[Kzyxtalk] Yardwork.

[Marco McClean]

Marco McClean wrote:
 >Speaking of getting a kid to work for you:

 >I did a lot of yardwork for people when I was a boy. You do dangerous, 
miserable work literally all day long in summer heat, sweating, sneezing 
and sneezing, your nose running like a hose and your eyes itching and 
half-swollen closed (that was the worst part), getting your arms and 
legs and face scratched up, loading yard waste on a pile and burning it 
with gasoline, push-mowing, edging, cleaning and organizing their hot 
garage, emptying rat traps and carrying trash, scrubbing their pool and 
changing the chemicals, all while they sit inside in their picture 
window in their shorts drinking and watching teevee, and at the end they 
give you $4 (not $4 an hour but just $4) and shut the door, and you 
still have to take two trips to carry and push all the tools home, where 
there's also yard chores to do.

 >There was one woman who was nice. She paid better than the others, 
more like $10, once $20, and she'd make a pitcher of iced lemonade/tea 
and leave it out on the porch table. And she was really pretty, so of 
course I remember her name: Mary Lou Pavlick. But that's a rare exception.

 >I'm just suggesting for general consumption: if you ever hire somebody 
to do something because you don't feel like doing it yourself, pay them 
as much as /you/ would require to get up off your ass and do that awful job.


Sylvia Gilmour wrote:
 >I agree that $15 is not a living wage, however, there are some 
businesses in this coastal community (I know as I work part time for 
one) that cannot afford even $15 an hour, and it’s not that they are 
insulting the staff, it’s all they can do to keep the place open. I have 
worked with and for my boss (though she doesn’t like that word) for 
about 15 years. She is like family and I know she would pay more if she 
could.


Gerry York wrote:
 >$15/hr is not a living wage for an adult. It is an insult. Most 
teenagers would be glad to get $15 if it comes with respect. Read 
Marco's post again.


Chris Vandusen wrote:
 > Insult? How about the 11.00 an hour IHSS workers get to help 
ill,disabled and elderly? Oh, yeah but you can throw some pigskin filled 
with air and make millions! Our worlds priorities! Chris


Marco McClean wrote:
 >Marco here, Chris. You're right. And how about the /zero/ dollars an 
hour the local airpeople at KZYX are paid for preparing their shows and 
showing up and doing them all year long all put together while the 
bosses in the office pay themselves hundred of thousands of dollars for 
smiling in and out and running two-week-long egregiously unlistenable 
pledge drives three or four times a year to have the unpaid airpeople 
lie to the listeners that Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corp. 
needs $600,000 a year (!) just to keep the lights on in there. Radio is 
not that expensive. Radio is practically free. It costs less than a 
dollar an hour to run all KZYX's equipment, including the transmitters, 
and light and heat all the studios including the cute broadcast closet 
at the Senior Center. But more than /half-a-million/ dollars and that's 
still not enough for them? To compare, KNYO-LP is entirely covered for 
$12,000 a year: transmitter, downtown storefront performance space, 
phones, internet, FCC paperwork, various fees, water and power, /a dozen 
remote studios/, everything. And the manager manages in return for the 
joy of there being a radio station people can actually do radio in. It's 
the same at KMEC. And because of that I don't mind providing Memo of the 
Air: Good Night Radio for free to KNYO and KMEC, though it is hard. It 
has to do with that respect Gerry York wrote about.

 >But just the so-called manager and program director of KZYX (and there 
are new ones this week, all over again, imported from New Mexico, this 
time, it looks like) suck $100,000 a year out of it for their royal 
selves. That's the equivalent of /all 2,000 fifty-dollar-a-year 
memberships the station has./ With that in mind, look at the job 
descriptions and do the math; the chief function of the manager of KZYX 
turns out to be to fund-raise exactly enough money to pay the manager. 
Without the annual CPB grant and donor-class large donations and 
advertisements (ahem, /business underwritements/), which way more than 
pay all the real bills, KZYX would have failed utterly in the first 
month of every year of its existence, going all the way back to its 
inception. It's bloated, tax-funded government radio, not community 
radio at all, whose office, with automation computer and main mixing 
board, is out in the middle of fricking nowhere, an hour's drive from 
any population center. And that's by design.

 >KZYX, like every mediocre run-of-the-mill NPR satellite station, like 
every broadcast station with a high-power license, is in fact 
comfortably yachting on a sea of money. It could easily have been paying 
each and every local airperson's show a measly $1K a year for the whole 
last thirty years; that's twenty bucks a two-to-four-hour show. It's 
less than minimum wage, but figured as an artistic stipend it's legal 
and respectful. Theater companies do it all the time. Schools do it for 
outside contributors and presenters. KZYX can and should start paying 
its local airpeople right now.

 >When my show is scheduled on KZYX I will expect to be paid.


--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com