Opinion

[leonerd]

A thought has been slowly bubbling in my head lately, I thought today I'd get around to posting on it. I should note for the record, I don't necessarily agree with this statement in its entirety, but it's something worth thinking upon.
"All people should be paid a salary that reflects the unpleasantness of their work, combined with the social

Comments

[captain_aj]

You've not defined the moral system behind your use of "should". Because if you mean "should" from the point of view "this is how it should be done in order for the world to practically work", we already have appropriate salaries set for this, and we don't have a shortage of people for unpleasant menial jobs (supply blah blah demand blah blah).

I suppose we need a definition for the free variable in "should be paid this much in order to satisfy the demands of $system_of_morality".

[stevolteon]

Hmm... one wonders how much the PM would deserve to earn under this system...

[cartesiandaemon]

I think to *some* extent we have that. Some jobs are paid lots of money because they're boring, stressful, and require insane hours. Eg. jobs in London :) Some jobs are paid lots of money because lots of people want them to do it. Eg. footballers -- apparently, which I don't justify, lots of people really really need footballers, maybe more than plumbers. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way it is.

I think the third tripod is supply and demand. The smaller the proportion of people able to do something, the more they're rewarded. I don't know if that's fair or not (though personally I take advantage of it).

[asheep]

That is what the labour market should do if left alone

[gerald_duck]

By my understanding, that's basically the Marxist point of view; the capitalist stance being that everyone should be paid as big a salary as someone's prepared to pay them.

In pragmatic terms, it seems to me that capitalism adds two extra components:

1. A person's salary should reflect the scarcity of their skills.
   
2. The requirement for a person's job need not be directly "social".

I mistrust absolutist ideologies, but my personal shade of grey tends markedly towards the capitalist end of the scale. Many specialists wouldn't do the work that demanded their skills unless they were paid a premium. I make equipment for DJs and audio engineeers, which your average Trot might not regard as advancing the greater social good, but to me it's fairly clear that having better, cheaper ways of creating and enjoying music improves a person's standard of living.

Besides, the labour market is now global. Individuals will balance their want of money against their ideological and pragmatic expectations of a society in which they're prepared to live.

[mad_tigger]

Now, I hate to pander to your view of me , but.... capitalism introduces the extra constraint, people are paid the least that they can be bullied by those above them into accepting in order that those above them can obtain the services required to resell to maintain this position of aboveness (yeah my fluency with words fails it).

[gerald_duck]

I feel the issue of how fair negotiations are in the labour market to be separate, though adjacent.

The employee is trying to get as much money as possible; the employer is trying to get labour as cheaply as possible. Hard-line communists would say the proletariat workers need protection from the exploitative bourgeoisie; out-and-out capitalists think employers need protection from collective action by and proxy action on behalf of workers. In the UK we have a balance between those two stances (minimum wages, the right to take industrial action, equal opportunities legislation, etc. v. mandatory strike ballots, illegal secondary picketing, no statutory pay scales in the private sector, etc.).

You can argue our balance isn't correct, but I'd counsel against moving too far in either direction: just look at the USA on one hand and France on the other.