Thanks to Our New Efficiency Czar, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Is Saving More Money Than Ever

“Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration…. Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.” — CNN, 2/14/25

“The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in a post on its website, says it has found $55 billion in savings through a combination of efforts, including a reduction in the federal workforce.” — The Hill, 2/18/25

Dear shareholders,

The Triangle Waist Company has been a proud manufacturer of high-quality shirtwaists for decades. And our factory has long been considered a first-rate place to work. But we didn’t become the greatest shirtwaist factory in the world by resting on our laurels. That’s why we’ve brought in a new efficiency czar, Noel Skum, whose job is to cut unnecessary spending and roll back overly restrictive safety regulations. After less than a month on the job, we’re excited to announce that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is saving more money than ever.

Keeping the workers at our factory safe has always been a top priority. But as some of our biggest shareholders have pointed out, our company wastes a lot of money on things like “giving the workers occasional breaks,” “keeping the sewing machine engines well-oiled so they don’t spark,” and “making sure the garbage bins where the fabric cutters discard scraps of highly-flammable material get emptied out regularly.” Luckily, Noel Skum has stepped in and, in just a few short weeks, made sweeping changes that are already improving our bottom line.

Noel quickly identified that one of the factory’s biggest expenditures was keeping all the exits unlocked during work hours. Between the workers taking unauthorized breaks and the occasional inventory theft, the factory was practically pissing away productivity. Since we started locking the exits, the company has already saved over fifty-five dollars. That’s nearly one percent of the factory’s annual budget. And now that we’re once again allowing employees to smoke by the giant leftover fabric heap in the corner of the factory, they no longer need to take their smoke breaks outside the building.

The next thing Noel did was fire Dale. Dale was the factory’s fire marshal, who was tasked with ensuring all the building exits were unobstructed at all times. Noel wisely pointed out that since the fire exits were now locked all day, Dale’s job had become obsolete. Unfortunately, Noel didn’t realize Dale was also the only person at the company who knew where all the fire extinguishers were. And he hasn’t been able to get ahold of him, since Dale doesn’t own a telephone. But we’re confident we’ll be able to find those fire extinguishers on our own if we ever need them.

The most significant change Noel made at the factory was laying off half the workforce and forcing those remaining to move from eight to sixteen-hour shifts. It might seem like firing half the factory’s employees would lead to lower-quality work, but simple math shows that if you make half the number of people work twice as long, you get the exact same output. Sure, the longer shifts mean scraps of leftover fabric get piled up twice as high as they used to. And yes, the long hours have meant that the workers are so sleep-deprived that their cigarettes often fall out of their mouths mid-shift, occasionally very close to those big piles of scraps. But we don’t see how those two things pose a problem in combination.

Noel has demonstrated that one smart guy can run an institution better than a whole team of people with decades of institutional knowledge. He’s done the same thing for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory he did at his previous gig—managing Chicago’s meat-packing plants. When Upton Sinclair wrote that Noel Skum had turned Chicago’s meat-packing industry into a “cesspool,” it was only because he was jealous of Skum’s singular genius.

That’s why we’re ignoring all the critics—from the union rep who called our practice of locking the exits “astonishingly dumb” to the fire chief who called our factory floor “an infamously deadly industrial disaster waiting to happen.”

Is it a bad idea to pile fabric on top of the radiators whenever we run out of storage space? Nope. Is it dangerous to have a sewing engine that is so rusty and decrepit that the employees nickname it “Sparky McGee”? Nuh-uh. Is it negligent to clean everything in the factory with nail polish remover even though it’s highly flammable? Absolutely not. These are all sensible cost-saving measures proposed by our intelligent king of efficiency, Noel, who has assured us that there will never, ever be a giant fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Besides, if there is a fire, we’ll just blame it on the Black employees.