That not all jobs are equal

[Jobqualifications]

There’s often a lot of heightened emotions about salaries on here, where low wages jobs are equally, if not harder work than high paying jobs.
What do people think makes a high paid job? Why do people seem to resent them?
I’ve been a SAHM, and for me that was my hardest job ever….predominantly out of boredom and monotony.

Pay is obviously not proportional to how hard you work.

I expect someone has researched a viable formula but there would need to be factors for:
How hard the work is.
How much raw talent is needed to do it well, vs anyone being able to do it.
How much training, qualifications and experience are needed to do it, on top of that raw talent.
How rare it is for someone to have the necessary talent, training, qualifications and experience - and how many other employers are competing for that talent pool - and how much of a difference to the employer's profit margin will a top-notch employee make vs a mediocre one?
How much of a requirement for antisocial hours is there.
How feasible it is to have a comfortable work-life balance.
How much is the work genuinely fun or rewarding in non-monetary ways that make it an attractive option even if badly paid

There's probably more factors than this.

But clearly there's a lot of relatively low paid jobs that honestly score so low on all these scales that it's clear they will always be badly paid. There's also a lot of jobs that are honestly a lot less hard work but the people who can do that work well are so rare that they can command a high salary. That doesn't mean they don't deserve their high pay, their time is a limited quantity which has a high real value and they have every right to grant it to the highest bidder.

I wondered this once , I was in an IT job, and staring out of the window across at the hospital, and thinking, the nurses need at least as much training as we do, probably more, and if they make mistakes, people die, but if we do, no one dies. We just lose money. Yet we get paid more.

It is the money-making, mostly - such is capitalism. There's also plenty of evidence that male-dominated jobs tend to pay better. In some professions, as the percentage if women increase, the average pay tends to go down.

The most stressful, difficult job I've ever had where I felt I was working the hardest both physically and mentally was a minimum wage retail job.

I'm in a higher skilled, higher responsibility and 10x higher paid position now, and it's a fecking breeze. I DEFINITELY worked harder at the retail job than I do now, I'm practically a lady of leisure these days. I'm paid for my experience and the quality of my work now, not the quantity and how much of it I could squeeze into 10 hours a day.

Pay does not consistently reflect how hard the work is (physically or mentally), the hours worked, the value of the work to society, the level of responsibility, the amount of training, how hard someone is to replace, or anything else. It is simply not something you can reliably quantify.

I couldn't agree more with @EBearhug , however, nurses paid so little is the outcome of state being almost monopoly here in the UK. It's not like this in EU where nurses are paid way much better. But we wouldn't entertain discussion about NHS privatisation. E.g. German healthcare systems is considered way superior to NHS, yet it's fully private.
The issue is that low pay and poor working conditions don't attract the most capable people in nursing and it's a vicious cycle now for NHS (don't shoot me for this, I'm unfortunate enough to have spent last year in multiple hospitals stays and appointments to see how incompetent and disinterested and plain rude many of our nurses and doctors are)

I earn a decent salary, which reflects the expectation that I have to work extra hours, and the weight of professional responsibility if I were ever to make a mistake (which I can’t really afford to do!)

But I love my job. It doesn’t feel like work, and it doesn’t feel difficult. Sometimes it’s stressful but it feels like a good, motivating form of stress.

Id find it far harder working a minimum wage job in retail, so no, salary does not reflect difficulty IMO!

A sahp isn't a job it's a choice.

I think we all realised during lockdown how underpaid but desperately needed,certain job were.
Such as shop workers .

People are paid what a company thinks they are worth.
It's not more complicated than that.
A sahp isn't paid because it's not a job or a career. It's a lifestyle choice.

A higher paid job has more responsibility, more knowledge needed etc.

Not necessarily.

DH earns 3 x my salary. If I make a bad decision at work, a child could come to serious harm or even be killed. If DH makes a bad decision at work, his company could lose a lot of money.

We both need a lot of specialist knowledge in our roles. His knowledge enables him to make a lot of money for his company and their clients whereas mine relates to the protection of children. My knowledge isn't as marketable as his.

DH works hard and has a lot of people depending on him, but he often says that the reason he is paid so much more than I am is because "society values the wrong things".

A video just popped up on this, she puts it well.

I don't think half of senior office workers on great salaries would be able to do a teaching job. It's hard!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/3774671729485583

I think I’d also put teachers / social workers with the police and nurses in my previous posts tbf. I take my hat off to all of them!

A lifestyle choice?

Is being full time carer to a family member a lifestyle choice?
The cost of paying for care can be more than the carer can afford. It isn't a choice.

It's mostly qualifications, class and privilege. People don't want supermarket workers or teaching assistants to earn near their wage so wages are suppressed. Some jobs are seen as for working class people or more female oriented so they're seen as devalued or easier. Personally I don't think working in a supermarket is that easy, especially with all the abuse you get these days.

Doctors earn £15.53 an hour. Used to be prestigious. Lots now looking at unemployment.
You earn more in Aldi.

Who are these people who ‘suppress’ the wages of retail staff and TAs because they don’t want them to approach their own?

The peak responsibility, in my eyes, is why you’re getting the higher salary than someone who ‘does more’. With your neck being truly on the line. I do, however, think nurses and teachers should be paid far more.

A lifestyle choice?

Is being full time carer to a family member a lifestyle choice?
The cost of paying for care can be more than the carer can afford. It isn't a choice.

Some people have more specialist skills that mean only a limited amount of people can do that job.

Also it’s basic supply and demand. Key rule of capitalism. There is only one Mo Salah for example, but a million shelf stackers.

My dad was a coal miner who started down the pit aged 14. He got gassed, ran over by a pit pony and had a roof collapse on him. Multiple broken bones and lung problems. All those hours underground in the damp and dark, often crouching for hours. Physically demanding but also mentally demanding in the sense of being enclosed underground. He got paid a pittance for it because “anyone” could be a miner. He was actually an extremely intelligent man and had he been born into a different family, would have gone to university and became a doctor (his dream).

I don't believe the fact people were born with the gift of intelligence means they should have a good life and earn a lot while someone else's hard work gets them nothing in comparison because they work their fingers to the bone on a minimum wage just because they weren't lucky in the genes they inherited and it doesn't always come down to education some are intellectually challenged and try their very hardest but are destined to live in poverty and work bloody hard for pittance.
Yes I agree a skill is always going to be worth more and pay more but people are paid at their intellectual level which is destined at conception for most.

In my personal experience, the more I've been paid the less hard I've worked. Mostly because I've gotten better at my job I suppose but also because I'm less managed and watched over so I get away with more. And people think I work harder now than ever!

So maybe it's that. I know this isn't true of everyone's experience but it is of mine and maybe people see that this is sometimes how it is. I worked wayyyy harder as a minimum wage cleaner (which I did for 6 years!) than I do now as upper management for a high profile institution but I get way more undue recognition now than I ever did then...

There's lots of factors that lead to a high salary. Qualifications, hours, responsibility, scarcity of skills are all factors but some sectors do pay more for jobs of similar qualifications, hours etc.

The jobs that are directly linked to making a person who has money, more money seem to be the best paid.

DoAWheelie

There are people on millions who spend all day golfing and people on sub minimum wage working 20 hours a day.
At some stage they’ve worked or are working for their money though? Or do you mean actual sportspeople?

I'm not a high earner, but I'm a medium earner and at the top of my career ladder. I can honestly say that the higher I've climbed the easier it's got. Being paid for my knowledge, responsibility, experience and decision making capability is nowhere near as exhausting as being on the front line. Not to mention the autonomy and flexibility that means I can choose to do the most difficult tasks at a time that suits, and I'm not at any ones beck and call.

Yeah fair enough but what I see from middle and upper management is that these people never get fired, they just move up or sideways in the organisation to roles that frankly sound "made up" , no one gets fired or demoted for not producing results, there is always some BS excuse about the world climate, if customers are unhappy is the lower people dealing with them and that's that, if the profits are down, the people at the bottom get it (in the way of no w raises and staff cuts), if the profits are up the regular folk get minimal increases while the big people get bonuses and promotions.

@AGlinnerOfHope there is a difference between being a cater and choosing to stay at home to be a sahp.
The later is a lifestyle choice.

Agree it’s mostly about scarcity. After that it’s also about how “in demand” you are and the size of the benefits - financial or otherwise - your employer/customer feel they can reap from your services.