>Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 14:55:49 +0000
>From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>
>I'd write philosophy and legal theory for free. I do. Apart from pro bono
>work, I would not write legal briefs for free. I like it, but it is hard,
>relentless, grinding work. Long hours, little sleep. It is, in fact,
>physically demanding. You just try three straight weeks of 15 hours days,
>and that's 15 hrs of work, not sitting on your duff. <...>
>
>People have taken your view with teachers, you can't pay them what they
>are worth, so why try, indeed, the ingrates, they should do it for love. Part
>of the result is that good people don't go into teaching. I have no beef with
>paying lots more for hard, dirty, dangerous, or repetitive work. But I
>don't accept the resentment involved in the idea that people who work in
offices
>shouldn't be paid decently, they should do it for love.
>
>jks
Actually, this part of this thread started with the suggestion that the mean income in the U.S. is $60,000 a year, if you count in the ill-gotten gains of the super-rich, aka our unpaid wages. So a computerized Job Market, which would arrange salaries to maintain this mean (and presumably be given a ratio of max to min that we'd vote on) would pay the job of *average* attractiveness 60K. Those more attractive, given a 3:1 ratio of max to min, would pay as little as 30K. Those least attractive would pay 90K. (Presumably, by then, having wrested from owners the power to set wages, we would also have done something about NYC landlords.)
Yeah, after three weeks of 15-hour days one should take a couple of months off, perhaps to write philosophy or do carpentry. I agree it's the nature of some work to come in binges, we can't blame that all on the Protestants. (I edit a magazine, for example, and while I've tried to eliminate the binge aspects of the job it never quite works out that way.) If, as the computerized job market suggestion would have it, we divide the work up among those seeking a job, the maximum work year is liable to be set a good bit lower than our current one. I believe the U.S. surpassed Japan in the '90s to win the prize for the longest work year in the industrialized world. Even before the new 35-hour workweek phase-in, the French worked on average 39 fewer days a year than we did.
Childcare teachers are told they should 'do it for love' & how dare they ask for more money than the $6.23/hr. they get (that's an Alachua County average which includes home daycares paying as little as $2.15 an hour). I fully agree with you that that reasoning is horseshit, also sexist. Speaking of difficult jobs, teaching twenty 3-year olds has to rate among the hardest. But if you eliminate the process of employers picking over employees like so many potatoes, and give job choice over to each worker, people will finally be able to pick the work they like to do for the price that seems fair to *them* individually. That's the suggestion at any rate. I'd like to see someone do a simulation (see http://www.jobmarketbook.com/AppendA.html for one proposal.)
Jenny Brown