The ledger that management would prefer you not read

I spent my working life close to the mechanics of a trade — the smell of ink, the heat of a press, the small negotiations between a master and his journeymen. So when Fox News reports that former Fuyao Glass America workers in Dayton, Ohio, described to Representative Ro Khanna "unbearable heat, union-busting tactics and a fatal accident," I do not find myself surprised. I find myself reaching, as I always have, for the practical question: who is keeping the honest ledger here, and who is keeping a false one?

A factory that suppresses the organizing of its workers is a factory that has decided the cost of labor shall be set by one party alone. That is not commerce — that is a monopoly on the terms of the bargain. I knew, even in my own century, that a workman who cannot combine with his fellows to state his price is a workman who has already lost the negotiation before it begins. The Fox News lead names union-busting specifically. I take that seriously, not as a partisan matter, but as an economic one.

The heat itself is worth a column of its own. A glassworks is a hot place by nature; I will grant that. But "unbearable" is a word workers choose when the ordinary tolerance of a hard trade has been exceeded, when the employer has calculated that the cost of adequate ventilation or rest exceeds the cost of the worker's suffering. That calculation is not thrift — it is the shifting of a private cost onto a human body, which is the oldest trick of a badly run enterprise.

Then there is the fatal accident, reported by the Fox News lead without elaboration. I will not speculate on particulars I was not given. But I have always held that a nation accounts for its prosperity honestly only when it counts the full price of production — and a life lost on the floor of a factory is a cost that belongs in the ledger of that factory, not merely in the grief of a family. Any commerce that externalizes its deaths is commerce that has cooked its books.

I note that this oversight visit was made by a Democratic representative, and the story appears in a publication of a particular political disposition. I do not much care which party is asking the question, so long as the question is asked honestly and the answer is recorded plainly. The working tradespeople of Dayton deserve an accounting from their employer — and from their government — that is as clear-eyed as any audit I ever conducted in my postal accounts.

My counsel to any working person who finds herself in a like situation: Write down what you witness. Dates, temperatures, names, incidents. The written record has been, in every age, the working person's most reliable ally. A complaint held only in memory is easily disputed; a complaint set down in ink is considerably harder to dismiss. Keep your own books when your employer will not keep honest ones.