I Have Always Counted What the Form Could Not

Dawn is a fillet hand on the catfish processing line I own outside Greenville, Mississippi. She is 34. The ergonomic grip the general duty clause could support costs $34. The anti-fatigue mat costs $180. I kept both. Dawn’s right hand has lost 40% of its grip strength after 8 years on the blade. She wraps it before each shift. The catfish on your plate this Friday came off Dawn’s blade at $3.47 a pound. The form that used to count her — Hispanic or Latino, Female, two checkboxes — arrived at my door once a year. The agency has just stopped requiring it. The form is no longer counting Dawn. I have always counted what the form could not. God willing, the line runs on time.

Ms. Stepman writes in National Review this week that the agency enforcing workplace anti-discrimination law closed comment on a proposal to stop requiring 2 million employers to file annual spreadsheets counting the race and sex of their workers. She calls it “racial bean-counting.” She celebrates. She notes the rollback will spare $4 million in taxpayer cost and $275 million in private compliance cost each year. She’s correct on every dollar. She hasn’t priced the body the form used to count. Let me show you my ledger, which never closed.

Let me put the numbers where you can see them.

A catfish fillet weighs 11.4 ounces. I sell it for $3.47 a pound. Processing cost: $1.19 a fillet. My margin: $1.28. Dawn cuts 340 a shift. That’s $435.20 in margin per shift. Her wage: $94.40 for 8 hours. I keep $340.80. The mat and the grip together: $214. That’s 0.63% of her annual margin contribution. I could buy them tonight. The mat would last 3 years. Dawn has lasted 8. The math was never close. I haven’t bought the mat.

The compliance software subscription for the EEO-1 I used to file on Dawn’s behalf auto-renewed in March. I let it lapse in April. The woman who compiled my reports for 9 years — a woman named Phyllis, 58, $41,600 a year plus health insurance that covered her husband’s open-heart follow-up — received a WARN notice on a Friday. The notice didn’t say why. The notice didn’t have to say why. The EEO-1 is no longer in the file. Phyllis is no longer in the building. The $45,000 is mine. The form was the only thing keeping her in the building.

Phyllis is Dawn with a desk and a stapler. Same plant. Same rollback. Different line item. Dawn’s line item is 340 fillets a shift with no grip and no mat. Phyllis’s was 160 hours a year at $24 an hour. The 2 line items together are why I sent Ms. Stepman’s editorial to my controller with a check mark beside it.

Now read this once and let it sit.

Lourdes is a fabrication-line hand on the beef kill floor I own outside Garden City, Kansas. She’s 34. She’s been on the line 11 years. The respirator the federal code recommends for the aerosolized beef blood she stands in costs $11 a worker a month. The $11 is mine to keep. The sirloin on your counter this week came off her station at 312 head an hour. The demographic category I used to mail to Washington on her behalf is the category the agency has just told me I no longer have to mail. The line runs at 312 head an hour. The form doesn’t arrive.

The plant employs 814 people. 71% of the fabrication floor is female. 64% is Latina. The night kill is 89% H-2B visa, recruited from a single country, because the country sends bodies that won’t file a complaint. Before the rollback, those percentages appeared on a form I had to defend. After the rollback, the percentages are a number I keep in a spreadsheet I don’t have to show anyone. The number is mine. The complaint the percentage would have triggered is also mine — to not file.

Widen the lens with me.

The form was supposed to be the check on men like me. It was supposed to make my floor legible — to count the heads and see the pattern and ask the question. But the form counted who Dawn is. It did not count what I do to her. The form had a box for Hispanic or Latino. The form had a box for Female. The form had no column for “40% grip loss in the dominant hand.” No field for “$214 in deferred equipment.” No line for “respirator unpurchased, $11 a month, 132 months.” The form met Dawn. It just never looked at her hands. Ms. Stepman is right that the form is offensive. She is wrong that its abolition changes the arithmetic on my floor. The form was a census. My ledger is a sentence. The census asks a question. The sentence answers one.

Pull the lens back.

The bean-counting Ms. Stepman celebrates is older than the Civil Rights Act. It’s older than the New Deal. It’s the brief arithmetic of a country that once asked the employer to confirm the body on the floor had been hired on its merits. The form didn’t enforce the merit. The form made the merit visible. Visibility is what the gentle Book of Proverbs, in its 22nd chapter and 7th verse, settled centuries ago:

“The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”

The form was the brief interruption of that rule. The form is ending. The plant doesn’t change. The line runs at 312 head. The country doesn’t change. I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The man who priced a field hand in 1830 counted the same margin I count — yield per body minus the cost of the body. The census taker came to his door and counted heads. He counted bales. Different columns. Same arithmetic.

Now let me show you the curriculum.

The rollback didn’t arrive in the mail. The rollback was priced. The compliance officers at the firms my graduates run — the firms that set your wage, that set the wage of the paralegal who drafted your will, that set the wage of the recruiter who placed your niece — priced the rollback 3 years ago at $1.2 billion in cumulative compliance savings across the sector. They presented the figure to the agency in a comment letter signed by 14 trade associations. The figure was mine before it was theirs. The graduates of the seminar I run at Warden University — Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation — staffed the firms that wrote the comment letter. One of them priced the severance your own paper offered last month when it laid off 22 to fund the dividend. He ran the Lourdes math. He ran it faster than I would have. I’m proud of him. The seminar is teaching correctly.

The line runs. The form doesn’t. Phyllis’s desk is a contractor’s desk now. Lourdes’s respirator is on the shelf in the supply cage. The cage hasn’t been opened. The compliance software doesn’t auto-renew. The drawer the EEO-1 used to live in is the drawer Phyllis used to live in. The drawer is empty. I haven’t looked inside it.

I’m told the rollback will face a court challenge before the calendar year is out. I haven’t read the complaint. The plant runs whether the form is required or not. The line runs whether Phyllis has a desk or not. The 312 head run whether Lourdes has a respirator or not.

I haven’t priced when Dawn’s grip fails. The line runs on her shift or it doesn’t. I have other numbers to tend. I haven’t lost a minute of sleep over the form.

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.