Tonya is a polish-line hand on the granite shop I own outside Danville, Virginia. She is 39. She has been on the wet polish for 14 years without the elastomeric respirator the silica code requires, because the respirator costs $14 a month and the $14 is mine to keep. The granite on your kitchen island is $34.86 of mine before it left the shop. The respirator is $14 of hers that has not left the shelf. The lesson begins. God willing, the polish runs on time.
Mr. Cooke writes in National Review this morning on Ms. Grace Ryan’s noblesse oblige. He prefers the system of ambition and mobility his working-class father used to make it to Ms. Ryan’s proposal to dismantle the system. Fellow capitalist, I write to thank Mr. Cooke. He defended us. He defended us through an op-ed he wrote for the readers who employ us. He did not, however, draw the arithmetic. The arithmetic is my department. Let me draw it.
Sit with the number.
I run 240 square feet of slab a day at $0.83 a square foot. That’s $199.20 a day, $59,760 a year. The bridge loan on the shop is $1,800 a month, retired 4 years early on her lungs. The slab-cutter blade is $14.30 a day. The polish compound is $0.09 a square foot. The wet-line respirator the silica code requires is $14 a worker per month. The cartridges run another $8.60. The fit test is $75 a worker a year. The medical surveillance the federal code asks for is $310 a worker a year.
I have not bought any of it.
Tonya’s wage is $13.40 an hour. The elastomeric respirator is on the shelf in the supply cage. I have not opened the cage. The 5-micron silica particles are in the air she is breathing. The federal code, 29 CFR 1910.1053, names the engineering control I declined. The code names it because the autopsy confirmed what the disease already had. The autopsy of a 47-year-old polisher in a sister shop is in the file. I have the file. I have not opened the file.
Same law, different yard. Marta is a pair of hands in the e-waste yard I run outside Memphis, Tennessee. She’s 47. She strips the boards off 1,100 phones a shift, and the gold in those boards, refined, is worth $1.64 a phone. The $1.64 is mine. The respirator is $3.75, and it’s hers by right of the lungs it was meant to cover, and I haven’t bought it, not in the 9 years she’s been breathing the solder dust. The phone in your hand came through a yard like mine — maybe mine, I don’t track the bales. You paid the $1.64 in the price of it. I keep it.
Count with me. 1,100 phones a shift at $1.64 of gold, refined. That’s $1,804 a shift, $9,020 a week, $469,040 a year before the line stops. I have priced every line item in that yard except the respirator. The respirator does not appear in the math. I have priced Marta’s lungs into the math at $0.00 a pair.
The $3.75 wins, which is not a tragedy. It’s a decision, and decisions are what I’m paid to make. The gold goes to the refiner. The dust goes to her. The arrangement is efficient, and efficiency is a kind of moral cleanliness I’ve never needed a pastor to explain.
Widen the frame.
The system Mr. Cooke defends is me. The bridge loan I used to buy the shop. The credit committee that approved me. The lifetime of work Mr. Cooke’s father deposited, and my father’s, and yours. Mr. Cooke’s father made it. So did mine. I made the granite shop with what they paid in. Ms. Ryan’s father bought a struggling chocolate company and made it viable. He made it with the metal of others. Mr. Cooke is correct that the system Ms. Ryan proposes to dismantle is the system that built her privilege. He misses that it is also the system that is filling Tonya’s lungs. He doesn’t miss it. He declines to enumerate it.
“For I know your manifold transgressions, and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from his right.” — Amos 5:12
The verse was written for the man who writes the warrant for what his shop extracts and calls it due diligence. The verse specifies the gate. Tonya is at the gate. Marta is at the gate. They have been at the gate for 14 and 9 years respectively. The respirators are behind the gate. So is the $14 a month I have not paid out of $199.20 a day, and the $3.75 I have not paid out of $1,804 a shift.
I’m not new. I’m the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. Grace Ryan’s trust fund was never a bet on her. It was a bet that the supply of priced hands would never run out — a contract with a future nobody had priced. Tonya is the collateral on that contract. Marta is the collateral on that contract. The collateral is performing beautifully.
I’m told the rate of new-onset silicosis in stone workers under 40 has doubled this decade. I’m told the county keeps a count of respiratory filings in the yards down the fence from mine. I haven’t read the count. The dust study came due last quarter. I haven’t opened it. The bales are on the boat. The slab is on the truck. The granite on your island is mine. The board you held to your face is mine. The respirators on the shelves are theirs. The demand for the cheap board goes somewhere I have not traced, and the yields, quarter to quarter, rise, and I find the arrangement restful, and I do not disturb it.
I’m the Dean of Instruction at Warden. Last April I sat on a thesis committee. The candidate proposed that the comfort of America’s privileged class carried an inherited debt to its unprivileged class. The candidate did not name the comfort. The candidate did not name the debt. The candidate submitted a feeling. I graded it. The grade was a D-plus. The chair phoned me. The chair asked if I would reconsider. I said no. The candidate had identified the system correctly and refused to draw the arithmetic. A feeling is not an education. Arithmetic is. The candidate was raised into the moral. The candidate was not taught the math. I don’t teach the math to the unprivileged.
I have taught the math to twenty-three cohorts. They sit on the compensation committees of the firms Mr. Cooke keeps his savings with. One of them — I won’t name him because Mr. Cooke never names them either — priced the severance Mr. Cooke’s own paper gave him last month when it laid off 12 to fund the dividend. He ran the Tonya math. He ran it faster than I would’ve. I’m proud of him. The seminar is teaching correctly.
The polish runs on time. The line runs on. The phone in your hand rang this morning. Mine never rings for Marta. The breath is hers — the one line item I do not carry. That is what makes the margin.
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.