The PreCheck Timeline Is a Margin I Already Collected

To My Partners,

Cody is a journeyman electrician on the Lilly expansion outside Lebanon, Indiana — 44 years old, pulling 240-volt circuits through conduit for the clean-room HVAC. He wires the backup power, the process chillers, the systems that keep your medicine cold from factory to shelf. The copper dust from the wire-pulling works into his left hand at the end of every shift, and his fingers stay numb for 2 or 3 hours after clock-out. The spec calls for a $42 glove with a copper-fiber liner. I don’t buy them. The acting FDA commissioner wrote in Fox News this week that the PreCheck Pilot Program is “unleashing a historic wave of domestic job creation.” God blesses the expedited review.

The commissioner described the career. I am describing the man who builds the building where the career happens. Your vial was sealed inside a clean room that Cody wired. You paid your $15 co-pay and brought it home. The glove Cody didn’t get costs less than what you paid at the register. Let me put the numbers where you can see them. $42 a glove. 240 electricians. 52 weeks. $524,160 a year. That is the margin. You’re counting the way I count now. You see the gap between the two numbers, and you know who kept it.

Now watch the arithmetic, because this is where the lesson turns. The PreCheck program compresses the construction timeline. Compressed timelines create rush jobs. Rush jobs go to the contractor who can mobilize fastest. That’s the bid I win, with my labor rates, my markup, my temp roster. Eli Lilly has committed $9 billion to its Lebanon campus. I own three of the electrical firms that will wire those facilities. I also own the temp agencies that fill the crews. The commissioner was addressing the manufacturer. He was not addressing me. I am the part of the supply chain the FDA doesn’t inspect — the hands that build the building the career happens in, and then leave.

Cody’s left hand has had a fine tremor since February. The hand still closes. He still works. The vial in your medicine cabinet was sealed by a machine inside a room that Cody wired with hands I chose not to protect. The op-ed describes the career at the end of the supply chain. I’m describing the body at the beginning. The two bodies are the same economy.

Same campus, different exposure. Nila wraps fiberglass insulation around the steam lines that feed the autoclaves — the machines that sterilize the vials before they’re filled. The insulation goes in before the clean room is sealed, so the fiberglass particles settle on everything, including her. The spec calls for a P100 respirator, a Tyvek suit with taped seams, a portable HEPA unit for the work area, and a decontamination shower at the exit. I provided none of it. The P100 costs $29. The Tyvek suit costs $11. The HEPA unit costs $3,400. The shower costs $1,200. For a crew of 6, across 4 facilities this summer, the total comes to $164,640. I kept the $164,640.

Nila’s cough started in June. It has not stopped. It is not yet a recordable injury under OSHA’s respiratory standards because she has not missed enough shifts. The contractor’s experience rating holds. The workers’ comp premium stays where I budgeted it. The vial in your medicine cabinet was sealed inside a room that Nila wrapped with bare hands and no shower at the exit.

Widen the frame. The commissioner mentioned something in passing that I want you to hold: “High-tech manufacturing jobs.” Here is the principle the case was only an example of. The first job a pharmaceutical facility creates is not in the clean room. It’s on the construction site. The man who holds the drill will never hold the pipette. I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The state accelerates the capital: the permit, the inspection, the compressed timeline. I accelerate the extraction of the hands that build around it. That is the contract, and it predates the FDA by centuries.

“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” — Ephesians 6:5

Paul was writing to household slaves. I price journeymen at $28.50 an hour with no benefits and a 1099 at the end of the assignment. The vocabulary changes. The arithmetic doesn’t.

I have built the extraction loop to be permanent. The regulatory speedup guarantees new construction. New construction guarantees temp labor. Temp labor is where my margin lives, because temp workers do not negotiate, do not file, and do not stay long enough to accumulate a claim. The commissioner’s $9 billion is the manufacturer’s capital expenditure. My $524,160 is the contractor’s margin. One of them built the facility. The other kept the margin and went home. You can guess which is which.

I’m told the electricians near the Lebanon site have started asking questions about the tremors. Not just Cody’s. Several of them. I haven’t asked for the names. The compliance firm says the incident reports are within the threshold, and I have learned, over a long career, that the people I pay to handle these matters are rarely wrong about the things I pay them to handle. I’m comfortable with that.

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.