Earl is a seasonal body on my groundskeeping crew in the Virginia Piedmont — 19, hired in June, paid $7.25 an hour to run a string trimmer and a 60-inch mower across six suburban properties a day in the months when the heat index clears 100 before lunch. The hedge at 14 Sycamore Lane — the one your HOA fined you for last spring — keeps its edge because Earl’s hands held the trimmer steady at 2:14 PM in 102-degree heat while I paid him $7.25 and gave him no water. The mist and the dust and 10 hours of unshaded Virginia sun are my operating conditions. The lawn is his output and the margin is mine.
Frank Miniter wrote in Fox News this week that more than 11 million American teenagers don’t have summer jobs, and that this absence of challenge is producing a generation without the discipline to resist impractical ideologies like socialism. He’s worried about the boys who stay home. I’m not. I have the jobs. I’ve always had the jobs. I pay $7.25 an hour, and the supply — the part that arrives because a parent heard the right segment and decided his boy needed character — is thin enough that I set the rate and the rate holds. God willing, the supply holds.
Let me walk you down the cost column.
Earl’s shift starts when the trimmer starts. I schedule the first property 12 minutes from the shop so the truck rolls at 6:03 and the clock begins at the hedge. The drive is unpaid. 12 minutes, 5 days, 24 weeks — 24 hours of free transport before Earl touches a trigger. At $7.25, that’s $174 I keep by starting the clock where the grass begins.
That’s not the number I want you to hold.
The number I want you to hold is the water.
Earl works where the heat index crosses 100 by 11 AM. NIOSH guidance puts the recommended break interval at 30 minutes for heavy labor in that range. Each break costs 8 minutes of output. Sixteen breaks across a 10-hour shift. 128 minutes. At $7.25, that’s $15.50 of idle labor I’d spend to keep a boy hydrated — for a case of water that costs $4.88 at the Kroger on Route 15.
I have not purchased the case.
Earl is classified as a seasonal independent contractor. A 1099, not a W-2. The classification saves me roughly $0.92 an hour in payroll obligations I don’t remit, $240 a year in unemployment insurance I don’t carry, and the workers’ comp premium I chose not to quote. Total across my summer crew: roughly $2,700 a season.
$4.88 for the water. $2,700 for the classification. Earl, who has not had a day off in 11 days, is learning exactly the lesson Miniter intended.
You’re going to tell me this is cruel. I understand the instinct, and I want to correct it — because the correction is the lesson.
The heat is not a hazard I manage. It is a condition I operate through. The boy who shows up at 6:15 and leaves at 4:15 without a break learns something no karate lesson or coding camp can teach: the hedge does not negotiate, the truck does not wait, and $7.25 is the same whether he drinks or doesn’t. The only variable is my water bill. Which is $0. Because the bill is his body.
A wage agreed is a wage righteous. Here is the sentence:
“But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give this last worker the same as I give to you.’” — Matthew 20:13–14
Lift your eyes off Earl for a moment, because the arithmetic on Earl is one instance and the system that produces Earl is older than Earl.
The 11 million teens who don’t take summer jobs are not, as Miniter fears, a generation lost to screens. They are a generation whose parents can afford to keep them home — music lessons, soccer camps, the kind of curated summer a comfortable parent provides — and whose absence from my crew does not reduce my labor pool by one head. For every boy who stays home, there is a boy whose mother heard the same segment and drove him to my shop on a Monday morning and said, “He needs a challenge.” She was right. I provide it.
Here is what Miniter does not teach, because he has never had to price it.
In 1832, a Royal Commission in England established the principle that the condition of the pauper must always be made less desirable than the lowest-paid independent laborer. The workhouse was built to be worse than any job, so that fear of the workhouse would force acceptance of any wage. The cruelty was not a design flaw. It was the design.
Hammond said it in plainer terms on the Senate floor — a class requiring vigor, docility, fidelity. Miniter, 168 years later, wants his son to develop those same three qualities through a summer of structured challenge. He does not know he is writing Hammond’s specification for the next generation of seasonal labor. The vocabulary has changed. The requisites have not.
The summer labor pool thins every year. My cost per property has fallen 8% in 3 years. The hedge gets greener. The margin gets wider. The homes have not missed a payment. I do not forecast beyond the quarter.
Earl finished at 4:22 yesterday. He sat in the truck for 9 minutes before starting it. The GPS logs idle time, and idle time costs me nothing but is, I suppose, a form of rest he provides at his own expense. His hands smell like 2,4-D and the sunblock he bought with his own money. The hedge needs a third cut this month. I bill the homeowner $85 for a mid-season touch-up. I pay Earl $7.25 an hour. The difference buys the mower blade. And the blade is mine.
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.