To believe that some professions deserve higher pay than others, regardless of education?

[OneKindDreamer]

I think it’s time we recognise that some jobs require unique skills or are more essential than others, even if they don’t require a degree. Is it wrong to believe that certain professions should be paid more simply based on their impact?

That’s an interesting way to look at it. Evaluating jobs based on their overall societal use could highlight the disparities between what society values and what roles are compensated the most. For example, we might find that essential jobs like healthcare, education, and public service rank high in societal value but often don’t reflect high pay. Conversely, high-paying roles in finance or entertainment might not have the same societal impact. It’s a thought-provoking exercise that could shed light on how we prioritise different professions and the need for a reevaluation of compensation structures.

I think we need to stop subsidising Tesco and other big corporations by topping up their low pay with benefits to bring working people up to a basic standard of living.
They need to pay a decent wage. They make massive profits. Why are we subsidising them?
It's a national disgrace that a fulltime worker can't make enough money to live.
I also think care workers need to be paid decent wages on proper contracts. If the providers can't run care homes profitably, then maybe this is where subsidies should be directed.

Public sector roles used to come with job security and good pensions as compensation for poor pay but those disappeared years ago. It's a surprise anyone works in the public sector anymore.

Absolutely, it’s fascinating how varied job experiences can be! Yeah, it’s interesting to consider that the same role can vary greatly in terms of the mental load and complexity depending on the person’s approach and cognitive style. Measuring effort, therefore, isn’t just about the tasks at hand but also about the unique skills and thought processes that each person brings to the table. Your ability to turn the department around is a testament to that!

But I struggle to recognise it as a skill. I just approached it in my normal way. It’s like a builder laying my patio described it as a really easy job. If I thought it was easy, I would do it myself 😂

footballers being paid more than doctors and anyone in the caring profession makes no sense to me (disclaimer: I hate football)

I work in a prison ...men's cat B....and I regularly think we don't get paid enough for this shit!

It's not just the obvious dangers but the hopelessness of it all

There's no money invested... I struggle to find a cup or a bin liner most nights!
The mental toll of listening to men talk about their crimes, then seeing them on the news or on here

The poor mental health and no solution... the worry as I approach a cell, what will I find this time

It's distressing

@OneKindDreamer it's easy to say that high paying roles in finance etc have lower societal value, but take away the financial sector, or make it less regulated, and the societal impact would be huge. There would be a lack of capital for investment on a personal (goodbye mortgages) and corporate level (goodbye capex). There would also be an impact on pensioners who holding their assets in funds which are managed by and invest in companies run by highly paid accountants/corporate financiers/business people. How do you unpick the value to society of a corporate treasurer, managing the funds of millions of investors, versus a nurse?

The industry I work in you are paid based on experience. A degree is great to have to break into the industry but after that it's all about the value you add and using that to progress.

Of course they do and this is already the case, so what is the AIBU?

The cost of living rose because of post-Covid inflation. Wages rose after that.

First you used mental load, but then you used the word stress. They're not the same thing and it's often more stressful to be at the bottom.

Public sector pay is very good at the lower levels compared to similar jobs in the private sector. Maybe not in se England, but they compare well in other places.

There are professional footballers on 'normal' wages though. We get to hear about the top ones so it's not that in general football pays more than medicine.

Anyone working full-time in the UK should be able to afford to raise, house and feed a family, go on the odd family holiday, buy a few Christmas presents for the children and have enough savings not to lose sleep if the boiler breaks or the car breaks down. The fact that that is so far from true should have us rioting in the streets.

I don't think salaries are particularly linked to education. Compare the current threads on academic salaries and graduate salaries and you'll quickly see that!

We tend to base pay on income generation, so someone with two minutes experience in fintech will easily out earn a career academic.

We should also award education (we so in some ways) and also things like caring. Careers like nursing, teaching, caring, childcare are woefully underpaid for the skills involved and it's because we don't properly appreciate them as a society. Also because they're done by women.

yeah, it’s hard to define “effort” though, isn’t it? Are you talking physical or our mental or just general day-to-day effort? Your effort to do a job might be different to my effort in doing a job it’s not something that can be accurately measured in any way shape or form.

@BarbaraHoward
It’s not that I don’t agree with you, but when you say able to afford to raise house and feed of Family… raise them-fine that we can do
House them- your definition of a suitable house and my definition of a suitable house would be too very different things so how do you justify that?
Feed them- again am I feeding them lobster or am I feeding them Fishfingers, so I’m guessing you mean feed the household a balanced nutritious diet, where everyone has the right amount and is never hungry. This again is very hard when everybody has a different Idea as to what a full place is and what fills them up.
go on the odd family holiday- does this mean a family holiday abroad or a family holiday in the UK and for how long one week or two weeks ?
buy a few Christmas presents for the children- again some people would be happy to spend 40 or 50 quid on a Christmas present and some people feel like they need 2 to 300.
have enough savings not to lose sleep if the boiler breaks or the car breaks down -this again circumstances and expectations. Some people are happy with having 2000 in the bank of savings. Some people need to have 20,000 because That’s how their brain works.

Again, like I say, I’m not arguing with you. I agree we should all have a living wage and we should not be able to afford what we want to afford. But it’s not a simple as that.

I dictated my message, so excuse my typos. It’s two not too…😂

I am a nurse and a qualified independent prescriber. My husband is a software engineer. I have higher level qualifications than he does, and I'd argue that my job is more useful to society. We have similar levels of seniority in our workplaces (junior management).
Of course his salary is triple mine and that is very unlikely to change any time soon!

So who decides who earns what?

I don't think this is too difficult to measure actually. The point is that some people are working full time, but are eligible for top-up benefits. That's enough to show you that the wages are not high enough.

I don't think you can do this with pay, as you still need highly qualified people to want to become highly qualified, and why would they bother if they could earn more by being a carer with fewer qualifications for e ample, so you would have lots of highly paid carers but no one working in engineering research and innovation for example ( probably rubbish example) which may eventually make elderly peoples lives eadier by inventing new drugs or equipment. I think we should make training free for people like nurses and teachers etc, as long as they stay in the public sector for a set period if time, say 5-10 years. As others have said, work based skills also need to be taken account of more than simply degrees, but many employers are too lazy or reluctant to train staff or train young people through apprenticeships, so eill employ someone ready trained through university or from abroad.

The point is though @Positivenancy that two adults working full-time on NMW can't come close to affording all that at any level. And that's before you consider single parents.

@Gwenhwyfar I totally agree wage are not high enough, what I mean by not being able is that you cannot measure people spending because they can justify it on what they think they need/deserve. And I’m not being funny when I say this, but some people can be given all the money in the world and will still be broke because they spend it on the things that they don’t actually need or they spent too much on things that they do need because to them they need a two week holiday in the Maldives when a one week holiday in Spain would suffice. Some people will spend all their money on the children’s Christmas gifts and then exclaimed they have no money for heating. It’s not up the government to make up the difference for these things in my opinion.

I think that we define impact based on what we can see and value, but don't think about how our economy is structured. I'm an accountant in a massive tech multinational. I'm paid a lot more than a nurse. I think many (including myself) would say on the face of it the nurse's job is more impactful. But if we don't do our highly technical, highly stressful job to an excellent degree, what would happen? Profit warnings, errors in financial reporting would equal a stock crash. Pension funds and institutional investors would be impacted. If it happened across many companies you'd have a full on financial crash. What happened to society the last time we had that? So I think you'd also have to totally reform the economic system as well (and we're heading to socialism/communism at that point which may or may not be an intended consequence). I do believe that my company and people like me should pay more tax and that there should be a living wage for all.

And we also know that benefits aren't sufficient. If they were, everyone who's job disappeared in March 2020 could've gone on UC under the normal UC rules and we wouldn't have needed the furlough scheme. The furlough scheme is proof that benefits aren't fit for purpose, and (non disability) in work benefits are proof that minimum wage isn't fit for purpose.