That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘firemen’

I think that this week is a first for me because I have not noticed a single news article about the poor hard done by teachers/nurses/firemen who are not content to earn above the average UK salary and think that, because they are members of a union, they deserve a whopper of a pay rise. The issue is a little bit complicated because they have the public on their side for the most part because they all do jobs that are supposedly very valuable to society and work very hard for their low earnings. Unfortunately the worthyness of the job does not ever seem to translate into the salary expectations, in fact the guys over at Graphjam have illustrated it quite nicely as an inverse relationship. A real world example of this is the fact that my mate, Big Dave, earns less than I pay in tax but he is a community fundraiser for a charity and I work for a financial services company; in no possible sense could my job be seen as four times more valuable to society in fact I would happily admit that his job is probably more than four times more valuable than mine.

The difference is earnings is quite simply explained, although Big Dave is a smart bloke with a good degree he is doing a job which is only just outside the capabilities of a hardback book. My job takes skills and experience as well as a lot of study time and certification where his job just takes the ability to spell your own name, the name of the charity and the likelyhood that you can write a letter to someone without accidentally dribbling on it. In that respect it is well within the realms of possibility that everyone who didn’t take the sunshine bus to school could actually do Big Dave’s job, even if they couldn’t do it as well as he can, and so the charity can get away with paying a pittance because there is a steady stream of people who are happy to do the job. This is where teachers fall down.

Teaching, let’s be honest, is a bit of a joke job. That’s not to say that all teachers are lazy workshy idiots who prefer bullying kids and taking three months of the year off because they can’t hack it working in the real world; some are though. Teachers complain that the twenty grand they are paid is not enough however when you consider that they work part time hours for only 9 out of the twelve months in every year you see a slightly different picture. They work from half eight to three with at least an hour for lunch so even by the time they have cleaned out the hamster and put big red ticks on some work they are out the door after only six hours of graft. They get all weekend every weekend off and so pull in a spectacularly inadequate 30 hour week. At this point most teachers complain about the fact that they are often marking long after hours however that is just another example of how out of touch they are with the real world because on average a fifth of UK employees do over 48 hours each week of which 8 are unpaid overtime. Then combine in the 13 weeks of holiday and one day of ‘in service training’ (teacher talk for a pub lunch and a half day) compared to the usual 5 weeks that everyone else gets and you see that the average paid working time of a teacher is 1170 hours per year compared to 1880 hours for everyone else. That means the twenty grand salary they are bitching about is actually a thirty two grand salary paid on a pro-rata basis. That puts them well above nurses who work a lot harder and, let’s face it, if a teacher makes a mistake then a kid might think that the area of a circle is something to do with pie rather than Pi; if a nurse fucks up then people may die.

Firemen are another group who complain about their jobs being badly paid but there is always a steady supply of men who want to spend their 8 hour shifts polishing their engines and rescuing cats; only to then enjoy a steady stream of desperate fat northern girls when they get down the pub afterwards. Firemen are actually paid to sleep on the night shifts because fires just really aren’t that common.

The police even have the gall to complain about their salaries and although I generally think they are overpaid for the little that they achieve, the Met is a slightly different story. The are still overpaid for the pitiful amount of crime that they are involved with but the salary scales for them compared to the rest of the country are a mockery.  An officer in the Met police will get around three grand a year more than the national pay scale for being in London; that means that an officer whose job it is to walk the beat in Crewekerne ensuring that kids don’t drink too much warm cider will earn only three grand less than an officer living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, chasing down rapists and being shot at by yardies in Brixton.

So what’s the solution? Simple! You pay market rates of a county by county basis for all public service jobs. If there is a shortage of nurses in London you raise the salary for the nurses in the hospitals that are short staffed without raising the salaries for the nurses in the hospitals which are fully staffed. You let market forces of supply and demand ensure that the cushy country police jobs are paid less than the harsh beats in London and the other cities. You channel the funds into the areas that need good quality teachers and you pay them well for a good job but you tighten up the entry criteria to ensure that teachers have a little bit of real world experience before they start moulding our kids into their own image. All this will of course cost a fair bit of money but rather than the government haggling over a 2% national rise, local education authorities, NHS trusts and police forces can channel the funds to where they are deserved.