Institute for Culinary Education needs to invest in human capital

by Chad Pagano

Before I became a pastry chef, I was a ranger and sniper in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division for four years. In that job, I learned the importance of esprit de corps. If you didn’t trust and work closely with your fellow soldiers, you put everyone’s lives at risk.

There is no such team spirit at the Institute for Culinary Education, where I now teach. There’s a lack of respect for instructors, a lack of collaboration. We feel underappreciated in every way.

It didn’t use to be that way. When I first took a job at ICE in 2002, I fell in love with the school and its quality instruction, quality ingredients and family feel. I fell in love with the idea of educating the next generation of chefs.

Fifteen years later, I’m still in love with teaching, but ICE isn’t the same. The new management has a different outlook towards its employees. In May 2015, the school spent millions of dollars to relocate to Brookfield Place, a ritzy mall in Manhattan’s financial district. Instructors are still the face of the school. In its marketing materials, the school says it has the best chef instructors.

Yet the low pay and the irregular work schedules are taking a toll on them.

The starting salary for instructors hasn’t changed in years, and it’s unreasonable. New hires earn $156 per class, and a class can run three or four hours, not including prep time. That’s only $6 more than starting instructors earned 15 years ago.

I’ve been a model full-time employee yet I’m not even offered a cost-of-living raise.

Scheduling is by seniority so someone like me is fine. But instructors who have fewer years on the job are all over — they are working nights, weekends and mornings, two classes with a big gap in between, two classes in a row, three classes in a row.

There are other instructors who, like me, have been at ICE for 15, 20 and 25 years. They are dedicated to the students, and their dedication is the foundation of ICE’s success. Yet their contributions are ignored, and like new hires, they are frustrated and underpaid.

That is why we formed a union and joined the United Federation of Teachers. ICE needs to recognize that it has to invest in its human capital if it wants to continue to thrive.