Dear Mr. Mix — you wrote in the Fox News opinion feed that every American worker deserves freedom from the union, from forced dues, from the contract that pretends to speak for her. I’m writing you back. I’ll show you what’s on the other end of your principle, because the abstraction does you no favors and it does me none either. Pull up a chair.
Carmen is day-labor in my flower houses outside Watsonville, California. She cuts roses under glass. The bouquet you brought home last weekend came out of her hands at 4 a.m., because the chlorpyrifos fumigant says re-entry in 24 hours and I send her back in at 4. The respirator that would keep the cholinesterase inhibitor out of her blood costs $38. I declined it. God bless the buyer who never asks whose lungs were in the fog, and God keep the harvest coming.
That’s the voluntary arrangement you asked for. Let me show you the arithmetic. The stems she cuts in those 20 hours come to me at $0.004 a stem. Four-tenths of a cent — for the hours the law wanted the house to sit empty. That’s the margin on the roses on your kitchen counter. The margin is mine; the lungs are hers.
You asked for the general principle. Here it is, named clean.
Voluntarism is the vocabulary of the man who wants the worker to face capital alone. The man who praises the worker’s freedom of choice is almost always the man who holds the only choice that matters. The 79% in your poll — the union members who say they should never be forced to pay a union — aren’t freeing themselves. They’re agreeing to be priced alone. They’ve been taught that the voice is the coercion and the silence is the freedom. The silence is mine.
The queue is not a modern invention. It’s the first labor market. Before the union, before the statute, before the National Labor Relations Board, there was the line at the gate, and the line was the law. The man who owned the gate owned the body. The body had one right: to stand in the line or to starve outside it. The union was the brief interruption — the decades when someone could stand between the body and the gate and say, “Not without a filter.” Those decades are ending. I can feel it in the queue. It’s getting longer.
Now let me show you the line where I keep the bigger margin.
Darcy is a mixing-mill operator on the rubber compounding line I own outside Muskogee, Oklahoma. She feeds uncured rubber through a two-roll mill at 260°F. The carbon black comes off the mill in a cloud you could see from the parking lot if you looked. The weatherstripping on your car — the seal that keeps the rain off your passenger seat — passed through her hands at 260°F before it reached the dealership.
The dust collection system that would clear the air costs $34,500 installed. It would capture 94% of airborne particulate at the source. I declined the 94%.
$34,500. Amortized across the 12 workers on the floor: $2,875 per worker per year. Per shift: $11.06. That is what her lungs cost me. I chose the $11.06 in 2021 and I’ll choose it this quarter. The collector sits in a catalog in the front office. The catalog is where plans go when I’ve decided they aren’t worth the margin.
$34,500 is what I paid for the booth at the Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance conference in March. 4 days, a banner, two polo shirts. The dust collection system is the same number. I signed one and filed the other.
Read the next sentence twice.
The OSHA PEL for carbon black is 3.5 mg/m³. My safety consultant measured the concentration at Darcy’s station: 18.7 mg/m³. That is 5.3 times the legal ceiling. He sent the result in an email marked “Urgent — Mill #2.” I read the email. I filed the report next to the catalog. They share a drawer. The drawer hasn’t been opened since March.
Maris is the carbon black story from the other end of the floor. She runs the weigh-and-dump, 12 feet from Darcy’s mill. Maris scoops carbon black from 50-lb bags into the scale hopper. She opens 40 bags a shift. Each bag releases a plume when it’s cut. The plume is the sentence. Her lungs are the period.
Maris is 39. Her pre-employment spirometry was normal. Her most recent — I require annual physicals, the insurance carrier insists — showed a 12% decline in FEV1. The doctor wrote “restrictive pattern consistent with occupational dust exposure.” I filed it in the drawer. The drawer is getting full.
Set the feeling aside. Look at the column.
The line runs two 10-hour shifts, 6 days a week. 6 workers per shift: 2 on the mills, 2 on the calenders, 1 on the weigh-and-dump, 1 on the packaging. The carbon black enters the air when the compound hits the hot rollers. It leaves the room when a worker carries it out on her skin.
Carmen’s bouquet. Darcy’s seal. Maris’s FEV1. The freedom Mr. Mix describes — voluntary association, the absence of compulsion — is the freedom I’ve already arranged. The union was the only instrument in Carmen’s life that could have named the poison. The union was the only voice that had ever said no. You’d remove the voice; I already have. Now the worker faces me entirely alone, which is the freedom of choice you mean, though you stopped one sentence short of saying it. She is free to choose my wage. She is free to choose my hours. She is free to choose the fog. That is the voluntarism. The compulsion is mine, and it was always the only one that was real.
The apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians:
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. — Ephesians 6:5
Paul was pricing a different kind of body in a different kind of room. But the arithmetic is the arithmetic: a task, a margin, a scripture that blesses the arrangement. The apostle commanded the obedience. He didn’t authorize the committee. The worker’s first and only virtue is the obedience, and obedience has no bargaining agent. The freedom Mr. Mix describes — voluntary association, the absence of compulsion — is the freedom Paul prescribed. It has never needed a union to produce it. It has never needed a law to sustain it. It has only needed a queue and a gate and a man willing to close the catalog.
I teach this. I’ve taught it for 30 years at Warden University. My students sit in the firms that set the wages in your county. One of them runs a plant not 40 miles from Darcy’s floor. His collector is also in the catalog. He tells me so at the alumni dinner every April. I buy him a drink. He’s the best student I ever had. He learned the column faster than I did. The man who set the wage on Carmen’s line took my course in the spring of 2019, third row, and he ran the re-entry arithmetic faster than I did. I say that with a teacher’s pride. I’m not the exception to your holiday, Mr. Mix. I’m the curriculum.
You asked for freedom. I gave it to you. You’re not reading about one ruthless man you can vote out. You’re reading the faculty handbook, and the person who set your salary band holds a copy.
The towns up the highway from Muskogee have been emptying for a decade. I haven’t driven past them. The queue at my gate is longer every quarter. I count the shifts, not the bodies. Every shift has been filled since the line opened. That’s the number that matters.
Her cough started in March. The clinic in Watsonville called it a respiratory infection. The drum is not a respiratory infection; it’s a cholinesterase inhibitor, and it’s in her blood, but the test costs $112 and there’s no one to demand it — which is the whole point of your holiday, Mr. Mix. The roses on your table have no idea. The weatherstripping on your car has no idea. The harvest is in. The line is running at capacity. The margin hasn’t been better since the spring of 2021, when I first declined the system. I have no notes.
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.