reparations & exploitation

[Justin Schwartz]

You won't hear me defending high salaries for lawyers, most of whom don't 
earn what they charge, whatever that is. I think that desert plays a  
smallish but important role in determining comopensation. For the most part 
we ought to socialize people into thinking of differential compensation as 
incentives, social engineering. "We have too many lawyers, salaries drop, go 
into teaching, salaries rise." (The reverse of my own course.) It hasn't to 
do with in intrinsic worth of the actitivies, but just how many lawyers vs. 
teachers we need, given how many capable people there are to do these 
things. Of course this would take a big socio-psychological change.

Your oral fix? I am not sure I want to know. Or not, at any rate, in public. 
Meet me at the Starlite Motel on Route 6, and we'll talk.

--jks


>
>At 02:12 AM 3/11/01 +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>>I disagree, Kelly. I think differential pay is fine, as long as everyone
>>has enough.
>
>my oral fix is fixed again!  woohoo!
>
>
>dabnabit.  i didn't say we should pay people equally.  i was challenging
>the assumption upon which we now tend to allow the woman lawyer with
>housekeeper to assume that her salary of 50$k is deserving and the
>housekeeper's "good salary" of 25$k is based on anything that is
>justifiable.  why is a lawyer's labor more beneficial to society than that
>of a housekeeper?  a kindergarten teacher?  don't tell me about education
>b/c i know perfectly well that you know that much of what schooling is
>about has to do with socializing us into professions... so it's certainly
>not about the differential time spent rec'g training.
>
>i'm perfectly fine with differential rewards, but the way we decide those
>things has to be called into question.  and we ought to start now by
>questioning the way we justify the differentials currently!
>
>kelley
>
>>This view is virtually universally shared among working people, as far as
>>I knwo, and I _don't_ think this is bourgeois ideology. Moreover, it's
>>important that we be able to give people incentives to do kinds of work we
>>want done that they might not otherwise do, that we do reward effort and
>>acheivement, and that we get some sense of what it costs us to have people
>>do the various things they do. I don't say the labor market in capitalsim
>>does this very well. But I don't think everyone should receive the same
>>income regardless of the value of their work (or lack of it) to society. 
>>--jks
>

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com