Corinne is a stick on the plasma collection floor I own outside Yuma, Arizona. She puts the needle in and she doesn’t stop until the machine is full. 44 arms a shift, 5 shifts a week, 6 years. The albumin in your aunt’s bag after her fall. The IVIG a hospital hangs for a condition you’ve never had to look up. All of it through her hands. Twice a week. For years. I pay her $18.40 an hour. The vein-finder that would let her stop guessing costs $2,400, and I run 34 chairs and own none of them. She is good at guessing now. I never had to buy the gun because she got good at it. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; in Yuma He taketh on a schedule I set.

Thomas Beck wrote in the National Review this week that hospital strikes should be illegal, and he brings the National Bureau of Economic Research’s twenty-year study of New York nurse strikes with him — a 19.4% increase in patient mortality associated with them — and he asks Congress to amend the National Labor Relations Act and take the walkout away from nurses the way it was taken from 11,000 air-traffic controllers in 1981. He’s right that the care team leaves. He’s wrong about where the danger is. The danger is that somebody covers the shift, and the somebody is a business now, and I have met the man who prices it. Let me walk you through what a covered week costs, because the figure is smaller than you’d guess and the arithmetic does not care whose blood is in the bag.

The strike-ban bill is a supply argument dressed as a virtue argument, and supply is my department. When the nurses at a facility walk out, the hospital still needs the albumin and the immune globulin and the clotting factors, and none of that arrives on a picket sign. It arrives on my trucks. Corinne runs the floor that fills them.

I’ll slow down here, because this is the part that pays for the building.

Her needles are safety-engineered, which is the law, and the device my supplier ships activates with a thumb sweep across the housing. Corinne can’t do a thumb sweep while her other hand is holding a donor’s arm down, so she doesn’t. She’s been stuck 3 times in 7 months. The sharps-injury log is required by OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard and it is kept in the office in a binder, and I have not opened that binder since March. She asked me, in April, to put a second stick person on the 2 p.m. rush so the difficult draws get two hands. The fully loaded cost is $31,000 a year. Put your thumb on the next number and don’t lift it. That is $0.07 a draw.

$0.07. That’s the margin on a woman’s left hand.

There is another number I keep in the same file, and it is harder to price because it does not appear on any schedule she was given. She works 12 hours. There are 40 minutes of charting after clock-out at $0.00. Every day. The record of her day, produced by her hand, is the part of her shift I don’t pay for.

Watch what that buys me. The thirteenth hour in the building is not the hour she organizes a walkout. She’s counting to the 15th.

Marta is Corinne without the wage. Marta doesn’t work for me; she feeds me. She comes in twice a week, which is what the Food and Drug Administration permits — no more than twice in any 7-day period, at least 48 hours apart, up to 104 times a year, which is the entire calendar most of my donors keep. $50 the first donation, $40 after, and the sign on the door promises $700 in the first month, which is real, and which is the recruiting program. On a bad draw she gets poked 2 and sometimes 3 times before the vein holds. She comes back Thursday, because Thursday is when the money is groceries, and I have never once had to write that sentence in my own voice, which is why you’re reading it now.

Here is the part where the sentence turns.

Before there was a National Labor Relations Act there was a command, and it did not come with a negotiation window:

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” — Genesis 3:19, King James Version

Notice what is being promised. Not the bread. The sweat. The labor is the sentence, and the sentence is the arrangement, and everything I run is an enforcement mechanism for a verse nobody quotes anymore because it stopped sounding like one. Before 1935 the arrangement came without a window at all, and the courts sent troops to a town where men had stopped pulling a train and called the injunction the law and the men the problem, and since then only the vocabulary has improved. Mr. Beck is proposing a nicer sentence. The man who fills the vacancy understands it perfectly well, which brings me to my favorite part of the semester.

I have taught the Dean’s seminar for 22 years, and I will tell you plainly that I am not unusual, I am a curriculum. One of my graduates, class of ‘19, prices the coverage contracts for a 30,000-worker walkout and invoices the same week the picket line goes up. He runs the subtraction faster than I do, and I say that the way a dean says it about a student who has stopped needing him. He doesn’t own a single chair in Yuma. He owns something better: he owns the hour between the notice and the replacement, and that hour is where all of this lives, and it is priced by men I taught to price it. So the bill isn’t a wall against me. It’s a subsidy with a uniform on it, and I intend to be grateful in the way that counts.

The FDA published donor-health guidance this spring. It runs 47 pages. My compliance director read it and told me which parts concerned me, and that conversation took 9 minutes. The binder is on the shelf above the chair I sit in when I tour the floor. I have never opened it. The board packet is due Thursday and my chair-utilization number is in it, and that number is 96%.

I wrote the sponsor’s political action committee a check this morning for $2,500. It is the first check I have ever given a politician, and it buys me a law that makes Corinne’s absence a matter for Congress. That is less than one Tuesday in Yuma.

The floor runs. Marta’s appointment is at 9:40. Corinne is on the schedule Thursday. Neither of them has been told what the bill says, because the bill does not touch either of their shifts. It only makes it harder for them to miss one.

Have a good week.

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.