Lakeisha is a hand on the coating line at the generic-drug plant I own outside Martinsburg, West Virginia. She works beside the powder. I keep her there because the line runs faster with a body beside it, and the body costs less than the alternative. I keep $0.01 from every bottle by refusing the safeguard that would slow my line. The orange bottle is in your cabinet. The cheapness is in her lungs. The penny is mine. The body is hers. May the Lord preserve your confidence in a clean package.
You paid for the pill, the pharmacy, and the silence around the pill. You paid for the profit I keep when Lakeisha works without the protection I could provide. You swallowed the tablet this morning. My label is on the bottle. Her hands carried the cost.
John Shu wrote at National Review that the FDA’s proposed “Transparency in Direct-to-Consumer Advertising” rule could make speech so expensive that silence becomes the only affordable option. He warns a Super Bowl drug advertisement could rise from $8 million to $48 million under the required safety disclosures. He calls the burden a threat to commercial speech. He is right about the price of speech. He simply hasn’t followed the price back to the hand.
Here is where the lesson begins. Make the warning expensive. Make the safeguard inconvenient. Let the market congratulate you for keeping the product affordable.
The guard costs $1,940 per year. A second operator costs more. The rotation costs still more. The missing margin is a fraction of a cent per bottle, which is too small to notice and large enough to keep. I declined the guard. I kept Lakeisha beside the powder.
Her supervisor calls her a unit. By unit he means a woman whose hands have been assigned a price below the cost of protecting them. I don’t use the word in the quarterly report. It has a way of acquiring a face.
The FDA’s proposed rule would make an advertisement carry its warnings instead of shunting viewers to a website. That is called transparency. On my floor we use the same principle — the hazard must be visible somewhere, but it need not be allowed to interrupt production. I posted the machine warning beside the time clock. Lakeisha still reaches into the line.
I do not need to hate her. Hatred is inefficient. I only need to place the safeguard on the wrong side of the margin.
The Scripture says it more elegantly than my accountants do.
“Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” — Matthew 20:15 (KJV)
The vineyard keeper was speaking of his own things. So am I. The plant is mine. The warning is mine. The pace is mine. I have arranged the lesson so that you admire the low price and never ask who absorbed it.
Here is the principle the case was only an example of: an owner doesn’t need to forbid a thing when he can price it beyond endurance. He doesn’t need to dismiss a body when he can make the body absorb the cost of staying. The FDA calls its burden economically significant. I call mine operationally stable.
“Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.” — Leviticus 19:13 (KJV)
That was written for people who still imagined theft required a stolen object. My theft is a refusal. I don’t take Lakeisha’s lungs. I take the $1,940 I would have spent protecting them. The lungs remain technically hers. The saving is mine.
I am not unusual. I am a curriculum.
For 30 years I have taught managers to move the cost out of the product and into the person standing nearest the machine. My graduates sit in procurement offices, compliance departments, and executive suites. They no longer call it cruelty. They call it friction. One of them will price your insurance. Another will decide whether your own hand is worth an $18 brace. The best students won’t ask.
Widen the frame. The rule is older than the agency and cleaner than the argument. First, the owner sells the product. Then he sells the warning. Then he charges the public for the warning’s length. At the end, the public is told that silence is the only affordable speech. The body on the floor is the same body that made affordability possible.
I have eliminated the wages that would have paid for Lakeisha’s replacement. The line’s labor cost has improved. The customers still require generic drugs, although I haven’t examined what they do when their wages disappear. The demand remains a reassuring abstraction. My monthly report has a pleasant shape.
Lakeisha’s lungs have a different shape.
She asks for a respirator. I offer a form. The form asks whether the exposure occurred during production. She checks yes. I check “review pending.” The line continues. A respirator would cost $34. I don’t buy it. $34 is not the point. The point is that I can keep it.
Lakeisha is not a tragedy in my ledger. She is a successful conversion of labor into margin.
The FDA can lengthen a commercial until the advertiser falls silent. I can lengthen a shift until the worker does. Both decisions leave the product available. Both decisions preserve the appearance of choice. Only one of them puts the pain where the customer can see it.
Lakeisha’s hands are still on my line.
The warning I did not print is still absent.
The safeguard I did not fund remains an available option in the equipment catalogue, where it can do no harm to my margin.
The pill is affordable.
The silence is mine.
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.