Yolanda is one of four hands on the flatwork ironer I own outside Shelby, North Carolina. The sheets from your hotel last Saturday came back to you folded because her fingers held them through rollers at 300°F. The finger-guard costs $1,400. I declined it. God bless the guest who never asks whose hands were on the sheet, and God keep the queue at my gate full. I thank Him for both.
James Freeman wrote this week in The Wall Street Journal that the small-business job market has gone “slightly softer,” quoting the NFIB chief economist William Dunkelberg. The index ticked down. The press treated it as a worry. It is not a worry. It is the restoration of the natural order, and the word “soft” is doing what the word “soft” always does — hiding a body. Desperation is the market’s way of repricing a body, and the body reprices on schedule. The slightly softer market is the finger-guard I declined, the 5th hand I did not hire, and the differential that is mine. The index ticked because owners like me chose the tick. I have not hired a hand since the spring of 2023. My ironer runs the same 16 hours a day it ran in 2022. The hands on it run faster. A labor market is not a measure of the health of a job. It is a measure of the health of the queue.
Pull up the line item. The ironer is a Chestnut Iron Works 36-inch flatwork, gas-heated. It pulls sheets and pillowcases through two rollers at 90 feet per minute. The hand who feeds it stands 14 in. from the rollers, fingers guiding each corner into the throat. The finger-guard, made by the same vendor, is a photoelectric trip that cuts power within 0.08 seconds of an obstruction. The vendor price is $1,400. I declined the guard in 2022. I declined the install in 2022. I declined the annual certification in 2023. The hand that gets caught is the certification I have chosen.
Yolanda is the entry-end hand. She is 47. She has run the ironer since 2019. The injury log at the plant shows 7 recordable incidents since the spring of 2023 — 4 contact burns on entry-end hands, 2 on delivery-end, 1 tendon laceration that needed 9 stitches and a hand surgeon at Atrium Health Cleveland. The OSHA 300 log has her name 3 times. It has the names of two of her co-workers, a husband and wife who handle the entry table on the second shift, twice each. Six names. The guard would have removed every line in that column.
Read the next sentence twice. $1,400.
The differential. My revenue last year at the Shelby plant was $4.83 million. The payroll for 4 entry-end hands at $14 an hour is $116,480 a year. A 5th position has been open 18 months. The 18-month savings on that open position: $40,320 in wages I did not pay. The guard I did not install: $1,400. The differential, Yolanda’s hand, costs me nothing and saves me $40,320. I have not hired the 5th hand because the 4 I have are running the 5th hand’s speed. Yolanda runs it. You sleep on it tonight.
Widen the frame. The arithmetic predates the index. A German chemical cartel at Auschwitz in 1944 paid its child prisoners 1.5 Reichsmarks a day and filed the books under Vernichtung durch Arbeit — annihilation through work. The press was a different press. The chambers were different chambers. The fingers were the same fingers on the same column. The column is older than my column.
The men who designed this arithmetic before me wrote it in different language and signed it in different ink. John C. Calhoun, addressing the United States Senate on February 6, 1837, on the institutions of the South:
“I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.”
That was 1837. He was pricing a different kind of body in a different kind of camp, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic. The body is a body, and the requisition is the requisition, and the men who wrote the spec before me did not soften the figure. I have only updated the instrument. Look at the principle the case was only an example of.
I have not traced where the tick leads. I have not hired the 5th hand. I have not ordered the guard. The press runs at 300°F and 90 feet per minute on the same 4 hands. It runs the same 16 hours a day it ran in 2022. The linen comes back folded. Your hotel bills you $0.79 a pound for the fold. The differential is mine. The fingers are hers. The towns up the 101, I am told, have already emptied. I have not driven past them. The margin is the best it has been since the spring, and I am, on the whole, content.
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.