Reading

Read through the text “ How Much is Job Worth? ” and do the exercises that follow.

How Much is Job Worth?

One of the most difficult questions to answer is how much a job is worth. We naturally expect that a doctor’s salary will be higher than a bus conductor’s salary. But the question becomes much more difficult to answer when we compare, for example, a miner with an engineer, or an unskilled man working in an oil field with a teacher in a high school. What the doctor, the engineer and the teacher have in common is that they have spent several years of their lives studying in order to get the necessary training for their professions. We feel that this training and these years, when they were studying instead of earning money, should be rewarded. At the same time we recognize that the work of the miner and the worker in an oil field is both hard and dangerous, and that they must be highly paid for the risks that they take.

Another factor we must take into consideration is how socially useful a man’s work is, regardless of the talents he may bring to it. Most people would agree that looking after the sick or teaching children is more important than selling used cars or improving the taste of toothpaste. Yet it is almost certain that the used-car salesman earns more than the nurse, and the research chemist earns more than the schoolteacher.

Indeed, the whole question of rewards can be seen from two points of view. You can argue that a man who does a job which brings him personal satisfaction is already receiving part of his reward in the form of a so-called “psychic wage”, and that it is the man with the uninteresting, repetitive job who needs more money to make up for the monotony of his work. It is significant that those jobs which are traditionally regarded as “vocations”, such as nursing and teaching, for example, continue to be poorly paid, while others, such as those in the world of sport or entertainment, carry financial rewards out of all proportion to their social worth.

Although the amount of money that people earn is largely decided by market forces, this should not prevent us from looking for some way to decide what is the right pay for the job. A starting point for such an investigation would be to try to decide the ratio which ought to exist between the highest and the lowest pay. The picture is made more complicated by two factors’, firstly, by the “social wage”, i.e. the welfare benefits which every citizen receives (such as pay for vacations, pay for illness, etc.); and secondly, by the taxation system, which is often used as a method of social justice by taxing high incomes at a very high rate. Taking these two factors into account, most countries now regard a ratio of 7: 1 as socially acceptable. If it is less, the highly-qualified people carrying heavy responsibilities become disillusioned, and might even end up by moving to other countries. If it is more, the gap between the rich and the poor willbe so great that it will lead to social tensions and ultimately to violence.