AIBU to question how different kinds of work should be valued?

[Holdinguphalfthesky]

How should work be valued? I’m in a profession that requires postgraduate qualifications and regular CPD and checks, but which is paid well below others doing similar work (I’m a teacher in FE; the FE pay scale is lower than the mainstream 4-16 pay scale) and is well below what the workload might seem to require. This is common across a number of sectors, I know.

Meanwhile we see people complaining about paying £20/hr for cleaning services, because although we all see it as necessary work that needs doing, we don’t require qualifications for it. we also see some employed people earning well above £100,000 per year.

I think current value is ascribed based on old notions of worth, which came down through the class system so we seem to value academic qualifications and ‘thinking jobs’ over vocational or practical qualifications and ‘doing jobs’ (medicine maybe an exception). But the intrinsic value we ascribe doesn’t always equate to value in pay.

My question is how should we pay people, on what basis do we assign a financial value to their work? As a thought experiment maybe ask yourself about jobs you don’t do.

I don’t have an answer, really, but I have the idea that all work should pay enough to live well on, and there shouldn’t be the size of gap that exists between the bottom rung and the top (particularly among employed people), but if you were starting from scratch, would you still assign pay in the ways we seem to now? Or would you, if it were up to you, reorder things so that maybe nurses and care workers earned more than fund managers (just an example, I know both jobs are important in different ways)? Or pay everyone the same?

Erm no. Let's not pay everyone the same. I don't think paying people who do the dusting and people who conduct open heart surgery the same would be good idea.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that industries dominated be female workforce has been downgraded in prestige/financial compensation.

Education/teaching is female majority, and alongside the push for young people to gain higher/further education, the respect for the profession and real terms compensation has definitely shifted downwards.

FE doesn’t require post grad. I did some FE teaching and it very much depends what you teach - I don’t have a degree. Teaching in HE is better paid - go to a university.

I think that talking about "value" and "worth" have a moral connotation which doesn't really work in a capitalist society (I guess that's why you've suggested a communist alternative). It's mainly about supply and demand - if people are willing to pay £20 for a cleaner then they can charge that amount. If they find that they haven't got any clients, they'll have to lower their prices.

Teaching A levels certainly requires a degree and teaching quals are postgrad qualifications. It’s the pay scale that’s the problem.

But, it’s less a question about me and more about the way we ascribe value to different kids of work. I’m just interested to see how others think on this.

Supply and demand.

People earn 100k because not everyone can do that job and businesses believe the job provides value. The more people who can do a job the lower the salary.

Female dominated jobs are often ones where the government sets the salary instead of letting the market decide. Women also often choose status over salary.

Salaries aren’t a secret. You can consider the salary and decide whether you want to do a job or not.

Is it though? There’s massive demand for teachers and nurses but pay doesn’t seem to rise in line with that.

But it is not all about supply and demand. There is huge demand for care workers and care places, and not enough supply but still the industry has low wages, because as a society we do not value care work enough..nor want to pay properly for it.
The work has more 'value' in society than a fund manager. But isn't paid as such.

There’s an interesting thought experiment in one of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer novels, which is set on a series of huge spaceships orbiting a sun, containing the last of the poorer inhabitants of earth who had to leave once our planet became uninhabitable (after the rich all took off to a colony on Mars).

It’s a no-money, barter economy, with everyone entitled to the same basic food, clothing and shelter, and everyone aged 14 plus, including the head of government, pilots, heart surgeons etc, obliged to do regular periodic shifts unclogging sewage pipes, cleaning public areas and recycling etc. Outside of this compulsory work, you choose what job you want to do because you want to do it. You don’t get paid.

I think that people really look down on certain professions and it’s awful. A hospital, for example, wouldn’t function without admin staff or cleaners.

Jobs that women do are unfortunately paid less and are not as valued in society - teachers, nurses, carers etc.
I read an interesting article about how the moment a profession becomes or is seen as more ‘female’, its pay/value decreases, and vice versa.
Marketing, for instance, used to be a mainly female domain, but the moment men started going for these jobs the pay increased, as did the status. They also started naming the roles in a more male-coded way, calling them ‘marketing engineers’ for example.
The same as coding. When computers were first invented, coding was done by women and was seen as a boring, less important job. Now the men do it its seen as super technical and impressive.

I would question that. Care work and health services are areas where the capitalist system doesn't work properly because of hiring from overseas. The wages are kept low because the supply has been messed with. If that hadn't happened and the supply was too low for the demand wages would have had to rise. In some ways the minimum wage has also messed with the market economy and likely made work poorer paid because wages are artificially set.

I'm a cleaner/housekeeper. I keep the show on the road for families. I make sure school uniforms are ready to go for that surgeons children, have their scrubs washed and ironed, clean the house so that at the end of their working day they don't have to put the bins out, load the dishwasher, do the food shop, put a load of laundry on or clean the toilets. They can rest instead, read to their kids or just have an early night. My job is important and they value my contribution and so should their patients.
There really is no need to be so patronising and demeaning and reduce what cleaners contribute to, a bit of dusting.

That’s still supply and demand.

The “shortage” is that employers are not paying what carers are willing to do it for when there are other jobs they can do.

If employers don’t pay what the market rate is they won’t get workers.

Agree there’s a difference between moral/societal value and monetary value. For professions such as teaching, nursing since they are public sector, the employer has a monopoly and therefore the capitalist competition for jobs and the salary incentives that go with that don’t exist. If you look at private medicine for example, consultants can work for certain providers that are recognised by the majority of insurers, they do this for a slightly lower hourly rate but they get the security of the “big name” hospital and probably more patients through the door. Or they can be independent and charge whatever they want as long as people are willing to pay (and the big names can and do charge a huge amount). Whereas NHS consultants are all paid on the same pay scale.

Regarding paying everyone the same: I have spent 10 years in higher education, gave up a lot of my fun years, got a lot of student debt. I have three degrees and decades of experience. I used to work for the NHS but I work in the private sector now. My salary is double and I have no regrets, I feel that I have earned it, I have worked and do work hard, I have a lot of knowledge and skills and I’m being compensated accordingly. I know that many people work hard day-to-day but there is something to be said for the sacrifice needed to put the time and effort into gaining skills that few have, in addition to putting in the hours while you’re actually at work.

However I would be the first to say that nursing is a skilled profession that deserves better financial recognition (I would put nurses in the same box, in that they’re people who work hard every day, and have also studied and worked hard to gain the skills and experience for the job).

Salary is often determined by what the employer can afford to pay. We might all agree that a cleaner in a hospital doing vital work in keeping those environments safe deserves more than the minimum wage. But, are we prepared as a society to pay more taxes to enable that to happen?

We might agree that teachers deserve more pay than say a marketing executive for an Ad Agency, again are we prepared to pay more taxes for that to happen?

Market forces and moral worth/value aren’t easy bedfellows.

For me it would be:
A score for benefit to society of the work, times a score for rarity of the skills required to do the work to arrive at a score for the value of the worker.
Which is how its supposed to happen now, but doesn't as the people with the greatest means to pay workers value those workers that create them wealth over those who benefit wider society. And creation of wealth for others is often not linked to any rarity of skill in the worker.

Perhaps the conversation about job value applies in the public sector where pay scales are decided out of a tax budget.

private sector is supply and demand, and what people are prepared to pay for that service.

It's a conundrum that can never be answered. Binmen don't have to study for years, do professional development or gain qualifications. They get paid up to £30k a year. If they didn't come for a month though and the streets were crawling with foxes and rats and rubbish was piled up, people would pay them with gold coins to come back to work.

I also suspect that you need demonstrate good communication skills, planning, organisation and others. So it’s not so low skilled job at all - far from it.

It’s not though, it’s very simple.

It goes “will you do this job for 30k?”. Yes, then the job is filled. No then the salary is increased up to what the employer can afford/ how much they value the job getting done.

If the salary that people are willing to do the job for is higher than what the employer is willing and or able to pay, then the job doesn’t get done.

It’s the same with the cleaner thread. Cleaners get paid what enough people are willing to pay them. If someone doesn’t want to pay £22ph they clean their own house or live in a tip.

I do tend to think that all work is equal. But at the same time I'm selfish enough to be glad I earn a high hourly rate. An hour of my life is no more valuable than an hour of a football player who earns probably 100 times what I do.

BUT the people we need most in society (nurses, teachers, carers) are paid the least. That is crazy. The bedrock of our society are the poorly paid.

This always sounds lovely. But obviously would never work in practice. Do you still need to pay for higher education? If so, how do you afford it or even afford to pay back loans? Why would anyone ever bother entering a career with severe high levels of stress? Do doctors still need to pay for indemnity insurance out of their basic pay? Because they might get sued. Or is being sued banned? If not, claims may go sky high as it’s a way of getting extra money. Who is paying out the money if they have no insurance? And if they do have to pay for insurance, why would anyone want that job as they’d be so much worse off than the shelf stacker in Tesco who doesn’t need to pay for insurance.

Anyway that’s just one tiny example of why it could never work. There are thousands more.

Op, 'should' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your question. As pp said, wages are largely determined by market forces.
People often try to turn this into a value judgment but it's pragmatic: can you walk into this job or does it require years of expensive, demanding training or a rare skill?

Or have we recruited from overseas because of lack of domestic workers willing to do the work at the pay offered.