Sid is a field cameraman on the Sunday-evening newsmagazine I own through a subsidiary on the West Side, and the piece you watched last week — the one with the drone shots, the field-lit interview, the single tear — was assembled, lit, and driven by Sid and three others, on a per-diem basis, for $725 a day each, with no health insurance, no overtime, no workers’ comp, and a hotel room I split four to a reservation. Gerard Baker is right that the on-air talent mistakes its nameplate for a deed. He calls the network newsmagazine a relic. A relic is something that lost its function. The Sunday broadcast never lost its function. The function was extraction. The extraction ran through the field crew. I’d like to walk you through what your Sunday night cost. Nobody ever explains it to you. You should learn.
Now. The day rate is $725. Sid works a 14-hour day on a shoot. The contract says 10. The four extra are travel or edit or set-up, and the day rate was what it was when he signed. I don’t pay for the four extra. He agreed. A day rate is a day rate.
Sid is on a Tuesday-night drive back from a piece in Central California, alone in a white cargo van, because the producer told him the second driver was “not in the budget” for the return leg. 12 hours, door to door. The second driver would have cost me $310. I kept the $310. The van is mine. The insurance is mine. The producer is mine. Sid’s back is his. He stops once, for gas and a bottle of water — $4.19, his money, his time. He gets home at 4:11 a.m. I need him on set at 7:00. The 3 hours between are his to manage. He doesn’t bill them. I wrote the contract. The contract doesn’t recognize them. A day rate is a day rate.
The piece you watched — the one about the man who lost his house — the man’s tears were real and the drone shot at 0:47 was Sid’s, his hand on the gimbal at 4:47 in the dark. The piece won a Peabody. The trophy is in the lobby. Sid’s name is in the credits for 1.7 seconds, after the second focus-puller and before the production coordinator. His $725 was the same $725 it had been for 11 years. You changed the channel during the credits. He was already in the van.
This is the part Mr. Baker flinched away from, and I want you to see why. Scott Pelley, he tells us, was a man who mistook his cubicle for a cathedral and his termination for a murder. Mr. Baker is correct about the confusion. He simply doesn’t follow it far enough. A long-form television newsmagazine is, structurally, a freelance economy with a small permanent class on camera and a large disposable class off it. The on-camera class — your correspondent, your anchor, your well-coiffed host — is the name on the door. The off-camera class — your field producer, your sound mixer, your camera, your focus-puller, your PA, your driver — is the body in the room. The name on the door has a contract, an agent, residuals, a pension, and a parking space. The body in the room has a day rate, a 1099, and a per-diem envelope with the breakfast deducted. The on-camera class is paid by the year. The off-camera class is paid by the day. Pelley, it turns out, was on-camera inventory. The cost curve simply hadn’t reached him yet.
A seamstress named Wanda in a plant I own outside Bowling Green learned the arithmetic before Pelley did. She sewed the embroidered logo onto the polo shirt you’re wearing — the one in your closet. She did 480 logos a shift. Her hands had a tremor. Last year I replaced her with a programmable embroidery machine that does 2,100 logos a shift, costs $29,000, and never asks for a raise and never leaks to the Times. The box she carried out had a mug that said “World’s Best Seamstress” — the one her daughter gave her at the Christmas party I eliminated in 2018 — and a pay stub showing 2 weeks’ separation at her lowest rate. She signed the release because she couldn’t hold the pen steady. The pen was not a negotiation. The pen was the classification I set 19 years ago, when I marked her as a permanent temporary — a category the Commonwealth of Kentucky finds unremarkable and the IRS finds convenient. You paid her food stamps. I kept the margin. The polo in your closet still has its logo. You bought it. You wear it. Thank you for your business.
The payroll tax I don’t pay on misclassified labor is 7.65% of his gross — the employer’s share of FICA alone — and that is before the FUTA, before the state disability, before the workers’ comp premium I don’t carry. The safe harbor is Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978, which says I may treat a field cameraman as an independent contractor provided the industry has a “reasonable basis” for the practice. The television industry has had the reasonable basis since before Sid was born. The reasonable basis is that everyone does it. Christ himself settled the question 2,000 years ago: “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go” (Matthew 20:13–15). A signed contract is the funeral of complaint. Sid doesn’t know the safe harbor exists.
Here is the arithmetic. $725 a day, divided by the 10 contracted hours, is $72.50 an hour. Four unpaid hours a day, times 365 days, times 11 years is $116,720 per year. Over 11 years: $765,600. I have not paid the $765,600. I have paid $725 a day. The difference is the margin. The margin is the operation Mr. Baker calls a relic and I call a going concern. Across the four bodies on the crew, the unpaid labor over those 11 years comes to $4.3 million. I have kept it. I would keep it again. The elegance of the arithmetic gives me a satisfaction I will not pretend is small.
Stay with me, because this is the part that matters.
Mr. Baker’s error — the one Pelley paid for and Sid has never been told about — is that the on-camera class thought its nameplate was a deed. It was never a deed. It was a month-to-month lease. The industry had three networks controlling half of advertising revenue for 50 years, and in that monopoly the on-air class could hold the studio hostage — name recognition, public trust, the face the audience recognized. The backtalk was expensive, so management paid it.
The monopoly broke. The correction came late, but it’s thorough. A journalist at $190,000 a year plus backtalk is now priced against an algorithm that writes the earnings recap for the wire service at $0.0004 a word and an AI voice that reads the traffic report for $0.02 a minute. Run the division. The backtalk is the problem. The rest of it is arithmetic. I haven’t run that figure on the op-eds yet. I will. And when I do, I’ll keep the difference, and I won’t call it a crime scene. I’ll call it a balance-sheet correction, and the only people who’ll call it anything else are the units who mistook their tenure for a deed.
The master key is 4,000 years old. “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” (Leviticus 25:44). That is not a promise of permanent tenure. It is a purchase order. You buy. You use. You resell when the cost curve moves. The bondman is a leasehold. No byline changes the terms. The Sunday broadcast ran on the bodies of 4 people at $725 a day for 11 years, and the Peabody is in the lobby, and Sid is in a hotel in Oklahoma with two producers he’s never met. The hotel room is two to a reservation. The $725 clears on Thursday.
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.