest dream. The state now feeds the worker. The state now medicates the worker. The state now transports the worker. I keep all of the yield, and the taxpayer bears all of the maintenance.
“And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.” (Exodus 21:20-21)
The text distinguishes between the death that costs you the property and the discipline that leaves the property intact. The socialist’s entire platform is just ensuring the slave continues a day or two. The scripture anticipated the welfare state. It merely lacked the vocabulary.
I have been told that a system which cuts the wages that would buy the chicken cannot expect the chicken to keep selling. I have heard this from people who don’t run poultry plants. I haven’t read the report. I don’t read reports. I read the line-speed log and the wage ledger and the inventory count. The inventory count has been climbing since 2019. The line-speed log hasn’t been adjusted. The volume is up, and the portfolio is positioned.
Yolanda is on the line tonight. Her right wrist is the price of the chicken in your cart. The chicken in your cart is the reason the city store hasn’t opened. The city store hasn’t opened is the reason the socialist mayor won’t be re-elected. The socialist mayor won’t be re-elected is the reason the question will be asked again by the next one, and the next one, and the next one. The line will be the same line. The answer will be the same answer.
The chickens keep moving. Yolanda is on the line. The belt hasn’t stopped since 4 A.M., and I like the sound a fully loaded belt makes.
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.