Irma is a cull hand on the sort belt at the stone-fruit packing house I own outside Dinuba, California. The peaches your grocer stacked this morning passed her wrist at 18 lugs a minute. The heat index inside the building is 102°F. The shade-rest station the state requires would cost me $2,400 a season per worker. I didn’t build it. The peaches I ship carry $0.014 a box of Irma’s wrist. I’ve always kept it. You bought the peaches. You paid the price my line set. May the Lord grant you a good appetite.
Ted Jenkin wrote at Fox News that the rich already pay their fair share — that the top 1% carry roughly 40% of federal individual income taxes, and that Washington should put a number on “fair” before it asks for more. He is right about the arithmetic. He is right that no one in Washington will print a number. He is right that “fair share” is, in his words, “just two words politicians use when they want more of somebody else’s money.” He has not asked what fair share is owed by the body underneath the body that writes the check. Let me put the numbers where you can see them.
The shade-rest station Cal/OSHA mandates would cost me $2,400 a season per worker. I employ 64 hands. The full build-out is $153,600. I haven’t built it. The line runs at 18 lugs a minute. The shade station would force it down to 16. The kept speed across the season is 84,000 lugs I didn’t lose. At $1.06 a lug, the kept speed is $89,040 I didn’t lose. The shade station isn’t built. The heat is hers. The $89,040 is mine.
Read the next sentence twice. A heat-stress incident reported to the carrier would cost me $87,000 in workers’ comp and 4 days of a stalled line. I’ve had 3 on this line since the season opened. I’ve paid 1. The other 2 were voluntary resignations the worker signed at the time clock the day she left. The resignations cost me $0. The unemployment insurance Irma didn’t claim cost her $0. I keep both. I keep her replacement. I keep the line.
The estate-tax exemption Mr. Jenkin defends is the same exemption my operating company reinvests under. The capital gains rate he praises is the same rate the building, the belt, the lugs, and the wrists are held at. The 40% the top 1% pay is paid by a category that owns the line. She is not in that category. She is on my payroll. The fair share Mr. Jenkin defends is the share paid on the backs of the wrists that built the exemption. The estate-tax exemption shields the asset. The heat-illness gap protects the margin. The wrists finance both.
I taught a seminar at Warden for 23 years. The case I assigned every fall was the heat-illness standard as a cost item — the line speed, the rest cycle, the comp exposure, the optimum refusal. The students learned. One of them — I won’t say her name, though I’ve written it on a hundred grade sheets — runs a larger operation now, and she runs the line at 22 lugs a minute, not 18. She grades the wrists faster than I grade the wrists. I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum. The class of 2019 graduated nine of you into agricultural processing. The seminar keeps graduating. The arithmetic keeps landing.
Here is the verse the seminar never taught. It is older than the seminar.
“Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your bondmen for ever. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.” — Leviticus 25:44–46 (KJV)
The verse was written for the buyer. I am the buyer. The 64 hands on my line are the strangers the verse licenses me to keep. The “for ever” is the contract. The “brethren” limit doesn’t apply — Irma is not my brother. The contract has been renewed, in different language, every decade the tax code has been rewritten. The arrangement is older than the verse. The verse is older than the republic. The peach is yours. The hand is at my sort belt.
Regulation was the brief, expensive interruption. It is ending. The estate-tax exemption the code extends to the operating company is the same exemption the heat-illness standard does not reach. I keep both. The peach is in the grocer’s case. The hand is at my sort belt. I’m told the ten-year forecast assumes a labor supply I haven’t priced. I haven’t priced it because the price is for the next owner to set. I sleep on the side of the ledger that does not carry the heat.
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.