Corinne is a body on the wash line in the central kitchen I run under contract for a school district that’s closing an $87 million shortfall this year. She’s 46. She stands 9 hours and 40 minutes a day on the bare concrete behind the tray run, because the anti-fatigue matting for her 62-foot line — $2,397 in the quote I never signed — is an item I do not budget where the children eat. The tray your child takes at lunchtime travels through her line at a price that depends on her floor staying hard. She asked for the mat in March. I moved the request to the budget line labeled “unbounded.” The Lord counts the stars; I count the trays.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board is right about Seattle, and I say this without rancor: the Education Association voted 91% to strike; the full-time teacher averages $117,000; the classified staff in the same schools averages $67,858; the city faces an $87 million shortfall; the 2022 strike lasted 5 days and won 7% the first year, then 4%, then 3%. They name the union’s power accurately. Their error is the same error the good taxpayer makes: they watch the bargaining table and never the price list above my kitchen door, where the shortfall is already priced into my trays.
Widen the frame.
When the Seattle teachers withheld their labor, Washington state called it illegal and fined no one. Illegal without a price is not illegal; it is a form of contract. My kitchen has no union and no strike vote, and for honest arithmetic I don’t need one: the vote would be 1 member in favor, 0 against, and the member who attends the vote is me. That is the advantage of at-will, which the editorial board treats as a line item in someone else’s bargaining. My at-will is a consent decree, and the consent is the applicant’s.
Iris works the same contract one floor down and 4 hours earlier — the night prep line, a 4:00 AM start the board added when the shortfall widened. Her left shoe has a hole over the second toe, and the uniform the district “provides” is a cotton smock documented in Appendix 19 of the contract as the approved dress code. Her line nets me $0.0009 a tray. I don’t believe in candlelight. I believe in the contract.
Now walk with me to a different school board, the one the editorial didn’t mention. Tawana is a body in the aide pool I run outside Chattanooga. She’s 36. She sits one-on-one with the eight-year-old your district codes “special education” — DeShawn, who can’t read his own name. The Chromebook the district loaned your kid this fall came off a vendor whose invoices I’ve been writing for 9 years. The Title-I paperwork in the folder by your fridge has Tawana’s hours in column F. The property-tax bill that arrives in November pays her $14.20 an hour. By “body” I mean the woman whose hand is the reason that boy hasn’t yet been removed from the classroom and institutionalized. God attends to DeShawn. I attend to the line.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them. The district bills Tawana at $34 an hour. Her wage is $14.20. The spread is mine. The 3% raise the Seattle Education Association is currently picketing for would compress that spread by $0.57 an hour. I’m not budgeting it. I’m telling you this for your own good. Tawana bills 30 instructional hours a week. $19.80 an hour on the spread. $594 a week. $30,888 annualized, before overhead. Her 3% raise costs me $437 a year per aide. Across my 84-aide pool, $36,708. Across my nine districts, $330,372. I keep the $330,372. You keep the spreadsheet that doesn’t show it.
The respirator Tawana’s not been issued would cost $34. The CPR training the general duty clause requires would cost $42. The two omissions on her station save me $76 a year. The $76 isn’t a budget line. The $76 is the line.
Doreen is Tawana with a worse back. The line ate her in March and moved on in 9 days. Her replacement started at $14.20. The aide pool runs at 14% annual churn. I’ve planned for the churn. The 14% is a maintenance interval, not a tragedy. The new hire is the worn-out ox leaving my books before the line buries itself.
This isn’t a cruelty I invented. It’s a curriculum. I’m the Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics. The textbook is mine. Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, third edition. Chapter Six: the paraprofessional as a mispriced input. I want you to understand I’m not unusual. The young woman who priced your district’s aide contract sat in my seminar 3 years ago, third row. She ran the Chapter 6 case in 11 minutes. They arrive sentimental. Most of them still believe the boy’s literacy matters. I cure it by October. By spring the best of them price the spread before I do. One of them set the wage on the aide pool your kid’s classroom depends on. I say that with a teacher’s pride. The model isn’t dying with me. I’ve graduated nineteen classes of it, and each one is colder than the last. Which is exactly what you want from a discipline that’s maturing.
Here’s what the 91% strike vote does for me, stated plainly. The cohort that walks out this September is the cohort that doesn’t walk in next September. The cohort that doesn’t walk in starts at $14.20. The cohort that walked out trained someone else’s children for 11 years and is now someone else’s problem. I haven’t priced the next district’s 4% line item. I haven’t had to check. The architecture is older than the Federal Reserve.
Widen the frame with me. The arrangement isn’t new. It’s the oldest there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. Cato the Elder, Roman agricultural manager of 200 BC, kept the same books I keep. He wrote, and I quote:
Sell the worn-out oxen, the blemished cattle, the blemished sheep, the wool, the hides, the old wagon, the old iron tools, the old slave, the sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous.
Cato had to feed the slave. I’ve arranged for you to feed the aide. The arithmetic has improved. The principle hasn’t. Cato’s worn-out oxen are my worn-out aides. The 14% churn is the same interval under a different name.
And here is the old law, for those who think the contract is new — read it as if it were statute, because it is.
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
That is Leviticus 25:45, and I do not quote Scripture as a chapter of my manners. I quote it as a rate card. The strangers that sojourn are not the district’s tenured classroom. They are the ones I give a sojourn — the second shift, the prep line, the classified. The pattern is not a new machine. It is the same old share of the ground under every season.
So I close where the editorial began, with the school year. The teachers strike, the district blinks, and the sky stays dry. The children stand in the hallway. Corinne stands on the concrete where the $2,397 mat would have been, working a warm body through the whole year we scheduled. DeShawn’s Chromebook will be in his backpack tomorrow. Tawana will be at station 4. The 91% will walk out on Tuesday. The 91% won’t be there in 2027. The invoice bills either way.
Sterling A. Varice Dean of Instruction, Warden University College of Business and Economics Richmond, Virginia
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.