to be fed up of hearing 'I've worked hard for my money'

[newbluesofa]

Lots of chat on MN recently about taxes on high earners. So heard lots of 'we have this money because we work bloody hard for it' and honestly I'm sick of it and think the people who say it are selfish.

Nurses work incredibly hard, long shifts, difficult job. Carers provide absolutely essential service, again shift work, difficult hours, difficult job. Teachers provide essential work, I know multiple teachers and they all devote evenings, weekends, school holidays to the detriment of their own families. All of these jobs also have huge emotional tolls. So 'I've worked hard for my money' means nothing to me, because a lot of people work a lot harder for a lot less.

Agree with this entirely.

I’ve worked really hard to get to where I am (the fabled 6 figure salary) and the sacrifices along the way have been always working FT, babies going to nursery, working evenings, kids in after school club, holiday club and now my health.

However, I know that’s not necessarily different to lower earners but let’s be honest being a teacher/nurse/carer (paid) are all choices. No one is forcing them to do these jobs. Yes they are completely necessary and society wouldn’t function without them but each individual has chosen to do them. They could’ve chosen to do the corporate job I do instead but they don’t. All this chip on the shoulder ‘I work so hard in an essential role’ is divisive and unnecessary because as the PP says, no one is saying ‘but I work harder than you’

And curiously and coincidentally, teachers and carers are mostly women. There’s a lot of snobbery and class dividers in place, but even those women using snobbery and power games to stay on top are just women, overworked and underpaid, kicking down instead of up.

There is a certain group of right wing ‘successful’ men who ‘worked hard for their money’ driving Britain’s political and cultural direction constantly towards money being the only value.

I am particularly sickened by it all today. Britain was different once, but it’s reverted to imperial attitudes. It could have been different. It should have been different.

You’re right there are a lot of NHS and other workers who work extremely hard and I have a huge amount of respect for.
But there are also people who don’t work a single hour all week and are netting more in benefits than a full time wage.
i suspect the high earners you are referring to are fed up being clobbered in tax to pay for the latter.

Plenty of people who say it DO actually mean that lower paid workers don’t/didn’t work as hard as them. It’s seen time and time again on MN.

I'm just taking a moment to savour that typo 🐛

Women, especially from poorer backgrounds and from different locations across the UK do not have the same choices. Many of us in work now have not had good choices.

When we actually have equality of opportunity across the UK and across wealth boundaries then there may be grounds for complaint from the corporate world.

Unfortunately the only systems that tried to provide that are now dead and buried.

YANBU. High paying jobs aren’t accessible to everyone because you usually need a good education and a good brain to get the best paying roles. Many of those people also work very long hours, but long hours and hard work aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Agreed, OP. So many people who don’t earn very much at all work hard for what they get. Some people like to imply that if everyone worked hard, they’d all be well off, which of course is utter bollocks.

I think the problem is that nurses, teachers etc are underpaid as opposed to lawyers, doctors etc being overpaid.

That’s a fair point. I’m sure not everyone does work hard.

Early in my career I was taking calls before 7am, and often still at my laptop at 10pm. I would work both days of the weekend, in that I was always on my phone and emails, and on a Sunday afternoon I would actively log on. I had two days “off,” fully, in 5 years. One of them was my wedding day, the other was my FILs funeral.

I work in the kind of (sales based) industry where you have to put the hard yards in early, to reap the rewards in commission and get an easier life later in your career.

I work around my disabled kid now, do my own school runs, predominantly WFH, accountable to just one person who trusts me to get stuff done when it gets done.

So I did work hard for what I have, but don’t work as hard for it now, because those early days of working horrendous hours have served me alright.

With the greatest respect to all cleaners and retail personnel out there. I did sacrifice and make the right choices. I did my day job which was considerably more than 35 hours advertised whilst completing my masters level professional qualification and working at a bar at night. All so I could have a good career and purchase a house. Those are the sacrifices I made.

if I thought for any moment I could get paid more cleaning or working in a shop, I would have. It would have been a lot easier. What is being said on here is insulting.

If those high paying jobs are so easy to train for and do. I suggest everyone go for it. That would bring wage parity. Let’s all be brain surgeons.

YABU. I don't have the bandwith to say more than that just now, but you cannot tax your way out of the mess we're in.

Not everything is about 'teachers and nurses'! I'm talking about jobs in general. Some people are highly intelligent some people are not. It's unlikely that a highly intelligent person will start and end their career in a junior role. It's also highly unlikely that someone who doesn't have much intelligence will end up as Chief Exec. That's life!

We aren’t all convinced that we are the only ones that work hard. HTH.

Because many jobs require education, skill, and/or significant effort. A lot of the people who complain about this are often the same people who didn’t finish school or never made an effort to improve their skills. Yes, there are jobs that require extensive training and still don’t pay well, but those are choices people make because they wanted those roles. It’s unfair to turn around and blame everyone else for the lower pay. It’s not exactly a secret that fields like nursing or teaching aren’t highly paid, so if earning a high salary is your priority, it may not make sense to pursue those careers.

Some of them are. On one of the other threads, there was as absurd comment which suggested that people with a lower pay are in that position because they are feckless and lacking in ambition. A barb about benefits was thrown in for good measure.

Nope. Unless we can stimulate growth in the private sector, we're screwed, Rachel Reeves has no clue how to do this so expect the mess we're currently in to get a whole lot worse.

Yanbu

I feel you may have misunderstood me. At no point did I say cleaners should be paid the same as those who have professional qualifications/experience.
Of course they shouldn't.
My point was responding to the OP that it's people who do not work, that this general statement is aimed at. It's those who are, for want of a better term, workshy.
The increments in NLW not being met my companies in proportion is a separate problem.

I think I just probably shouldn’t have replied to you specifically! Just your comment prompted my reply 🤦‍♀️

I have, left school at 16, went straight to work. Been working even since (late 40s now). But a great many haven't. My sister worked only for ten years of her adult life, gave up in that first lockdown, by which time she was too poorly to work anyway (not covid) and got back onto benefits instead. She was was later distraught when our father died, not so much at his death, but the fact he'd left her half of a house and a few tens of thousands in the bank. It meant she had to come off her housing benefit and she was not pleased, to say the least of it.

Are you seriously saying that doctors and nurses should be paid the same? 2 years of school vs 12 are not the same and they are paid accordingly.

I grew up in an immigrant community/ family and was very familiar with dads who spent 18 hours a day, 6 days a week on a building site and mums who came home from 8 hours day work to do a shift behind a bar until midnight.

I wasn’t familiar with those people banging on about how hard the worked- it was just life, and what you were expected to do.

It was quietly clear that english* people were considered lazy and lacking the resilience and motivation to work hard.

when people on MN bang on about how hard they work doing everyday jobs I can see what they mean

*I grew up in England, I have no idea what they thought of Welsh or Scottish people.

Fair enough 🤣🤣

In soviet Russia there were 2 wages; professional and manual, with professional being higher but everyone paid the same. They stilll had plenty of professionals. When it comes down to it, money isn’t the only reason people want certain roles