Trina is a hand on the deboning line at a poultry plant I own outside Ellijay, Georgia. She is 36. She has 2 kids, and she stands at station 14 with a six-inch knife in her right hand and a $14 brace on her left wrist she bought at the Walgreens in town in March because I don’t supply braces and she couldn’t afford the doctor who’d tell her she needs more than a brace. The conveyor runs at 175 birds a minute. The $14 is hers. The $0.0083 a pound the line saves on her wrist is mine. The chicken breast you thawed last night for dinner is hers too. I am the proud owner of the line that produced it. The Lord giveth the bird, and the Lord taketh the wrist. I keep what falls between.
You read John R. Puri in the National Review this week telling you the share of your household budget you spent on clothing fell from over 5% in 1972–73 to 1.9% in 2024, and that this is a victory for the American standard of living. (Read him here.) He is not wrong about the figure. He is wrong about who paid it. The 5% did not disappear. The 5% was moved. It was moved onto the wrists and lungs of women whose names are not in the BLS consumer expenditure survey. Puri notes that a family in 1984 spent $11,468 a year on shelter and a family in 2024 spends $20,522, and that the clothing share collapsed in the same period. He calls housing a legitimate grievance. He doesn’t say what the clothing number means. I’ll say it: the 5% was a cost. The 1.9% is what’s left after the cost was moved onto people who will never appear in the survey. The survey is a complete document. It is complete the way a ledger is complete. It counts the dollars. It does not count the wrists.
Let me put the gloves where you can see them.
A cut-resistant glove costs $11.40 wholesale. The OSHA guidance recommends a fresh cut-resistant glove each shift. I provide one glove for every 200,000 birds processed, which works out to one glove every 73 shifts for a station 14 hand. Trina has had the same glove for 11 weeks. The glove has a hole in the index finger. The hole is where the bird kicks when the line jerks, and the line jerks on the third Tuesday of every month when the truck from the hatchery runs late and the live-haul supervisor speeds up the shackling line to compensate. The hole has been there for 6 weeks. She has not asked for a replacement. She will not ask. Asking costs the asking.
Read the next sentence slowly.
I ran the number in February. A new glove per shift — the OSHA recommendation — would cost $0.0047 a pound on my dressed-weight line. The savings I currently enjoy by not buying the glove is $0.0083 a pound. So the question I presented to my operations committee was not whether the glove was safe. The question was whether $0.0047 a pound was worth $0.0047 a pound. The committee voted correctly.
Now watch what happens to Trina.
At 175 birds a minute. With one knife. On a stand that has not been adjusted since 2017. The wrist takes 41 minutes at a time of work the ergonomist’s report recommended the wrist not exceed. The 41 minutes is a fact about the line, not the worker. The worker can be replaced. The line cannot. When Trina’s brace is no longer enough — and the brace is no longer enough; the brace is for tendonitis, and tendonitis is not what she has now — I will move her to sanitation, where the pay drops $1.27 an hour and the line speed is the speed of a mop. She will, in the technical sense, recover. The line will, in the technical sense, not notice.
Here are the numbers the annual report prints.
| Line Configuration | Birds/Min | Wrist Incidents/Qtr | Effective Labor Cost/lb |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 Standard | 98 | 1× baseline | $0.1183 |
| 2017 Line (prior) | 134 | 4× | $0.1100 |
| 2024 Line (current) | 175 | 11× (under-reported) | $0.1083 |
The middle column is the column the annual report does not print. It does not print it because the handler at the clinic 4 miles from the plant is paid by the company clinic, and the company clinic does not bill OSHA, and OSHA does not audit, and the auditor who comes is the one we have retained since 2018. The 11× is the speed the line is at. The 11× is not in the report.
$0.0083 a pound. The plant processes 522,000 birds a week at an average 4.2-pound dressed weight. Compounded across the week, the savings is $18,206.81. Across the year, $946,754. That is the line item “Throughput Optimization” in my 2025 P&L. It sits on the same page as “Capital Improvements Deferred.” It is not on the page labeled “Glove Replenishment.” Glove Replenishment has been $0 since 2022.
Now lift your eyes off Trina’s wrist for a moment and widen the frame.
I am not unusual. I am not new. I am the curriculum. The line-speed formula — 4% every 2 years, ergonomic limit be damned — is the formula I published in Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation, third edition, 2019. The chapter is called “Throughput as Moral Discipline.” I taught it for 15 years at Warden University. There are 41 graduates of the seminar currently sitting in poultry and protein operations across the Southeast. One of them is the line supervisor at my north Georgia plant. He took the seminar in 2018. He has since surpassed me. He set the line at 175 in March. I set mine at 134 in 2009. He is, on the relevant axis, faster than I am. I say that with the pride a dean reserves for a graduate who has outpaced the syllabus. I have taught this arithmetic for 30 years. My graduates run the firms that set your rent, that staff the chicken line, that price the wrist brace you can’t afford. The student who sits in your manager’s office took my section in 2018. He runs his operation exactly as I described Trina’s, except his line turns at 180 and mine at 175, and I’ll tell you that with the same pleasure I take in any clean margin. I am not a man. I am a curriculum. The dean’s office is a credentialing operation, and the credential is the no-glove rule, and the rule graduates a class every May.
And here is the verse that proves the law is old.
Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.
— Ephesians 6:5
It was written to a different set of wrists in a different century. The arithmetic is the arithmetic.
The BLS consumer expenditure survey for 2024 will record that the median household spent 1.9% of pretax income on apparel, down from over 5% in 1972–73. The survey will record this as a victory for living standards. The survey will not record Trina’s wrist. The survey will not record the 11 weeks her glove has had a hole. The survey will not record the $1.27 an hour I will save by moving her to a mop when the brace fails. The survey counts the dollars. It does not count the legs. I am told the supply of bodies willing to work deboning lines at 175 birds a minute is, at some point, finite. I haven’t looked into whether BLS has any plans to expand its data collection to include line workers’ wrists. I don’t expect they will. The BLS does not ask me. I do not volunteer.
The plant opens at 4 a.m. The line runs at 175 birds a minute. The line will not notice when the brace fails.
I will. I will replace her.
Trina does not know this yet. She thinks the brace is temporary. She has told her kids she will be back on the line by Christmas. The line will be there by Christmas. She will not.
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.