It seems that anyone who attempts to have a frank discussion about labor and/or capitalism finds themselves staving off the same arguments again and again. So, as an homage to Mandolin’s Fantasy and Science Fiction Bingo, No Racism in Fiction Edition, I present Laissez-Faire Bingo:
The minimum wage? Sick leave? Overtime? Parity? Clearly a communist plot to overthrow America! Enjoy your barbecues, everyone.
Errr…….bingo requires 25 squares. I’m sure the commentariat here can help come up with 9 more – how about “If only the government would get out of the way the market would fix the problem!”
We only need eight more, because the center square is a free space.
I think your suggestion, though, is pretty similar to the current top left square. I’m drawing a little bit of a blank for new ones right now.
Oops. Well, if we come up with more, I can revise it.
Do you think that perhaps the “frank discussion” should take into account the context of the job itself? And would you stop trying to wear the mantle of an uneducated laborer?
Perhaps you are an exception. But adjuncts and professors who complain about their job security are highly intelligent people who pay a lot for a degree that takes 4-8 years, knowing full well that a) they are intelligent enough to get a job somewhere else, and b) they won’t be getting paid worth a damn. Yes, of course, they ARE underpaid. They are underpaid both in proportion to their investment and in proportion to their skill level. But… I dunno, I just can’t help thinking that of almost all the people I know, academics don’t deserve much sympathy.
Plenty of people “accidentally fall into” work as a janitor, or a Gap manager, or a Walmart checker, or a Toyota sales agent, or a secretary, or a ditch digger. Plenty of people I know picked up a job, and then some debts, and then couldn’t quite go to college, and then they end up being a carpenter. And by the time they get that out of their system they have a truck it’s too hard to turn down the $2o/hour, even though they know they will ill their elbows by the time they are 50 and they would LOVE to take 6 years and get an MBA. Life can get you on a track, like it nor not, and 10 years later there you are in a job you don’t like, getting shafted by your employer.
I am friends with a lot of UPS drivers and Fedex drivers and carpenters and laborers and people without college degrees trying to stay above water in the 2008 economy. THOSE people need protection. Desperately, in some cases. Many of their are my clients.
For those folks, school is an investment. They go (if they can) with a purpose, spending their hard-earned cash to give themselves the life they want (or try). Often they choose their field or major entirely by economies and employment. I can’t tell you how many applicants, when asked “why did you study ____?” answered with a career based reason.
PhDs are in an entirely different category.
Nobody “accidentally falls into” a PhD program. People WANT to do it. Often they dream of doing it for their whole life. How many garbage pickers said in high school “hey, I know, I want to drive a garbage truck when I grow up?” How many years ahead do you think Joe UPS Driver planned to be shifting packages every Friday afternoon?
So, you want to make that irrelevant?
This is classic “ivory tower” behavior. You seem so certain that your desires are irrelevant: the fact that you got to do what you wanted through your PhD program; the fact that you are working in a field that you want to work in; the fact that you are doing work you want to do, albeit for less money. Maybe you are living in a shell; you certainly seem to think that at will status was rare (it’s not) and perhaps you also think that most people are doing work that they always wanted to do (few are.)
Doing what you want to do is a LUXURY. You. Are. Living. A Life. Of. Choice. Own up to it already. And realize that makes you a hell of a lot less sympathetic.
Pretending that you are “just like the rest of those folks” with your bingo is embarrassing. The bingo applies to plenty of people–but you and I are not in that category.
Minimum wages increase unemployment!
If we increase the minimum wage, people won’t retrain for higher-skill jobs and the country will fall behind!
When jobs move overseas, we’re *helping* poor people in other countries!
Hayes’ Law of Ruthless Bastardry: Low wages increase social utility and increase human happiness.
Low (sub-market) wages in an occupational field tend to drive out people for whom the field is not inherently satisfying. People for whom the field is inherently satisfying, will be differentially willing to choose the field even if it pays a lower wage than the market value of their skills. Thus, over time the field will become dominated by those who enjoy the work greatly for its own sake. Having inherently satisfying work is psychologically and socially good for people. In addition, those driven out of the field will have some chance of being driven into a new field where they might be inherently satisfied. (After changing careers three times, Alice found herself deeply satisfied by the work at the [fill in the blank].) Theoretically, low enough wages could eventually drive nearly everyone in a population into the jobs where they were most happy.
There are limits on the benefits of this process. Too-low a wage and people are unhappy even after the happiness premium afforded to them by their job fit.
Square 17: “The only roles for government are to enforce contracts and defend our borders. Anything else distorts and disfigures the market.”
Square 18: “If we give rich people tax breaks, you’ll get richer too!”
Square 19: “Poor people suffer greatly from low-self esteem when the govenment helps them, so the government should stop helping them” (funny how rich people and corporations do NOT suffer from low-self esteem when the government helps them)
(or maybe these belong on the Friedman-economy bingo board)
“Tax Breaks Always Pay For Themselves!”
“If White Men Really Got Paid More, No One Would Hire Them.”
“Government is always less efficient than the market!”
Ok, am I getting this right? Someone with a PhD is whining that he’s not getting paid enough and would like the government to legislate a higher minimal salary for his chosen position?
I must be missing something. An M.Eng was enough to guarantee me a six digit salary two-three years out of the Institute. If a PhD is willing to work for less than what ‘he deserves’ then he obviously has a reason. If that reason makes others willing to take the job at the present compensation, what right does he have to want the job and more money?!
My sister is leaving a six digit job as a senior designer for a manufacturing company to go write games (as in creative writing, not as writing code) Too bad she did not have the brilliant idea to ask for someone to legislate her a higher salary at the new place, and has to start at barely half the compensation.
By the way, there is at least one square missing from your bingo sheet “Government intervention created this screwed up situation in the first place”.
Petar, if you continue to use belittling language like “whining” about the bloggers here, you’ll be asked to leave.
Funny about that Ph.D.’s being worth lots. I have a vivid recall of seeing multiple applications for a barely minimum-wage receptionist’s position with Ph.D. listed in the Education section. None of whom got a call f or an interview because they were too overqualified for the position.
What part of the country do you live in? Up here union carpenters pull down about $40/hour. Plenty of people fall into college, too, but it’s a different kind of falling.
More suggestons for the 5×5: “But I like money! I like making money, I like having money, I like spending money!” & “People who want socialism and communism just don’t work as hard as others & are looking for a free ride.”
Personally, I think anyone who thinks no one can “fall into” an advanced degree program does not understand Asian people. Or most groups of immigrants, actually. The peers I knew who were most pushed by their parents into *respectable* professions, academia included, were of Afro-Caribbean ethnicities.
Sailorman, I agree with… the gist of what you’re saying, but I think it’s straying a bit into a Perfect Victim mentality. No one likes hearing that they deserve to paid less from some bozo with some regurgitated talking points and mangled Econ 101-esque jargon.
Petar, how can you refer to someone whose handle is “The Girl Detective” as a “he”? That’s just dumb.
Robert, that is completely illogical. The lower your wage, the less time you have to get secondary training, let alone afford it. Just look at who gets all the useful degrees: those who already come from well off backgrounds. Having some money increases opportunity; not having it decreases it. Whatever moral hazard that follows from lack of starvation is completely dwarfed by this basic law.
Ampersand. I am asking this in good faith, and not being sarcastic.
Is the problem that I am using the word ‘whining’ instead of ‘complaining’, or that I am describing the behavior of a local blogger? Because I must have missed the thread identifying the complaining PhD, and ‘whining’ has been used repeatedly on this blog, even by established posters to express disdain toward some comments.
Hell, I respect your right to protect your regular bloggers, and even to legislate that some opinions are open to attack while others are not. I can even get my mind around believing that someone complaining about being underpaid deserves more respect than someone complaining about not being able to get a date.
But did you say “no belittling language is to be used toward a specific subset of the people posting on Amptoons” or “no belittling language is to be used when arguing on Amptoons”?
sylphhead: I had not realized that The Girl Detective had made the bingo card as answer to the people disagreeing with her in her own thread.
Whether or not a PHD enjoys their job is not relevent to the fact that they are underpaid. It makes no sense to me to say to a worker, hah because you enjoy something you are not exploited. Every single person who sells her/his labor is an exploited worker.
I honestly am yet to figure out whether this blog is Communist or not. It supports many Socialist policies, but it has condemmned Communist regimes as unworkable in the past iirc. Honestly I think Communism would never ever work and judging from history is just a terrible idea, but I’m not opposed to some government programs
Why is there an assumption Girl Detective has a PhD? Or that people with graduate degrees are “worth” much money in any market?
I have a masters in creative writing, and if I were to start looking for jobs, it is extremely likely that I would be in exactly the same position as Girl Detective. I would not have the option of leaving academia for more highly paid positions elsewhere; even publishing companies are not over-fond of fiction MFAs (they prefer not to hire writers, whose attention they probably rightly assume will be divided).
People deserve to be paid and treated fairly, no matter what their position.
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Petar, it’s less about the words than the tone. Yes, “complaining” would have been better than “whining.”
And yes, I think it makes sense to expect that the bloggers here, especially, would be treated with a minimal amount of respect — after all, this is our space, and y’all are guests here.
That said, I don’t claim to be perfectly consistent at all. Moderation here is based on many arbitrary factors — mood, mental energy, free time, etc. — that have nothing to do with exactly what happens on the blog.
Mandolin Writes:
September 1st, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I made that assumption because, in general, a PhD is required for most full time college professor jobs.
I’m also pretty confident that a Masters/PhD is more marketable than than a Bachelors degree in the same field. I don’t have data to back that up but given the choices ‘more marketable’, ‘less marketable’ or ‘no difference’ I’m going with ‘more’.
Mandolin Writes:
September 1st, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Yes. A large part of that has nothing to do with monetary compensation. You should be treated with respect, courtesy and in a professional way, no matter what your role in the project. BUT, how we decide what the ‘fair’ monetary is the big question. My opinion is that people should get paid all that they can get from the company. (The company of course will be working things the other way.) Unions do a good job in many fields of balancing the conflict.
A) Not all. B) She doesn’t have a full-time college professor job. C) Some of us teach at community colleges.
(D) In my field, it used to be entirely possible [though it’s growing less so] to get a full-time tenured college professor job without any kind of degree at all, including bachelor’s, and the graduate degrees in that field can still be treated with a certain kind of disdain and suspicion from certain arenas.)
No, you don’t have information to back that up, so it might behoove you to listen to someone who actually does have information.
It makes you more marketable for certain kinds of positions, is neutral on others, and may make you less marketable for those positions you’ll be seen as too qualified for or distracted from. Different kinds of PhDs or masters degrees have different effects on one’s marketability as well. It turns out the field listed on the diploma isn’t just cosmetic.
And they do a poor one of balancing the conflict for part-time college instructors and graduate students, something that’s well-known in both labor organizing and those fields.
The center square should really be “There’s no such thing as a FREE SPACE.” This square is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
A big portion of my practice is consumer law. I represent a lot of poor people who get shafted. I also do a lot of foreclosure work from the consumer end; I am currently trying to keep various folks in their houses.
Many of those people I represent (other than the ones in foreclosure, at least not often) actually have a higher take home pay than I do, and many of them make as much an hour as I do. I respect them, though I do occasionally reach my limit (my foreclosure client who has a nicer car and a more expensive house than I, and who makes about as much per hour, and who still hasn’t paid me? Not OK.)
At the moment I probably work, oh, about 65 hours per week, no benefits and not job security, with a take home of somewhere in the range of $50k–perhaps less–after I give away or deliberately write off another $15-20k of services to nonprofits and my poorest clients. And I like what I do because I choose to do it. But yeah, I think I have a decent idea of what the difference is between CHOOSING to do something and HAVING to do something.
HAVING to do something means that if it is a slow year I start working as a computer tech, or as a carpenter, or that I start doing law I hate, like suing consumers.
Doing what I do is a choice. I own it. And I can damn well tell the difference between a forced choice and a vanity job trying to look like a forced choice. My clients get to say that, but I don’t, even if they make more than I do.
Did you notice TGD’s comment that “With my degree and expertise, I could easily get a job making $50,000 or more?”
Really. did you see that? Because if you did, I can see essentially ZERO reason why any complaining she does about her own salary would not be classified as “whining,” insults be damned. And if (as she suggests in her comments regarding relative worth) this is a common situation for adjuncts, then I similarly think it is so much bullshit that a cynical approach gets tagged as somehow “anti-poor” or “pro corporate” or “uber capitalist” when what it really is, is an ivory tower filled with self righteousness.
Oh yeah, and as for the ‘bozo’ comment, fuck you too.
“Why do you hate FREEDOM!!!!” in some form or another is a frequent reply I see from libertarians – every discussion from them ends up with talking about “government telling ME what to do” or “taking MY money at gunpoint!”
I’m sorry I assumed she had a PhD and that in general advanced degrees made you more marketable. They seemed like reasonable assumptions to make. I wasn’t trying to offend anyone.
Since I haven’t done much research on this subject, can you point me to good source for the breakdown on where getting advanced degrees helps/hurts/has no impact?
Sailorman, you’re out of line, and out of this thread. Goodbye.
I kind of like that the laissez-faire bingo card is rigged so that you can play, but can’t actually win (get 5 in a row).
Yup.
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