Society / country where cops, fire-fighters, schoolteachers are paid more than accountants?

Factual Questions
21

The only way for wages to be set other than by supply and demand is to arbitarily declare that the wages will be set via some other standard, which will involve somebody making judgments about the value of any particular profession to society. It’s foolhardy to begin down that path, when the reality is that society needs all of these professions. We need engineers and doctors, but we also need janitors and assembly line workers. Should all of them be paid equally? Is that a better system?

Let’s give it a shot: pass a law that caps doctor’s salaries to be on par with janitors. Pretty soon students will be shunning med school and its associated long hours and student debt. Afterall, why would they go through all of that when they can earn just as much money by becoming a janitor with a few hours of on-the-job training? After a few years you’ve got yourself a doctor shortage. How do you get more students to pursue careers in medicine? If you’re not going to let doctor’s salaries rise up in proportion to demand, then you’re going to have to mandate that a certain quota of students pursue careers in medicine. In other words, you will have to take away peoples’ freedom to pursue the career of their choice.

OK, instead of capping doctors’ salaries, let’s take the opposite approach, and insist that janitors’ salaries be elevated to match the salaries currently paid to doctors. Same end result: if I can draw a six-figure salary pushing a broom, why would I spend a decade slogging through med school? We’re back to the problem of a doctor shortage, the only solution being to dictate what people’s careers will be.

If you think “doctors-versus-janitors” isn’t an illustrative case, then pick any two professions with a salary disparity, such as pencil-pushers and firefighters; you’ll get the same result, i.e. taking away peoples’ freedom so as to make them work in particular professions will be the only way to assure society has the number of doctors, teachers, firemen, etc. that we need.

22

ok, terribly poor choice of words on my part with “contributes ‘nothing’ to society”. My point made since in my head - it just came out wrong.

23

Machine Elf is wise and his commments should be considered as such.

24

I’d need to see research before I believed that people would very typically choose to be a janitor over being a doctor if the pay in both cases was going to be the same.

Honestly (and I’m revealing something possibly not nice about myself here) you’d have to pay me a fuckton more money to take the janitor job, if I genuinely had a choice. (Lemme soften that by saying I have worked as a day laborer before. I’ll do what I have to. I’m just saying that given the choice, it’s hard for me to imagine most people thinking the janitorial job superior.)

25

Contribution to society and income are only somewhat related. It’s more about supply and demand, with each artificially adjusted (e.g. unions, government funding, etc.)

26

And yet, incredibly, we do not pay janitors a “fuckton” more money than physicians and we nevertheless have hundreds of thousands (millions?) of both.

OK, Frylock, you would need to make more than a few hundred thousand dollars annually (the average MD salary) in order to get you to be a janitor. That is a fact about you. It is obviously not a fact about a lot of other people, since we have plenty of janitors and we don’t pay them six-figure salaries.

27

When high school graduates who could become doctors are faced with this decision:

A. pick up a broom and start earning $150K+ a year right now. No studying required now or ever, and you have a 40-hour work week.

or

B. do four years of pre-med and four years of med school/residency/internship, acquiring a massive student debt along the way, and then maybe you start earning $150K after 8-10 years of working a lot more than 40 hours a week. After that, keep studying in your spare time to stay abreast of the latest techniques/technology/practices in your field.

Maybe not everybody would choose option A - possibly not even most - but plenty would. As soon as you have fewer people going into medicine than the free market wants, you have a shortage.

How would you propose to alleviate that shortage without allowing a salary differential to exist?

28

Of course, there are other ways to address the imbalance instead of increasing or decreasing salaries. One is to increase supply of doctors by subsidizing medical training instead of forcing doctors to go six figures in debt. Another is a massive propaganda campaign about how awesome being a doctor is. Another is to make being a janitor a more shitty job in ways other than money–make sure all people who supervize janitors are fucking assholes, while people who supervize doctors are saints. Create a lottery, and you can’t be a janitor unless you win the lottery. Or decide that doctors only work 20 hours a week, while janitors work 60 hours a week. And so on. The point is, there’s a supply and a demand. The supply curve and the demand curve will intersect at a point. If you want that point to move, you can increase or decrease the supply in a lot of ways, or you can decrease or increase the demand in a lot of ways. Salary offered is only one of those ways.

29

That number sounds suspiciously like counting Captains and Lieutenants as “supervisory” personnel. While my job as a Captain does include supervising the three or four firefighters beneath me, I am also adding to that supervisory role by performing the same job those I’m “supervising” are. Middle-management in the fire service (Captains and Lieutenants) don’t get to stand back and observe the actions of their minions, we are side-by-side with them doing the same work. Hoseline needs to be pulled? I don’t get to watch the other three do it, I have to assist them. Door to be forced? I’m right there with the firefighter making sure he does it properly, and helping him if he needs such help. In the meantime, I am also deciding which door to open, which hoseline to bring, advising the chief in the street what the conditions are inside, and deciding and calling for level of assistance my crew I need to complete the assigned task.

The Boston Fire Department is perhaps one of the best examples of this. There are more Lietuenants and Captains who have been killed in the line of duty in Boston than firefighters, even though there are three times more firefighters in the department. Why is that? Because the “supervisors” are on the front line each and every time. As I think to my own department, the only fatality we have had was a Captain. Never lost a firefighter. Supervisors in the fire service don’t sit behind desks and administrate, they do the same work as their subordinates.

Is there administrative stuff going on at the top of the food chain? Certainly. Is the ratio 3.6:1 for supervison? Could be. Does it need to be that low? Absolutely. Is the fire service “larded” with supervisors? Not a chance in Hades.

The theories and ideas of other industries and professions do not mix well with the fire service, and I spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to explain it to those not familiar with it. It is one of the few careers (along with law enforcement and to some extent medicine) that continuously demands immediate decision making based on limited information, and the unfortunate requirement that you are not allowed to make a mistake. We cannot sit back, discuss the problem, brainstorm solutions, pick one that we like, and implement it. That low supervisor ratio is a result of our different decision making process, and that we need to have coordination between operating units. Each unit gets a boss. The chain of command is beaten to death in the fire service, because it is critical to the decision making and coordination process.

30

Well said.

31

All of this requires outside agencies that claim to know, better than a free society, how many people should work in each profession, and artificially manipulate the supply and demand accordingly through propaganda and/or subsidies.

This sounds a lot like a centrally planned economy, which has a poor track record in the history books. With a few stubborn exceptions, every country that has tried this has moved (or is in the process) of moving away from it toward a free market economy.

32

Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I love capitalism. It is the most perfect system that has ever existed and that ever could, with prosperity, freedom and justice for all. I promise I will never say anything is wrong with the way the world now is ever again. That way, and if everybody follows my example, as they should, nobody will ever be motivated to even try and think of ways to improve things ever again. Mmkay?

33

If you’d like to suggest improvements, feel free. I’ll be waiting right over here.

34

I’ll ignore your opinion about who does and does not “contribute to society.”

The rational reasons why those jobs pay less cash salary include that they typically have better benefits (ie, medial and reitrement plans), better job security, lower barriers to entry, and greater feelings of warm fuzzies (for those people who share your views of who does and doesn’t “contribute to society”).

35

See post # 22 - I already acknowledged that it was a piss-poor choice of wording, and didn’t construe my point at all. I think the “supply vs demand” and “doctor vs janitor” discussion above has been great food for thought.

I’m a pencil-pushing CPA, in middle management, and if I ever wanted to go through the steps to change careers and become a police officer / firefighter / middle-school math teacher, I’d have to take approximately a 40% cut in pay*. Hence the question.

  • at least in my part of the country
36

This really happened in some Communist countries; especially those with a thriving tourist industry aimed at Westerners. In Cuba you can make over 10 times as much money (mostly in hard currency tips) as a waiter/bell boy/spa attendant in a tourist hotel that you can as a doctor or engineer. Granted the state pays for all of you education so there is no such thing as student debt, but there’s still the years spent in training, long hours, stress, etc. Presumably doctors & nurse working in hospitals servicing medical tourists earn alot more than those serving ordinary Cubans.

37

Oh good god no.

In Australia a police constable with 3 years work experience earns about $60, 000 a year by the time you take in penalty rates. That is after just 6 months training. In contrast a CPA who holds a three year Bachelor’s degree who has an *additional *3 years experience might be lucky to make $60, 000 as an auditor if they were exceptional. More likely they would be employed as an asset accountant or similar on about %55, 000.

A primary (elementary) school teacher with a 4 year degree will only earn about $50, 000 in the first year, however the qualifications are much easier to get and in reality primary teachers only work 5 hours a day, 8 months/year. While officially they work 7 1/4 hours a day. 49 weeks a year, any teacher will tell you this is just nonsense. Primary teachers work school hours and little more. So while teachers can be said to be slightly underpaid, the working conditions and total absence of any solid performance criteria make it extremely appealing to many people.

38

I am pretty sure most places in the world pay police officers, firefighter who have many years in service more then a freshly minted accountant.

39

dunno about cops and soldiers but in mexico, boxers are paid better than accountants. ask juan manuel marquez.

40

In Spain firefighter is a government job. Government jobs get the following salary structure:

  • Base salary, based on the job’s “grade” (from A through C). Firemen are As, they require HS or equivalent. In many locations, firemen are required to have training in a Construction Trade (HS equivalent, or provable experience). This is the same for everybody in the same Government: not every A in the country gets the same base salary, but every A whose check is sent by the Government of Villagia gets the same as every other Villagian A.

The base salary structure is longer for cops and varies with corps: Guardia Civil provides housing, other bodies don’t, so Guardia Civil pays less cash. A sergeant makes more money than a rookie, a no-housing-provided rookie makes base salary comparable to that of a level A civil servant.

*Seniority. In Spain salary levels (be they government or private) aren’t ranges, they’re a figure; time in grade doesn’t give you a higer base salary, but a % bonus. Again, a Villagian A with N years seniority gets the same seniority bonus as any other Villagian A with N years in, or a grade-1 member of the Villagian Police with N years’ service.

  • Bonuses. Ah! This is the part where firefighters have their office counterparts beat and then some. Danger pay, off-hours pay, holiday pay, going-to-court pay (this may crop up for firemen when arson was suspect, for example)… Mind you, many of these get lower with time, as veterans generally decide that theory’d rather sleep at night and let the young guys have the bonus (with or without compensation from the young guys - I know doctors and pharmacists will pay each other to trade desirable shifts, figure it happens among other emergency personnel as well).

So, a Villagian A cop or fireman with N years seniority will get much higher pay than a Villagian A paper-pusher with the same seniority thanks to the bonuses.

But what would you make?

In Spain the closest thing to being a CPA would be having a Licenciatura in Business, specialty Accounting (or any of a dozen degrees considered equivalent). That’s a level B, so your base salary would be that of a Lieutenant or Captain. While you can get a job directly as a police or firemen Lieu, you’d still be losing your seniority.

And if you were in private industry rather than in the government? Starting salaries in the government are higher than those in comparable private jobs, but private ones overtake them at about the five-year mark.
Oh, just for completeness: C is jobs requiring a PhD (college professor and little more). Master’s isn’t a level that’s recognized by our government’s salary structure, nor the college degrees which would be similar to an Associate’s.

TLDR version: in Spain, a rookie fireman or cop makes much more than a rookie accountant or teacher (private or government). An accountant with 10 years in, working for a private company, makes more than a fireman or cop with 10 years experience. A teacher will make similar to a government office worker, even in the private sector; the advantage of teachers over office workers in private sectors is the hours, stability and vacations.