Carole Osterink’s blog has a new post about the latest attack on popular programs at the Hudson Youth Center—still known to most people locally as the Boys & Girls Club. This is just the latest eruption of the same boneheaded nonsense that Carole Clark was subjected to last winter.
The whole “$50 an hour” thing is a total red herring, intended to mislead people about the true cost and benefits of the program. More honest questions would be: How much is paid per class? How many students are there? And, is the program benefitting them? The clear answers appear to be: The cost is very reasonable, the classes are popular, and seniors clearly feel they are deriving benefits.
Having lived with a yoga instructor for eight years (who taught many classes in our area), I’m a bit familiar with the economics of the profession. This is hardly a highly lucrative job by any stretch of the imagination. Most instructors do it out of dedication and a passion for helping others feel calmer and healthier. It’s hardly a way to get rich.
A typical class lasts an hour. That doesn’t include arriving early for set-up, and sticking around as students unwind and chat afterward; and the instructor doesn’t get paid extra for that time. A yoga teacher around here will typically charge between $8-$15 per student, depending whether a student pays by the class or for a whole season. (The price can be more like $20 per student or more as you get closer you to NYC.)
So if you there are about eight students in a typical class, a private instructor might gross between $64 and $120 per session.
Those are gross returns, not net profit. And as such, $50 for a class ought to be considered a tremendous bargain.
Fifty bucks is literally an unbeatable price. Trying to pay someone $25 for teaching such a class would be an insult—and anyway, it’s highly unlikely the City could ever find anyone qualified to do it at that rate. Moreover (as discussed in detail here), using an hourly rate to evaluate a freelance job like this is completely bad math.
A self-employed teacher usually only gets paid for the actual minutes the students are being instruced. Typically, s/he doesn’t get paid or reimbursed for related expenses such as travel, equipment, certification, ongoing training, phone bills, insurance, space rental, advertising, business cards, taxes, accounting, set-up and clean-up time, and the like. So that flat fee for “per hour” has to cover countless other hours of training, prep, and countless self-employment expenses.
If an instructor were teaching three classes per week at a flat fee of $50 per class, the cost of delivering free yoga classes to dozens and dozens of seniors would be about $7,500 (assuming no classes on holidays). At that price, the instructor will make very little profit, maybe a few thousand dollars per year, while members of the community enjoy free, beneficial classes.
If the people at the Hudson River Bank Foundation don’t get that, they probably shouldn’t be in banking at all. All this observations above are just Freelance Business 101. Unfortunately, one suspects that they do understand it, but are again deploying the bogus “$50 an hour” slogan as cover for going along with a political agenda driven by Hudson’s mayor.
That agenda is to push “those people” (independent professionals like Clark et al.) out of the picture. They don’t want fearless, observant eyes observing what goes on inside City-run fiefdoms. So one suspects that if another funder were to come up with the monies that HRBF plans on canceling, the City would just come up with a different excuse why such classes must be stopped.
