to think that the more superfluous your job the more money you earn

[ohdobehave]

ie. nurse, social worker, mp, police officer, teacher, fireman, street sweeper, midwife, etc. pretty badly paid compared to ... footballer, actor, merchant banker, model, etc.
just wondering

purple I don't understand why you think you are not employable outside the care industry (I have to say I hate the idea that caring for our vulnerable loved ones is an 'industry' but that's what the Conservatives want).

There seems to be two conflicting rules about wages:

Essential, relatively low paid jobs (care workers/nurses etc.) are poorly paid because they would leave and do something else if they were better paid, as higher pay would remove the sense of altruism and vocation

High earners like wankers are well paid because they would leave and do something else if they were paid less as they have absolutely no sense of altruism and vocation

Nearly all actors earn virtually nothing.

I can't afford to go freelance at the moment as I have a mortgage and bills to pay.

I call myself unemployable outside what i'm experienced in because that's how it is. I am articulate, well educated and not yet thirty. I have had my CV professionally checked. I fail to get interviews for anything but care work.

I can't retrain as a teacher because I can't afford to take a year out of work. The starting salary is 18k ish and my mental health is not up to the stress of handling our education system. I would absolutely love to retrain as a music therapist, and have discussed this with DP, but I haven't enough experience or maturity to be a therapist - I'm really quite self-aware

They way I see it, donkeyderby, is that the more of a knobend you are, the more people will pay you so they don't have to work with you. Therefore middle management attracts dickheads because it keeps them at arms length from the real management, who don't want to get their hands dirty by actually doing "real" work, and keeps the drudges like me happy because they have something other than the subsistence level wages to whinge about.

Yes, I am in a very cynical mood tonight.

things like doctors/lawyers/teachers all require a lot of education before hand, as well as competition to get into it. Nurses should be paid more than they are.

You've made me laugh with that second-to-last paragraph, purplepidjin

Sorry, for some reason I'm feeling bitter and twisted tonight. It brings out the best worst in me and I start speaking my mind. Haven't even had wine!!

LadySybil I have a high level of education - well, I have a lot of letters after my name

Means fuck all in the real world.

purple - music therapy, what an awesome career. I considered this once, a long time ago. But there's very little work available, and I should think even less nowadays with cuts, etc.

The singing with kids thing is something you could possibly fit around your normal workday, depending on what your schedule's like. I know someone who does a couple of hours a week and earns £40 an hour. No training needed, just experience of music/ working with children (presumably you're a mother and so have oodles of experience of both?!)

Basically, the kinds of people whose main motivation is money would be totally useless at the public service jobs mentioned by the OP. The types of people who take those jobs do them for other reasons as well as paying the bills, so employers can pay much less and still recruit.

Conversely, superfluous jobs that exist purely to make money for self-serving individuals attract self-serving individuals who only want to make money, so they have to pay much much more to get those people out of bed in the morning.

I like your analysis purple. It rings true.

gaelic, I think mine is just a ruder version of yours. You're very diplomatic

I'm not a Mum, I just hang around the SN boards doling out anecdotes of my experiences with SN (particularly ASD) kids. And, while I would love to do Jo Jingles etc, I work shifts. 12 hour shifts. On a fortnightly pattern. Oh, and youth work every Thursday night. And trying to physically recover from the emotionally draining shifts in between... And trying to lose a bit of weight/get fit/fight the depression (which are pretty much all the same activity, luckily)

Hey purple. There is hope. I'm 37 and am now a professional musician after years of doing monkey office jobs for f all. It is far from easy, but totally possible even at my age!

i think the people who do really important stuff get paid really poorly -yes.

They do much that society cannot survive without. The most fabul;ous people i know display that through the work they do for others. But actuallythey are not all in vocational careers.

Some people who earn a lot of money do contribute too.
the idea that anyone with a big pay packet would screw over their own grandmother and don.t give a shit about anyone else is really wearing

Hmm - most actors aren't exactly overpaid.

People are paid the smallest amount of money that will get someone to do the job.

It has nothing to do with what they are worth.

Chocolocolate/WilheminaAteHer - High pay for doctors and the treatment of Junior doctors are both results of their union restricting supply in order to maintain rates.

Where I work there is a running joke that if you are doing a job that is vital to the running of the organisation you will inevitably be on a short term, fixed contract which will run out before HR get around to extending it.

The amount of valuable people we have lost because of this is truly staggering and the sheer waste involved in recruitment into temp jobs (because of cutbacks we are no longer allowed to employ anyone on a permanant basis) is frightening to say the least.

I work in a "team" of 1. Just me. When my contract expires in May I may have to walk away leaving a highly expensive system that supports the income generating part of the organisation with no one to run it. And more importantly I walk off with the detailed and intimate knowledge of how the system works in conjunction with all the other organisation systems. Go figure.

Bit of a crap generalisation.

I agree with TheCoalition (the poster, not the actual coalition), it's about market forces.

The economics of different kinds of jobs works differently, I don't think its quite so simple as the 'heart-of-gold-people-with-a-vocation' and 'self-serving-superfluous-fat-cats'situation that gaelic and others describe.

It depends on training, scarcity, risk, who else is willing to do that job, and the impacts of technology...filtered through the good old laws of supply and demand.

So at the bottom end of the salary league you have jobs that could and are done by people willing to take a minimum wage, and without much training or capital - school leavers, recent immigrants without recognised qualifications or capital, parents (mainly mums) who want local, part-time jobs.For example - care, retail, cleaning, childcare, call centers, catering, laboring etc...If you are doing one of these jobs, however long your experience you could always be replaced by someone cheaper and so there isn't much of a career ladder.

Then there are jobs with a big upfront investment in training, or apprenticeship of some sort - traditional jobs with formal barriers - like lawyers, accountants, doctors, and those where you just have to put a lot of low paid time in in the early days to get connections and experience - journalism, policy and politics, the arts.

There are 'craft' jobs that you get better at over time after initial training - teacher, plumber, chef etc..your earning power goes up, but it reaches a ceiling beyond which it can't go much further unless you go into management or train others.

Then there are winner-take-it-all jobs like being Robbie Williams, David Beckham etc.. where one person can earn millions, and thousands of others aspire to that dream but don't make much of a living out of it.

Then there are careers where you take a risk with your money, or someone else's and this is where the biggest money is - financial sector, CEOs etc... At this end the reward-for-risk argument has pushed up salaries and bonuses, but a lot of people are paid too much because as it turns out they were just riding the market not creating real value, or were benefiting because others covered their risks(as with the bank bail outs.

These are not hard-and-fast categories, and new technologies and business models can change the economics of different jobs over time, but I think they are useful to think about why different people get paid different amounts.

Definition of Superfluous:

1. exceeding what is sufficient or required
2. not necessary or relevant; uncalled-for

No, I don't think the majority of high-paid jobs falls into those categories.

The exception is probably the highly paid minority of sports people, entertainers and writers. But, I don't want to live in a world devoid of culture and competitive sports, and the recognising those financially who are the most talented in these areas is an inevitable by-product of this.

A lot of people dismiss everyone working in finance as superfluous, but when we need a student loan, or a mortgage, or to invest in a pension, we need the products available to us. Someone has to work out those products (and yes, some of those products have been got wrong in recent years, but that doesn't mean the job itself is superfluous).

Agree, Checkmate. Most jobs are stricly unnecessary for the survival of the human race. However many of us make use of the products of so-called "superfluous" jobs. E.g. people who think acting is a waste of time - are they going to give up watching TV dramas/soaps?

Its supply and demand.

If you do a job that everyone wants to do, or anyone can do, you will get low pay.

If you do one that only very few talented people can do, or no-one wants to do, then you will get high pay.

There are very few top calibre footballers or bankers, but there is a huge oversupply in nurses/teachers/carers. Thus the pay gap.

Also superfluous is an odd word to choose, following a list of people in sporting/entertainments/finance etc. These are as important to society as any other industry.

That doesn't follow though in local government or anywhere else where jobs have been subject to job evaluation. Then it boils down to exactly how much dexterity you need to do your particular computer work, or how many heavy boxes you lift in a day. Except when you get to "management" level posts when the language becomes more woolly and about how much "planning" you do. Now why should somebody who "plans" 3 years or more ahead be paid more than somebody who works outside in all weathers, or someone who does vital work caring for the needy? No reason, it's just established in the consciousness. The so-called objective job evaluation exercise is nothing of the sort, it merely sets in stone existing prejudices. One place I worked even admitted that when scoring they first looked at the person's grade - the lower grades were unable to score highly, thus perpetuating the pay differential. Go figure.

Not all lawyers get paid well. DP gets quite irate when people assume he gets paid a lot. Considering we can't afford to buy a house and he gets paid similar wages to our none qualified friends I think he questions why he spent so long and so much money on training.

Supply and demand as well as private v public sector.

It's also about more that your basic salary. A huge reason the the public sector has lower pay is because traditionally there has been a trade off in job security and excellent pensions etc.

Also you'll often find that responsibility for things like corporate manslaughter will rest with an individual and they will be paid for that risk.

At the end of the day employers will pay as little as they can get away with.

don't agree that consultants only work 9=5. My friends hubby is a surgeon, he may get a good wage but he has studied very hard, and has a LOT of responsibility.