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Salaries and the People Who Deserve Them
sittered
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I know people gripe about actors and athletes and musicians getting paid out the rear for doing comparatively little. So who really deserves the big money?
I say:
-Doctors, depending on the type (surgeon: more, pediatrician: less)
-I don't know how much soldiers get paid, but in time of war, it should be pretty high.
-Teachers. Give them more than they get now, anyway.
I say:
-Doctors, depending on the type (surgeon: more, pediatrician: less)
-I don't know how much soldiers get paid, but in time of war, it should be pretty high.
-Teachers. Give them more than they get now, anyway.
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But athletes don't really need to be getting paid as much as they do. For fuck's sake, all they do is play sports their whole life.
But that statement could be wrong too, because once they are no longer fit to play they may be screwed and will pretty much have to rely on whatever money they made for the rest of their life.
Teachers should get paid more, but not the big money, otherwise there would be no incentive to become something besides a teacher in a specific field.
Soldiers, while they put their lives, aren't exactly a specialized job. Pretty much anyone can become one.
Actors and atheletes shouldn't get paid what they do, but they bring in a lot of cash so yea....
Teacher is really the only job I can think of that doesn't get paid quite what they are worth.
The worst part about it: You don't work an eight hour day. Your expected to stay late, work weekends, do extra-cirricular activities with kids, and otherwise devote yourself day and night to the profession.
In the private sector, if someone demanded that I do twice as much for medicore pay, weekends and holidays, i'd laugh and find a new job. Of course, my profession is in demand, and I can do that. For some reason, teachers put up with it. I guess it's more than just a vocation, it's a calling. I still don't know why my mother does what she does. I have less education, and fewer years in my profession, and yet make more than she does. Some inequalities in life will never make sense, and that's just one of them.
Tossing my 2 cents into the 'they need to make more' category: Emergency personel (Police, Firefighters, EMT's). Most professionals I know make decent livings, at least enough to care for thier families. They'll never be what most consider wealthy by modern standards, and they accept it. Still, they're watching out for me and mine, I sure as hell wouldn't mind their wallets getting a bit fatter.
Having done both salary and hourly, I think I prefer salary. Hourly work makes me feel a little to disposable when management decides it's time to trim some fat from the bone. If there is copius overtime involved, the hourly is certainly the way to go. However, for a forty-hour a week slave wage job, take salary. If things get abusive, you walk and find an employer that doesn't have a hard on for shitting on your parade. A salaried job isn't a leash if you adopt a mercenary attitude.
Also, I think pediatricians should get a fair amount, I'm not saying they should get less than they do now.
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the day-to-day of either of these professions; I'm only surmising here.
:roll:
Actors and athletes make billions for other people, so yes, they do deserve to make the kind of money they do.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
If you don't like how much they're paid, then stop spending money on entertainment and convince everyone else to do the same. Instead, find pleasure in watching people get cured and students get taught and pay the people who do those things accordingly.
Problem is, we have an overabundance of brain surgeons and anesthesiologists and not enough general practitioners, nurses, and pediatrians. The market will correct itself eventually but as it is, market signals are not adequately addressing the needs of actual patients.
Outside of that: my mom has taught middle school for over 25 years and makes a good salary. Sure, she could probably have made more if she had gone into business or even education administration but she still makes a good living and will get a good pension. Her overall income will actually go UP after she retires because she will get her pension plus income from private tutoring that she can do full time. She's a young 62 so she could probably make a lot of money in the next 15 years or so and then finally retire for good, health provided.
I have no issue with actors, athletes, etc. being paid what they are paid. As robosagogo said, their services draw in the big bucks. You should be more upset about the music industry where many entertainers who generate tons of revenue make relatively small amounts of money compared to the overall earnings of their products. That will change, of course, but it is still an issue.
An economist studied the pay of certain athletes and determined that most are underpaid or paid what they are worth. Someone like Derek Jeter or A-Rod might actually be underpaid for the amount of revenue they generate. There are cases where that is not the case (Jose Reyes, Ryan Howard, Albert Pujols) but it will even out after they reach free agency.
If anyone is underpaid in our society, it would probably be IT/IS people, and salespeople are probably overpaid, by and large. That will eventually correct itself, I believe, but right now, a lot of very skilled tech workers are undervalued by their companies.
The entire emotional angle is purely subjective and no way to decide anything among a group of people.
At least at the moment, this is still tied heavily to the tech bust around 2000. A ton of IT workers were let go, so there's currently an over-abundance of workers relative to the number of jobs out there, keeping wages low(er).
Here's the thing about IT/IS though. You don't need a degree. You don't even need certifications. Job expierence is currency in that buisness. And you can make pretty damn good money too. A junior network administrator with 5-6 years of solid expierence under his belt can rope in 60k, with a decently sized company (and a talent for salary negotiation).
Eventually however, you career will likely plateau. That's when degreee's, and certifications can really help you out, and push you into the next pay bracket. Underpaid? I'm not sure I can buy into that.
Eh, we just need a better system for evaluating teachers and weeding out bad ones. There is always a need for teachers but if we made a more rigorous process for certification, backed it up with continued observation, and then raised salaries, I think you'd have a better applicant pool to begin with.
As for soldiers........I know that there is a knowledge gap between what the armed forces needs and what it is getting. It will be interesting to see how the composition of the armed forces changes in the near future.
Are you trying to say that you think more teachers die as a direct result of their job every year than soldiers die as a direct result of their job every year?
As far as pay goes, sure, pretty much anyone could do them, just like pretty much anyone could go work in a coal mine or on a dredger or as a logger. The thing is that very few people want to, because the jobs are physically demanding, or dangerous, or emotionally taxing, or require that you shelve your private life in favor of the position, etc. You pay more to attract people to the job because it is not a desirable job than you would if it was a neutral job.
And sales is particularly skill based? Honestly, lots of salespeople struggle to reach quota with products that practically sell themselves. They don't need degrees because their jobs are built mostly around networking.
Seriously, I can think of more incompetent, overpaid sales people off the top of my head that I've worked with in the past few months than I can think of overpaid IT/IS people.
Btw, there was an interesting article about how companies are creating new, junior positions in companies for IT people that did not exist before for the sole reason of cutting costs. They are putting IT people in positions that require senior level abilities, degrees, and responsibilities while paying them substantially less than their non-IT counterparts.
It's seriously bullshit. I think that undervaluing IT people will come back to bite these companies in the ass.
Considering a combination of several things:
the technical difficulty of their job
the commonness of the job itself among people
the amount of education the job requires
the risk of bodily harm the job entails
I didn't consider how much revenue one generates, but that seems valid too.
I would also say the demand for the job, both from employers and employees.
Some jobs in sanitation don't really require highly-trained skills, and they're not particularly dangerous, but they are unpleasant, like working in sewers. Since this job is dirty, but very necessary, and nasty enough that ordinary people wouldn't want to do it, a monetary compensation would be appropriate.
As an E4 deployed to a combat zone, I cleared somewhere around $40K-$45K for a year. Factor in that I was paying no taxes, and the effective rate of pay is actually a bit higher than that.
Considering this is not a particularly high level of rank, and that it requires no education and some basic on-the-job training, that's a pretty high salary.
Now, factor in the whole "high risk of death," "away from family for a year at a time," and "100-hour work-weeks being common" and it starts to look less rosey.
However, factor in having my college paid for, other VA benefits, and that if I were to make a career of it after finishing college I could draw a pension at 45, and it starts to look better again.
Altogether, the pay and benefits of soldiers, especially those that make it to retirement, is decent compensation for the sacrifices they make. Not great, and I think combat pay especially could use a bump, but not as horrible as some make it out to be.
Though it is demoralizing when you find out that civilian contractors taking two days off a week (when you're lucky to get two off a month) are making 3X your salary.
Also, I'd say that we cannot really complain about the salaries of athletes, movie stars, etc. when compared to soldiers or teachers. The American people are the ones deciding this is how it should be. Every time they're willing to spend $40-$100 on a ticket to a sporting event, or $10 to go to a movie, or $30 bucks on a jersey of their favorite team but willing to bitch at the smallest tax increases, they're making the statement that they value one over the other.
I have to agree with this. Sports teams make crazy amounts of money, yet the city or state pays for the stadium? Fuck that, though I do understand the whole aspect of it supposedly bringing in more revenue for the city I still think its retarded.
Teaching requires little expertise or skill? Unless I'm mistaken teaching at all most any level requires at minimum a college degree thats not really minimal education to me. Also unless its changed recently I though there actually was a shortage of applicants for teaching positions, at least I believe there is in my state.
Sittered: Your definition of deserves is pretty what drives the salary for the majority of jobs. With Rolo's addition I can't really think of anything else. Occasionally the market is out of wack, but it fixes itself eventually if some one is paid a lot there is almost always a reason for it.
Teachers are paid by a salary wage so effectively it is. The whole idea behind a teachers salary is that their essentially required to work overtime during the school year and to balance that out they get a lot of time off in the form of certain holidays and summer. Also they can do various jobs during the summer such a tutoring to raise their yearly wage.
TL:DR Teaching is a great job. It's what I am working for.
40k to 50k a year salary is pretty damn good, especially when you don't work for 1-2 months of the year or more, though as I explained above there is some reasons for that.
Lots of teachers work in the summer, taking classes (some mandatory) to increase their pay. Also, they still have to go to meetings and prepare the curriculum for the next year. Combined with the long hours they pull during the school year, I'd say that it's not as cushy as people make it out to be.
Just wanted to make it clear that teaching can pay well in the end.
Compare that to starting pay for investment banking (one friend is pulling in 60k this year in salary and probably will get an 80k+ bonus, another is working for google for 80k) and you see that there are sacrifices to be made in starting pay for teachers. Also, lots of teachers need additional certification and need to either shell out for grad school or get certification through alternative means like Teach for America (which sucks). Not really all peaches and cream, folks.
Elementary teachers up here only recently broke 20K in some areas.
Also, most teachers put in 10 or 11 months of work in the 8 or 9 they work. I think a lost of people don't realize that the number of days students are in school does not equal the number of days teachers are in school. Remember when you got "teacher in-service days?" Yeah, that means they were working. Also generally teachers are required to show up several days or even a week before school starts, and most are there even earlier. Many also work for up to a week after school gets out.
My wife, who is a teacher, has looked at pay scales in many areas when we were considering moving. Generally the only places where teachers with less than a decade of experience are making $40K-$50K are places where that isn't really all that much money (Seattle, San Francisco, etc).
Also, that $100K area is also location dependent. For instance, I'm looking at a pay scale here that shows teachers with a Master's+45 credits and 22+ years of experience topping out at $59664.
You mentioned professional athletes as being a position that doesn't "deserve" its high salaries, but you need to realize that those huge paychecks aren't determined arbitrarily. The only reason MLB owners are willing to pay A-Rod millions per year is because, after considering all the factors, they've determined that he will bring in at least that much extra revenue to his employers. All your other criteria almost certainly influenced the decision as well, although in a less explicit way. Now, you could make the point that such high salaries are a sign that American consumers need to care less about professional sports and more about the things you listed as being underpaid, and I might even agree with you. But to say that the athletes themselves somehow aren't contributing to the economy what they are being paid is less justifiable from an economic standpoint.
Some teachers get good positions at good schools with good students, but others end up being security guards/wardens/janitors/councellors/mediators all at once, and have both their students and the parents hate them for it.
The death rate for soldiers in Iraq was less than half that of a theoretically comparable US population (male 18-39 or so) a few months ago. 3.92 vs 8.42 per 1,000.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082500940.html
Like I said though, this doesn't count normal casualties or injuries or the like, and if you start segregating by things like rank or branch of the military, it varies quite a bit.
But yeah, looking things up I was getting information crossed. Teachers are just really high up there in risk of being a victim of physical violence on the job, but not actually death. *shrug* Apologies.
If you're going to make a comparison to another job, at least include all the facts.
Investment banking (or working for google, or any other high paying job) is significantly more selective that teaching (I've never met or heard of someone physically unable to meet the qualifications for becoming a teacher, that's not that case in any of the jobs you mentioned) and the burn out rate is higher by orders of magnitude. The average time an investment banker/stock broker can work those jobs before burning out is something on the order of 3 years, the average teacher works for more than 3 decades.
As much as people like to bitch about how rough teachers have it, it's not a bad deal at all. The pay is roughly commiserate with the difficult in preparing for the position, the job security can't be beat, and the work isn't unbearably difficult (all things considered).
At the end of the day, given enough time and a free market, salaries and overall compensation tend to even out to where they "should" be, when considered objectively. No one's got it too bad, and nothing stays cushy for long.
Oh, certainly. I-banking draws from a self-selecting group. How many people do you know want to and physicall can work 100 hour weeks? Then again, some i-bankers have tons of dirty little secrets (coke and meth anyone?) to keep themselves going, but that's besides the point. The time is really why the attrition rate is so high. You make tons of money but you don't actually have any life to spend it on until you get maybe 5 years under your belt. I think the about 80% of people burn out by the end of 3 years or something along those lines.
However, my friend has repeatedly stated that the job itself is not intellectually challenging in an absolute sense. You have to be willing to put in intense hours and work hard but lots of people have the intellectual capacity to do so. It is the desire to do it that differentiates.
As for google, the pay is right in line with the level of person they hire and the amount of work employees generate. They truly only select the best and actually value their technology employees correctly. On employee quality, they blow companies like Yahoo straight out of the water.
However, I would not say that teachers in the inner city (the good ones, who are few and far between) are paid in line with the time and energy they put into their jobs, not to mention the difficulties they face. There really is a huge spectrum of environments in which one can teach.
Honestly, the free market hasn't done particularly well at deciding C-level executive pay. I think many executives would agree with this as well. The compensation levels for those at the top has become out of line with their actual contribution to companies.
It is a trend that will hopefully reverse itself but I don't see that happening in the near future. Maybe down the line, but that doesn't much help the people seeing their absolute income and purchasing power declining year after year.