As an (admittedly) member of the soul-crushing, office-job, finance-accounting part of society, I’m struck by the fact that any of the alternate careers that I would be interested in - I would have to take a serious cut in pay, to pursue.
Is there any rational reason why the high-risk occupations, such as police-officers or firefighters (or the positive-contribution occupations - like becoming a schoolteacher), are paid far less than someone who sits at a desk and contributes nothing to “society”?
For you dopers not located in the USA, does this hold true for your customs as well?
There is a general trend to pay people in offices more than people doing manual labour. This is obviously unfair for several reasons, but it’s also long established to consider people doing manual stuff as less-skilled than office workers (despite the fact that fire fighters and cops do have a real education for their job), so it’s hard to change.
The other barrier is that cops and fire-fighters are usually paid by the state (except those areas in the US where fire fighters run their own protection racket), which is always short on money and will not raise wages until it’s forced to, while accountants are employed by private industry, so it depends on demand. And every bigger company needs an accountant, which is a job with long training, so the pool is small.
It would be nice to be fair and pay the fire-fighters and cops more. On the other hand, do you want people to choose to become a cop based on the amount of money they make? So the pay should be enough to live on it, but not enough to attract people who value money over other things. Otherwise, bribery and so on would look attractive.
It’s going to entirely depend on where you live and how many years you have on the job. We are in Calgary (Canada) and my husband is a Fire Fighter and I work in an office in Environment. He has five years on the job and makes $80K a year, the same amount that I make with four years of University and ten years of experience.
I think public services start low (he started at $48K) but raises as you move up to more senior positions are pretty decent. Again though, it will vary by area. Also, our city services are paid by the city, not the province.
Society / country where cops, fire-fighters, schoolteachers are paid more than accountants? Ontario, Canada. Highschool teachers probably about the same but with tremendous pensions and a lot of time off, police about the same with good pensions, and firefighters a bit less but with good pensions and opportunities for part-time jobs due to having many days off in a row. Add nurses and machinists to the list too. For every high paid chartered accountant working downtown on the big jobs, there are many CAs plodding along on their own or in small partnerships, and there are even more accountants who are not even CAs and do not do nearly as well.
To be fair, lots of people who sit at desks contribute quite a bit to society. Just looking around my office I see engineers and programmers, and they’re doing quite a bit. (And they’re getting paid crap, to be honest.)
I think the OP might be thinking more of people in finance who push money around. Some of the highest paid people in the world don’t’ actually create any value, they just take money from one group of rich people, and give it to another group of rich people, and take a huge cut in the process. These people - it CAN be argued - add little if any value to anything. Accountants, however, do not fall into this category.
One reason, I think, is that many people actually do want to feel that they are making a useful contribution to the betterment of society, and they are willing to work for a bit less in order to feel good about themselves (and thus, employers can get away with offering lower pay for these sorts of jobs). This is probably especially true of young people just setting out in life, and once into a certain career path it can be very difficult to obtain the necessary training or experience that would enable one to switch to a more lucrative one.
Why do some jobs that seem easy and fun get paid well, while other jobs that seem difficult and tedious get paid crap? It’s called supply and demand.
If you have a job opening, and it’s a hard, dangerous, dirty, difficult job, and you get 1000 qualified people lining up to take the job, then you don’t have to offer a high salary. If you have a job opening, and it’s mentally rewarding and in a comfortable environment, and there are only a few people who are qualified to do that job, you’re going to have to offer a high salary if you want to attract one of those people.
There are large numbers of men who aren’t qualified for office jobs, because they’d go crazy sitting at a desk, or because they don’t have the education. And so there are large numbers of men lining up for blue collar jobs.
Of course, your accountant job could disappear tomorrow, if someone figures out how to automate your job. But even with the advances in technology that make accountancy easier, there’s been an even greater increase in demand for accountancy. And so, accountants still get paid relatively well.
Engineers, programmers, and, come to that accountants and even financiers, can be doing stuff that is good for society, but they might equally well be doing stuff that makes the world no better, or even somewhat worse, and mainly serves to squeeze money out of regular people’s pockets, and to make the already rich even richer (or to kill foreigners more efficiently, or whatever). It depends on what engineering or programming projects they are working on, or for what enterprises or projects they are doing the accounting, or what they are helping to finance. It is not inherent to being an engineer, programmer, accountant, financier, etc. that one is working to improve the world, and many of them are not in fact doing so (although many are). That is the contrast with jobs like cop, firefighter or teacher, where, so long as you are doing your job reasonably honestly and competently, you are ipso facto contributing to the bettering (or retarding the worsening) of society.
Indeed, and this is one of the many reasons why capitalism is a horrible way to organize an economy (which is not to say that I know of a way that I am confident would not be even worse).
I suspect the OP is aware that wages are set (largely) according to supply and demand. I think he (or she) is questioning whether this is a good thing.
If it’s horrible to set wages this way, what’s the alternative? If you decide that wages should be set by society based on social value, then how does that work? If you’ve got thousands of people lining up for your “socially valuable” job, doesn’t that indicate that, although the job is socially valuable, there’s no need to expend a lot of extra resources to make that job happen? If you hate capitalism so much, outline your fucking alternative, don’t just whine about how fucking horrible capitalism is. You’d prefer feudalism?
Or rather, what exactly is the “fault with the system” here? That firefighters aren’t paid enough money? Who says?
If you think certain types of jobs deserve to be paid more than other types of jobs, you have to explain your method of determining how much a certain job deserves to be paid. If you can’t come up with such a method, then what exactly do you mean by “deserve”?
Take the OP. He says he’s in a “soul-crushing” job. And then he wonders why this soul-crushing job is well compensated, while spiritually rewarding jobs are poorly compensated. Isn’t it obvious? Because there are lots of people willing and able to do the spiritually rewarding jobs, in fact lots of people do them for free. Very few people are willing and able to do soul-crushing jobs, and so if you are an employer who needs to fill a soul-crushing job, you’re going to have to pay a premium for every soul you crush.
There are lots of systems that have flaws. Planes and cars still crash and kill their occupants. People die of head-injury while riding motorcycles, despite wearing a helmet. Cancer treatments fail, and patients still die.
Are you suggesting that I’m not allowed to say anything about how terrible chemotherapy is, unless I can provide a better alternative?
Yeah, I’m not sure where you get the idea that cops and firefighter are underpaid. In Chicago, and I believe in most large cities, those departments are larded with supervisory personnel (I think the number for CFD is 3.6 supervisors for every 1 rank-and-file employee, for CPD it is 8-to-1). These supervisory positions pay between $90K and $120K. Our police officers get 365 sick days every two years.
