The national debt has passed $40 trillion. Allysia Finley writes in The Wall Street Journal this morning that the long-rate signal is the political class’s comeuppance. I want to feel a number too. Mine is closer to my body. I want to show you which body absorbed it.
Maritza is a body on the trona-crushing line I own outside Green River, Wyoming — 34 years old, 9 years on second shift, the woman who stands at the hammer mill when the raw trona hits the blade, the woman who clears the jam each morning while the baghouse filters are 22 months past due and I have not replaced them. The baghouse is what catches the dust that does not belong in her lungs. I have not raised a wage on second shift since 2019. Read that sentence twice. The replacement set is $9,800. I keep the $9,800. You washed a load of dishes last night. The detergent under your sink contains soda ash. The soda ash came off my kiln. Maritza’s hopper feeds it. You paid $5.49 for the box. Maritza is the dust I keep. God keep the schedule intact.
The hammer mill runs 3 shifts. The baghouse collects dust across all three. The filter set lasts 14 months. We are at month twenty-two. The dust the filters no longer catch settles in Maritza’s chest over the eight-hour shift. The chest x-ray is on the company doctor’s schedule. I have not asked the company doctor to order it. $9,800 against a line that moves $2.4 million in soda ash a quarter. The arithmetic does not require me to think.
Now take a different county. The principle travels. Tamela is fifty-six. She stands at the moving belt and pulls the slate from the coal at the tipple yard I own above Paint Creek, 6 days a week, 5 hours a shift, for $11.20 the hour. The kind of money that pays her is not the dollar. It’s scrip — mine, issued in my payroll office, signed in my hand, honored at the building I own across the lot from the gate she walks through at the start of her shift. She hasn’t driven to the Piggly Wiggly for 15 years; there isn’t a Piggly Wiggly on her road. The bus doesn’t run. I’ll come back to the bus.
Set the receipt down. The store she redeems the scrip at — Varice’s Supply, also mine — buys its stock at the same wholesale rate the Piggly Wiggly buys the same canned beans, the same lamp oil, the same thread for mending the work gloves the dust takes from her before the year is out. The store I run charges 22% more than the Piggly Wiggly would. I keep the 22%. Tamela takes home $336 the week, scrip. She spends about $311 of it at Varice’s Supply on the groceries for her mother and the kerosene and the work gloves and the boots. The 22% I keep comes to $68.42 a week, off one body, off the wage. Across the 38 women on the tipple line, the scrip store clears about $2,600 in a quiet week on her line alone. I’ve been running the schedule for 19 years. The store across the road from the gate, the bus that doesn’t run, the dollar she can’t leave the yard with — those are the columns in my quarterly.
The respirator array I was quoted for the tipple deck came in at $6,400. The blower on each mask; the four-stage cartridge; the half-face that would have kept her lungs cleaner on the 4 hours of the run when the wind comes wrong off the holler and the dust is denser than the coal law permits. I declined the bid. I’ve declined the bid each time it’s come back; it’s quarterly. The $6,400 is the cost of the deck I’m not buying. The lungs continue to be hers for the next 26 years. I have factored the lungs at the rate of the respirator I haven’t ordered.
The verse arrived before both yards:
“You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns. You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor, and he sets his heart on it), lest he cry against you to the LORD, and you be guilty of sin.” — Deuteronomy 24:14–15
The verse is honored precisely. Tamela has her wages the same day, scrip, at the door I open and at no door but mine. She doesn’t cry out. She walks the quarter mile home with the dollar I paid her that morning. She’s not, by the verse, oppressed. She’s settled by the verse at the rate I print. The verse is the older contract; my contract is the newer one, and it’s honored at face.
The 22% is not a store’s profit. The 22% is the room between the dollar you can print and the dollar someone else can spend. The Treasury prints into the difference on a federal scale. I print into the difference on a county scale, twice. The county scale is what you can visit before lunch. The federal scale is what gets the column inches. The breathing is the same. The job I do is what the column describes.
I am not a deviation, friend. I am a curriculum. I have spent 30 years grading men into this kind of omission. The plant manager at the trona operation two counties over — I won’t name the firm — skipped a respirator fit-test for a body on his line 6 weeks ago. He skipped it faster than I would have. I keep his card in my desk. I am proud of him. A second graduate of mine sits on the county commission that approved the dust waiver on my next mine. He approved it 3-to-2 in March. The waiver is on my letterhead. The dust the waiver excuses has not yet earned a first name.
I am told the long-rate signal is a problem. I have not read the report. The kiln ships at six tonight. Tamela turns fifty-seven in March; the card I’ll mail her costs 11 cents; her mother is on the porch with the bone broth. The chest x-ray is on the doctor’s desk. I have not opened the envelope. The baghouse replacement has been on my desk for 22 months.
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.