Rhonda is a hand on a single-stream recycling line I own outside Concord, North Carolina, where she sorts paper, plastic, glass, and metal off a conveyor that runs 250 feet a minute, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. She has been there 11 months. The cardboard box you broke down and put in the blue bin passed through her hands. Her agency rate is $19.40 an hour. Her paycheck is $12.85. The difference is $6.55, and it does not vary with experience, education, or the number of fingers she has left. That is the price of her freedom, per hour, and I keep all of it.
Ben Connelly wrote this week in National Review that only 10% of American workers belong to unions — that the other 90% are best served by a system that grants each worker the sovereignty to choose his own employer, his own terms, his own dignity. He is right. I am the free market he is celebrating. I have been the free market for 30 years. Rhonda is the labor. Let me show you what the triumph looks like at station 8.
Here is what she chose.
The facility calls my agency when the sorting line cannot hold headcount. I send a body. The client pays me $19.40. I pay the body $12.85. The spread is $6.55. I provide gloves. Latex. Disposable. The kind a food-service worker wears to make your sandwich. They cost me $0.83 a pair. They protect against nothing a recycling line produces — not the glass, not the metal edges, not the chemical residue on the containers. Cut-resistant gloves — ANSI Level 5, the kind the safety consultant recommended in the report I did not read — cost $12.75 a pair. The difference is $11.92. My margin on Rhonda is $6.55 an hour. I could buy the good gloves out of the first 2 hours of her shift and still keep the remaining eight. I have not done the arithmetic, because the contract specifies “personal protective equipment as required by client site protocol,” and the client site protocol specifies latex, and the latex satisfies the contract, and the contract is the document I read.
Station 8 is the glass line. Rhonda pulls bottles and jars from the stream by hand. The bottles arrive whole. They do not always leave whole. She told the shift supervisor the gloves split on the glass. My supervisor told her to sort slower.
On a Tuesday in March, a bottle broke under her hand. The glass went through the latex. Fourteen stitches in the palm. A partial laceration of the flexor tendon to the ring finger. The surgeon repaired the tendon. Worker’s comp coded it as a laceration, first-aid category. She missed 11 days. She came back with the stitches still dissolving, because the short-term disability pays 60% of $12.85, which is $7.71, and $7.71 is not the rent.
Read the next sentence twice.
The hand does not close all the way. The scanner reads the barcode anyway. That is what the scanner is for.
She did not file a grievance. She is not afraid of me — I am the warmest employer she has ever had, and I say that without modesty, because modesty about a fact is a form of dishonesty, and I am many things but I am not dishonest about the arithmetic. She did not file because the agency performance index tracks complaints the way the line tracks throughput, and three tracked behaviors in a 90-day window result in a “placement reassessment,” which is the agency’s word for a transfer to the overnight shift at the waste-to-energy plant in Gastonia, where the intake temperature is 185 degrees and the PPE is the same latex. She is free to file. She is free to call OSHA. She is free to walk out the gate carrying the recycling she sorted past the parking lot to the car she almost lost, on a day when her paycheck has already been garnished by the arbitration agreement she signed on day one, before she had touched a bottle, before she had opened the handbook she has never opened. The arbitration stipulates that all disputes are resolved by a private arbitrator selected by the agency. The fee schedule is in the handbook. She has never opened the handbook.
That is the freedom. It is real. The freedom is the most real thing I own.
The prophet Jeremiah knew the arrangement twenty-six centuries ago — “woe to him… who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing, and does not give him his wages” — but I read the verse as a description, not a rebuke. The arithmetic scales. It always scales.
Now take it north, 600 miles, to the rotary furnace I own outside Muncie, Indiana. Lyle is a hand at the charging end. The battery in your engine started this morning off lead that passed through his hands on a Tuesday. The lead is recovered. His are not.
Lyle’s blood lead runs 62 µg/dL. The company clinic files it under the older threshold — the 1971 rule, which removed a man at 80. The clinic is not wrong. The current rule removes a man at 60 for a single reading, and the clinic has not been asked to know this. He told me in February that the fingertips of his right hand had stopped telling hot from cold. He told me while he handed me the dross weight for the day’s pour. I filed the figure. I did not file the hand.
The hood he works under was specified to have pulse-jet capture, sealed transfer, air sampling wired to an automatic shutoff. The system costs $84,000 to install. The furnace runs 22,000 tons of recovered lead a year. That is $3.82 a ton. A car battery holds about 20 pounds of lead. The whole upgrade comes to 3.8¢ a battery in your engine. I declined it. The hoods were specified. The hoods were never ordered.
The $84,000 would have bought Lyle a hand that could still tell hot from cold. A hand like that starts asking what the hoods are for. I do not need that hand. A hand that cannot feel the charging door is a common hand. Common to any master who will pay its freight. To keep the hand from telling hot from cold is to keep the worker common. To keep him common is to keep him available.
The harsh master is not a perversion of the system. The harsh master is the system. The good and gentle master is the brochure.
“Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.” — 1 Peter 2:18
The Gospel does not promise the worker a kind master. It promises the worker a master. Period. The text is older than Labor Day, and it is more honest about what your Labor Day celebrates.
I teach this arithmetic. I have a chair at a university in Virginia, and I have spent 30 years grading young men and women into the math I have just shown you. My graduates sit in the HR departments of every facility I supply bodies to. One of them wrote the staffing policy that classifies sorting-line operators as “seasonal,” so they fall outside the benefits package the direct-hire line receives. He got an A. I wrote the recommendation. It was accurate. Torin came up through the same seminar at Warden. He sits on the compensation committee of the firm that sets the regional waste-hauling rate. He ran the $84,000 subtraction in 11 minutes. He was faster than I would have been. I am proud of him. I have graduated nineteen classes into this arithmetic, and each one is colder than the last. That is what you want from a discipline that is maturing.
Now pull the frame back one more degree, because this is the part worth your time. The trust fund was always a bet that the supply of paying bodies would never run out. Yours. The public’s. The one called Social Security — built so the workers paying in today would pay in for 40 years and collect for 20. I have run that bet down. The supply of Lyles is the supply of cafeteria workers, last-mile drivers, and the reverse-centaur on the loading dock whose hands are tracked to six decimals. The supply is still adequate. The baghouse is still not installed. The new projection reached my desk in June. The cover page said the paying side of the ratio shrinks. I did not read the page that names what happens when it does. The furnace is warm. I am on schedule.
The client in Concord is renegotiating for next quarter. New throughput targets. The belt will run at 300 feet a minute instead of 250. The contract specifies the output. It does not specify what 300 feet a minute does to a hand that cannot close all the way. I have not asked. The question is not in the deliverable.
If Rhonda declines the placement, I will send another body at $12.85. The roster has never failed to refill. I have not looked into why. The answer would not change the rate.
Lyle is free. The employment packet says so — the wage, the hours, the hazard acknowledgment, the line that says he took the work voluntarily. I keep the signed original. The hoods were never ordered. The battery in your engine started this morning.
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.