To think that SOME high earners don't work that hard?

[Usernamemcname]

I'm a domestic cleaner. The people I clean for are usually quite well off, five bedrooms in a posh suburb of an expensive city. They are often in whilst I clean, sometimes they come back whilst I'm here.
I see a lot and I know they are in quite high paid jobs. Yet they always seem to be 'working from home' also known as fannying about the kitchen a lot and playing X Box. A lot of them either start late (10am so they miss the traffic) and finish early. One dad picks his daughter up from school every day even though his wife is at home!
I was always told that you have to work hard to get what you want in life, so why do I have to work two jobs whilst my partner works 45+ hours and we just scrape by? What have these people done to be so lucky? They're not old, seem around my age, what jobs do they do and why can't I do them, I have a degree.
Life just seems unfair sometimes. Unless it's a doctor, I'm sure I could have a crack at it.

@Xenia black people in the UK aren't one homogeneous group. The people of Indian heritage I was educated with at school, college and university plus work with if they aren't Muslim come from a select few castes.

I’m a very high earner and I was thinking last week about whether it’s justified. My job is intense and I’m in the office at 6.30 every day. I work from home one day a week so I can do drop off and pick up from school. My cleaner also comes on this day so probably thinks I’m lazy as I put on washing or cook in between meetings...

I’m not saving lives like a nurse or a doctor but the work I do generates a lot of money and I think it’s fair that a chunk of it comes back to me. In theory (and putting privilege aside as I didn’t have any) you could have made the same moves I did after university and be doing my job now. Hard work alone isn’t what gets you well paid. You have to be smart about the moves you make and sacrifice quite a lot on the way up. I often wonder if it was worth it.

Cola, I know and indeed the UK considered changing our discrmination law to make discrimation the bsais of Indian caste illegal as some of that had been imported to the UK. However Leigh Day advertising for black London solicitor apprentices does tihnk it worth having that one "group" for hiring. I wonder if they discriminate on age - so if you ahve a black London woman of 30 or 40 with children who did A levels in London applying would they take her on e.g. if our original poster here met those criteria?

There is a big issue with positive discrimination measures those in how they can generalise. Eg I knwo a good few Nigerians who were erducated at UK boarding schools - I remember one lawyer my age in Lagos when I was over there for example and she had lots of others she knew. Those are not disadvantaged in the same way as people from poverty like Sunderland white (or black) boys where some of my famliy are from. Anyway I don't want to deflect the very interesting thread although it goes to the heart of how we all do - where we are from, our families, support at home, mental and physical health, internal robustness and confidence, knowledge, inherent IQ, propensity to work hard and all the rest.

Probably a computer could do a reasonable job of comparing job prospects between a white working class boy in Sunderland with an IQ of 120 and a London low or high caste Indian girl, a Chinese boy from Manchester etc etc and in theory you could feed in all kinds of criteria eg alcoholic parent or whatever and end up with an attempt at parity for your group of students all with say AAB grades at A level.

Since when are Indian people classed as black? Have we gone back a century?

LonginesPrime I think it's an American thing. Anybody not white is black. I found that in my academic texts written by Americans (on social work) they'd describe South Asian, north Asian, black African, Carribbean, Japanese, Hispanic people all as "black" or "people of colour".

I found it infuriating. I think that British English (as a language) is much more nuanced.

@LonginesPrime I attended a talk given by Shami Chakrabati (I guess Baroness now) and she described herself as a black woman. It might be a generational think as I don't think Asian women my age (30s) tend to consider themselves black.

What are people classing as high earnings ?

I’m not sure it matters what people are classifying it as as long as it’s over min wage or UK average wage job. Because that’s the comparison. Regardless of ‘high-earning’ meaning £40k or £200k.

(Absolutely, I agree. Asians are not black. The only point that arose was the the original poster may be black and I suggested some internships for black people (which are obviously not open to Indian, Chinese or white working class boys from Sunderland etc). The legal profession has more Asians than in the general population. In fact it is one of the professions with the most data on the subject as it is gathered and published anually. 14% of lawyers are Asian against about 7% of the UK population. Black people comprise about 3% of the population and 3% of lawyers I think. )

However I don't think the thread is really about race so I don't want to distrack it.

What are people classing as high earnings ?

on this forum? Anyone earning more than they do!

@ColaFreezePop Yes, I know it can be tricky, but at least if people are aware of biases, they can hopefully try to be more open-minded and look beyond the sailing clubs and Russell Group unis not he CVs.

DH is from a very privileged background and had a tendency to recruit people very like him, who just came over better in the interviews due to being well-spoken and highly confident. I volunteer with diversity groups and have helped him to realise the unconscious bias he takes into assessing applications. He now assesses applications very differently.

He's really keen on more gender diversity in his team at present, and spent a lot of time drafting a job spec that would appeal more to women and other diverse groups (as if you want good women to get the role, you need good women applying in the first place), testing it with an on-line tool and with me and women in his team. It was a great spec, but unfortunately when it went on-line, the HR team removed all the special wording we'd so carefully put together, and if you run the spec through the diversity tool software now, it's back to being male, and only a couple of women applied. SO frustrating.

@Xenia threads evolve when more information is given.

@Pollaidh I hope your DH isn't doing what many companies do when they are looking to recruit people to increase diversity. This is recruit people who are black, gay, lesbian, female, disabled, etc but on every other characteristic they are essentially the same as everyone who is white and privileged. (There is a Beeb program called "How to break into the elite" that illustrates this with the presenters own story.)

@edgeofheaven up until about the mid-80s Asian people were frequently classed as black in the UK. There are charities and organisations that still have "Black" in the title but are only focused on helping Asian people, or their remit involves helping Asian people as well as anyone from an ethnic minority.

Sorry, I may have started the earnings debate!!! I said over 50k as high earnings as average wage here is apparently just over 21k and a lot class us as rich (apparently!!)

Cola, it is an interesting issue. For example if you are recruiting sureons they need to have passed the exams and ditto lawyers so to some extent you do need characteristics similar to those already there.

In recent tests of a new exam for solicitors it was found that non white people did extremely badly in the essays but fine in the multiple choice questions. Being able to write and speak English is an essential requirement for lawyers - it is what we are paid for at times, one word wrong and you could lose your client £100m in some documents. So the difficult issue or perhaps it is not difficult at all - is should they change the test. www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/sqe-regulator-ponders-pure-multiple-choice-to-help-minority-candidates-/5071190.article

Being able to write and speak English is an essential requirement for lawyers - it is what we are paid for at times

I'm not sure I would count Legalese as English! I read a lot of legal documents and usually it's a language all of its own!

I'm not sure I would count Legalese as English! I read a lot of legal documents and usually it's a language all of its own

Yes and ever word counts. Every comma counts.

I think it's an American thing. Anybody not white is black. I found that in my academic texts written by Americans (on social work) they'd describe South Asian, north Asian, black African, Carribbean, Japanese, Hispanic people all as "black" or "people of colour"

No it isn't. We don't refer to any non-white person as black. How ridiculous.

I don't know if they have ditched the essays because foreigners found them hard and their pass rate was lower (more of the non whites taking the samle SQE1 test were from abroad so not surprising they were not so good at essay questions). It is probably still being discussed. This exam is instead of reading law for 3 years at university or doing a one year GDL law course so will be quite a big change, supposedly starting in 2021 although people will need some kind of course or self learning at home before they can take the SQE1 exam.

On the question of what is high pay as someone said above it tends to be any sum higher than the mumsnetter earns.
I cannot remember what the original poster earns in her jobs in mental health for the NHS working with offenders I think it was (and her part time cleaning job). My suggestion of working towards NHS porocurement job I posted paying £50k and the 5 year solicitor apprentice for people who are black (Leigh Day by the way in the ad use Afro-Caribbean term I think which may be slightly outdated now but I am sure they mean well) probably would ultimately mean higher pay than her current job.

Sometimes there is a "jam tomorrow" type issue for people to consider. What will you sacrifice today for something better in the future? Would you take 2 weeks off to have a baby in as I did? Would you graduate a teetotal virgin aged 20 as I did? Would you not collect children grom school but pay someone else to do so as we did? Would you hire someone to look after children on Sat and Sun morning which we did at times so you could work or study - as we did? We all have our own limits and boundaries. None are right or wrong - just different.

How much money you are paid tends to be related to how much money you generate/can save for someone else, rather than how hard you work. You can spend every hour that God sends cleaning houses, and be very good at cleaning houses, but it is never going to be worth much more than minimum wage to the person who pays you. Someone who works in B2B sales, finance, upper management etc is going to be worth a huge amount of money to someone.

I’d say YABU - that’s as lazy a judgement as if one of them suggested you haven’t worked hard enough if you don’t have a career like theirs, since you have a degree. I’d fall into the well paid, wfh group. I am now at a point in my career where I get lots of flexibility and high earnings - but I researched careers extensively and then stuck at the same career for 15 years and started a consultancy to train other people how to do it and now that means I don’t ever miss a school play etc. People might think I’m lucky but it took a lot of work to get to where I am.

@ColaFreezePop

Absolutely not. I volunteer for a social mobility charity, and we've spoken a lot about his previous assumptions, so he's very much looking for social diversity as well. As I said in one of my previous posts, he used to be won over by the confidence and speaking ability of your typical middle class white guy, and similar interests etc... He's digging much deeper into the applications now, and overlooking surface polish, to find people from non-traditional (i.e. low income, first generation to uni, non RG unis, people who have done apprenticeships and worked up) backgrounds who have high potential.