Dimas is a hand on the 800-ton press I own outside Rock Hill, South Carolina. He has run it for 19 years. The trailer hitch on your SUV — the square receiver the ball mount screws into, the thing you towed the boat with over Labor Day — Dimas stamped it. The press cycles every 5 seconds. The hitch retails at $34.99. The hand makes $19.40 an hour. The difference between those two numbers is the productivity gain the press runs on. The difference stayed at my plant. The hand got Saturday.
God keep the rain off the lot and the chain moving at the speed the chain wants to move.
Editors wrote this week in National Review that we should call Labor Day “Economic Growth Day,” because the eight-hour day and the two-day weekend weren’t invented by the union but by Henry Ford at the strictly non-union Highland Park Plant in 1922 and 1926, and the wage and the safety and the rest came from rising productivity the union merely ratified. They’re right up to a sentence I’ll say aloud.
The sentence is the one they stopped one sentence early. I will say it.
Productivity is Dimas — and the differential between the wage I pay him and the wage the gate outside my door would pay a man who hasn’t eaten today. Productivity is the refusal of the $4,800 light curtain. Productivity is the chief editor at the magazine in question having never watched a press cycle at twelve strokes a minute. Let me put the numbers where you can see them.
The press is a Danly 800-ton mechanical, four-column, single-point. It cycles at twelve strokes a minute. The die is the shape of the hitch receiver — a 4-inch square tube with a 1¼-inch pin hole punched through the rear face. The slug drops into a bin below the die throat. A stopped press is a press that isn’t making hitches. So Dimas reaches into the die twice a minute to clear the part. Sixteen hundred crossings a shift. He has done it 19 years. He has lost the tip of his left ring finger — on a Friday in the autumn of 2019, when the press did not stop because the press has never stopped, and the tip is in a jar on his wife’s dresser because worker’s comp paid for the burial and not for the funeral. He has nerve damage in his right hand that the company clinic calls what it calls, and that keeps him from opening jars at home and from feeling the die edges at work. He has made every hitch bolted to your SUV in the last 19 years.
The light curtain runs around $4,800 per press. The annual certification runs several hundred more. The downtime to install is 4 hours per press, twice a year — at twelve strokes a minute and $0.30 a part, that’s about $1,700 a year of stopped production per press. Totaled: more than $3,000 a year per press. Across the four presses on the line: roughly $12,000 a year Ford’s productivity gain would charge me to install, certify, and tolerate the lost output.
I declined it.
The saving between $0 a year in safety equipment and $12,000 a year in safety equipment is mine. That is what productivity looks like at my plant. It looks like the tip of a finger in a jar on a dresser. It looks like a hand that can’t open its own pickle jar at 58 years old. Ford’s productivity gain paid for your weekend, National Review. Ford’s productivity gain also paid for the hitch on your SUV.
Both are true.
The light curtain is mine. The fingertip is his.
Hold that against your weekend.
Now walk across my yard, because this is the same arithmetic in a different room, and the room is the fabrication floor at the beef plant I own outside Dodge City, Kansas. Tess is 38. She’s worked the fabrication floor since 2018. The steak on your grill this weekend came off her knife. The chain that runs the carcass past her at 180 head an hour costs the photoelectric interlock that would cut the line when her hand is in the throat of the splitter — $11,400 per station, four stations, $45,600 to install, $1,200 a year per station to certify — and the $0.0064 a pound I keep by running the line open is mine. The OSHA 300 log at the plant records 11 recordable incidents on the line since the spring of 2023 — 6 tendon lacerations on entry-end hands, 3 partial finger amputations on the splitter, 2 hand-crush injuries on the rib saw. Tess hasn’t had a recordable yet. The log is mine to decline.
Same arithmetic. Different station. Same proprietor’s hand on the cost basis. Dimas’s finger, Tess’s knuckles — the line item is the only one in the room that doesn’t bleed.
Pull up the line item. The safety devices I have declined to buy across both plants cost me approximately $17,000 a year to operate — the $12,000 for Dimas’s curtains plus the $4,800 a year to certify four interlocks on Tess’s line that have never been ordered. The 2 men at my gate who haven’t eaten today would each cost me less than the safety devices I decline to buy. The hand that gets caught is the differential I’ve chosen. The two hands are theirs. You chose this when you bought the SUV and the steak.
Now widen the frame with me, because this is the part worth learning.
What Ford’s productivity gain actually does, in plant after plant after plant in this economy, is widen the gap between the receipt and the wage. Every productivity gain since 1922 has done the same thing. The wage gains the Editorial cites — rising wages before unions, falling hours before unions — were real, and they were purchased. They were purchased by men like me, who paid for them in output differentials we did not pass through to the worker. The five-day week was not a gift. It was a productivity gain that we, the owners, allocated. We allocated the Saturday. We allocated the wage. We allocated the safety statute. We allocated the productivity gain to ourselves first, and we allocated what was left to the worker, and we called what was left a gift. The Editorial credits Henry Ford with the gift. Ford was the early allocator. We are the present ones.
The curriculum is older than Ford. Ford merely built the assembly line I’d been building by hand for 2,000 years.
From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. — Aristotle, Politics, Book I, 1254b
He was pricing a different kind of body in a different kind of city, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic.
Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the harsh. — 1 Peter 2:18
Scripture anticipated harsh masters. It did not authorize committees. The apostle told Dimas his duty in the household codes; modern Christians made it a metaphor when obedience became unfashionable. The light curtain was not in the verse. The verse was the assignment. The light curtain would have cost me $12,000 a year. The verse cost me nothing.
I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum. I’ve spent 30 years grading men into this arithmetic at Warden. The MBA I taught at Warden in the spring of 1997 now sits on the board that approved your SUV’s last cost-of-living adjustment. The MBA I taught in 2003 runs a stamping plant in Tennessee that prices a hitch at $0.07 less than mine and pays $2.10 less per hour to the hand that stamps it. The best of them run the subtraction faster than I do, and I say so with pride. The five-day week was not the gift of one allocator. It is the gift of an industry of allocators, graduating class after class, and the present allocator of your Saturday is whichever one of my students last sat in a cost-review meeting with a number like $12,000 on the page.
Dimas worked 53 hours last week for the privilege of the five-day week Ford invented. He had Saturday. He had Sunday. Monday he was back on the press at 6 a.m. The press does not observe Ford’s gift. The press runs at twelve strokes a minute on every hand I can find to feed it.
The hand finds a way to feed it. The queue at my gate is full of men who have not yet lost a fingertip and would like to learn how.
I have not priced the next jar. I have not priced what the next man looks like at fifty-eight with one less fingertip and a queue of replacements behind him. The hitch on your SUV will retail at $34.99 next quarter. The press will run at twelve strokes a minute. The light curtain will not be installed. The state of Kansas hasn’t yet audited my interlock schedule. I haven’t asked whether it intends to. Tess is still on the line. The DOL has expressed concern about line speeds in the larger beef plants. I haven’t read the report. The line at the gate is the line at the dresser. I have not opened either door since 2019. I do not intend to.
May the Lord keep the gate full and the drawer closed.
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.