Sharecropping in the Horse Industry 1.0

What follows is an email I wish I could send to what passes for our HR department: 

File under #2021Sharecropping 

Dear HR Person,

I could use some help understanding some new information about my wage.

My department admin advised me this week that my horse's board at Upper Campus has been considered a benefit at $5 per hour worked. As I have never seen this benefit listed on my paystub, and have never heard otherwise, I believed that all Equestrian Department employees – especially those who teach and supervise students – received this benefit at no cost. As a summer camp riding teacher, I saw no indication that my contract did not include a personal horse or that I earned less because my horse was in a school barn. Likewise, when I received housing as a teacher, this benefit appeared as discounted rent added and then subtracted from my paystub. 

In reviewing my most recent time cards, I calculate my horse's board benefit as $500 per month. I recall that is the amount our school charges students for privately-owned horse board and wonder why the school considers an employee benefit at the retail level. 

Additionally, our director may not have conveyed to you that I am responsible for approximately 80 percent of my horse's care, stall cleaning, turnout, hoof care, veterinary care, and I buy about 25 percent of his feed. At barns in and around our valley, $500 buys full board includes stall cleaning, feeding, and feed. In a quick internet search, I found a trainer who includes full board, two training rides, and a weekly lesson for $500. Even without an employee discount, the care my horse currently receives fits more in line with the local industry standard for a barn where owners do some or all their horses' care. Either of these calculations would make my hourly wage at least $17.50. 

As a school employee for four of the last five years, I am currently responsible for ensuring the health and well-being of between 15 and 24 horses, as well as the students I supervise and teach. With more than 50 of experience riding and caring for horses, a university degree that informs my riding instruction, and 25 years of high school classroom teaching experience, I am an asset to our school. Having my horse at the Upper Campus only increases my value to the school. I am a daily set of eyes on the horses and facilities whether I am on the work schedule or not. As I recall, administrators were as grateful for my presence in the early days of the pandemic lockdown as I was to have a place to fully quarantine. 

In short, please help me understand, one, why I receive no discount on my horse's board benefit and, two, why you would pay a less experienced employee more recently hired with fewer responsibilities fully 13 percent more than the school pays me. 

My supervisor's suggestion that I pay horse board elsewhere in the valley so as to receive a wage comparable to my less-experienced co-worker, wonderful and hardworking as she is, seems illogical. If the benefit I forfeit is worth $5 per hour, why would my wage only increase by $2.50?

This next sentence is a joke and not meant for any real email to my bosses, I promise.

Don't get me started on how the state and my unemployment insurance have been subsidizing you for my employment since 2019.

Fox, Trot, Canter, RUN!

This never-got-posted post is about eight months late. Typical. 

A California Gray Fox is my closest neighbor here in the deserted dorm village at the Ojai Valley School. He calls for a mate several times in the night and early morning. I must've done a passable imitation of a suitable lady fox night before last. When I stopped returning his screeches, he came into the courtyard and gazed up at my balcony, okay, really a metal deck in front of my window.

*****

13.July.2020 – Three months have passed since I chatted with that fox. Three fox kits were born and raised in the rocky culvert next to the barn. I've named two of the 50 or so resident lizards, Lefty and Stumpy. They've just molted (is it molting with lizards?) so I think Stumpy will be hard to find as his new tail section was looking more and more normal every week.  Lefty is missing three middle fingers on his left forelimb. Doesn't slow him down a bit.

People are still contracting COVID19 at an alarming rate here in California. Though we thought we had it wrapped up six weeks ago, we didn't and now the Southwest is the epicenter of the global pandemic. That is, the southern and western US states are gaining cases faster than anyone else in the world.

We have a fake-billionaire-reality-TV-host for a president and he appears to be trying to burn the entire country to the ground.

The school where I work is in some serious denial about the coming year. There's a so-called Roadmap to Reopening (lately I dislike the verb to open and loathe the word reopen) that fails to mention asymptomatic spread at all. It seems completely insane to write a set of rules and guidelines that makes no mention of the mode of transmission widely understood to cause 40 percent of the cases. Of course, these must be guidelines since we are asking for tons of money and probably won't make anyone do anything that endangers our chances of getting paid.

All I know is that I would not send my children to a school that pretends that 40 percent of cases in a deadly pandemic simply did not exist.

*****

Because some 70 percent of us will contract this disease eventually, according to the brainy Angela Merkel, and I have congenital risk factors that make survival a fifty-fifty shot at best, I think I must set down some notes for my sister here. She hates writing. Hates it. She's not a fan of tidying up after the dead either and I want to make it as easy as I can, should she have to sort through my crap.

If any of my friends from the early days want to remember me they will want to play good music and dance. Though some will remember the Boothbay Playhouse, others will remember studios in Santa Cruz or New York. The common denominator is dancing.

Even on horseback, it is rhythm and movement that made me me.