Close-up considerations

1. People begrudge even 10 p piece for the cause of good.

2. There are not very many good causes one can contribute to because a lot of them are not genuine.

3. Too many of the good causes are of purely local interest.

4. People get so obsessed with local issues that they fail to notice what is happening in the society.

Unit Fifteen.

Open-up ideas

1. Doctors, teachers, etc. should be paid much to reward the years devoted to obtaining their qualifications.

2. Miner, oilrig laboures must be highly paid as well, for the risks they take.

3. A man of a certain profession should be paid in accordance with the social usefulness of his work.

4. We should find a ratio between the highest and the lowest paid jobs.

5. A gap between rich and poor may lead to social tensions, even to violence.

Text for discussion

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 wage. But the question becomes much more difficult to answer when we compare, say, a miner with an engineer or an unskilled man working on an oilrig in the North Sea with a teacher in a comprehensive school. What the doctor, the engineer and the teacher have in common is that they have devoted several years of their lives to studying in order to obtain the necessary qualification for their profession. We feel instinctively that these skills and these years when they were studying instead of earning money should be rewarded. At the same time we recognise that the work of the miner and the oilrig labourer is both hard and dangerous and that they must be highly paid.

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 agree that looking after the sick or teaching children is more important than, say, selling second-hand cars or improving the taste of toothpaste by adding a red stripe to it. 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 just reward can be turned on its head. You can argue that a man who does a job which brings him personal satisfaction is already receiving part of his recompense in the form of a so-called ‘psychic wage’, and that it is the man with the boring, repetitive job who needs more money to make up for the soul-destroying drudgery of his work. It is significant that those jobs which are traditionally regarded as ‘vocations’ – nursing, teaching and the Church, 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 proportions to their social worth.

Although the amount of money that people earn is in reality largely determined by market forces, this should not prevent us from seeking some way to decide on what is the right pay for the job. A starting point for such an investigation would be tried to decide the ratio which ought to exist between the highest and the lowest paid. The picture is made more complicated by two factors: firstly by the ‘social wage’, i.e. the welfare benefits which every citizen receives; and, secondly, by the taxation system, which is often used as an instrument of social justice by taxing high incomes at a very high rate indeed. Allowing for these two things, 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 emigrating (the so-called ‘brain drain’ is evidence that this can happen). If it is more, the gap between rich and poor will be so great that it will lead to social tensions and ultimately to violence.