Exploitation of workers becomes more socially acceptable if the workers are perceived as "passionate" about their jobs

Look for the exciting follow up “Why a well paid nurse is a better nurse”

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What a great argument for paying CEOs minimum wage. I mean, if you have a vocation to be a leader, then leadership is its own reward!

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So - always hire the cheapest penis enlargement surgeon?

What have you got to lose?

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But then who would clean up the vomit outside the first grade classroom when the building’s only custodian is on vacation? It’s not like you can ask the Development Director, the Finance Officer, the Director of Enrollment and Marketing, the Assistant to the Director of Enrollment, the Director of Lower School, the Director of Upper School, or the Head of School to do that.
– First grade teachers at my [fancy, private] school this morning

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That you for saying this so well, I’ve typed up about 3 drafts but you state my opinions very well. (ETA: meant this in reply to Space Monkey)

The main thing I wanted to add is that everyone is different, and has different motivations. It should be up to the indivivdual to decide their own sliding scale of whatever mix of rewards satisfy their life. The dynamic in my business that I loathe is a constant slide towards demanding higher pay per labor-unit; this is normally good, right! But the evidence is it leads to less work and declining artistic standards for everyone. I don’t blame a lot of organizations for their bland artistic choices when I see the payroll they have to meet every month. If you want a world in which people still take chances on things that don’t have huge commercial potential, we have to allow that sometimes other things aren’t going to be perfect or desirable.

I contract for a concert series and just last week we were having this conversation: halve the number of concerts so we can double the (IMO opinion unacceptably low) pay? It’s the right thing, it gets us from paying below-minimum-wage to a respectable amount? Yet it means depriving 50% of potential future musicians of that work so the ones who can command the higher pay will do better. Great for some people, shitty for others. Who gets to decide that? The people at the bottom are the ones who always lose.

00%20PM

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Now that’s thinking like a CEO!

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Lol. Yes, are you referring to this story perhaps?

As it happens, I knew the author of the academic paper. I think it was one of his more successful ones. His younger sister was a nurse.

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Nope. Just a general observation that the low bid doesn’t equate to the best service.

So - the study was motivated by sibling rivalry?

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Its a fine question. Why do young teachers do it? Why take the gig? Is it vocation? I am often horrified in Trader Joes by all the school teachers working the tills. It seems all teachers need to work 2 jobs now. That was not the case in the 70s.

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Mal was always passionate about his work.

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Hasn’t it been established as an article of faith that the rich must be paid more, lest they be disincentivized from wealth creation; but the poor must be paid less, lest they be without an incentive that curbs their natural laziness?

Nobody ever seems to explain why the demand curve for money behaves in this manner; but it’s the closest thing to a coherent underpinning for their policy prescriptions.

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LITERALLY.

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In the context of money alone it makes sense. For example, look at the kind of sleazeballs that certain sectors of the banking industry attracts. A banker has to have a low moral and ethical character indeed to have lent money to Il Douche when no-one else would (perhaps getting a Fed appointment as a reward) or run a private equity vulture capital bust-out operation or help Russian oligarchs or other criminals hide and launder their ill-gotten gains.

Adding in the vocational element, though, it’s a rare nurse who gets into their line of work mainly for the money like one of the scummy bankers I mentioned above does. Raising nurses’ wages wouldn’t change the training required for the job or change the profession’s standards. If anything higher salaries for nurses and other vocations would increase expectations of and demands for competence and performance and training in a capitalist society that equates money with virtue, in a way that they don’t in non-vocational professions like banking or used car sales or multi-level marketing where money is the entire point.

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In a lot of charter schools, that would be the “volunteer” parent of the day who, in many cases, is replacing the custodian (thereby reducing the school’s labour budget) along with other parents.

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I’ve said for years, anybody who says you should love your work so much you’d do it without being paid is trying to talk you into doing exactly that.

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Learned that in IT as well.

“you work in IT?! Can you come over Saturday and help me with my printer?” “sure. It’ll be $45 an hour, 2 hour minimum”

People stop asking once you convince them you’d seriously like to be paid real money for real work you normally are paid for.

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This use of the word “passionate” makes me queasy, precisely because it papers over such a huge, wilfully-ignored open can of writhing worms.

Simply put, outside of manufacturing, the orthodox economic picture of labor is plain wrong. We’re expected to think of nursing or singing jobs as basically the same as factory jobs, and then when this fails to make any sense it’s waved away as “mumble something something passion”. It’s nonsense. Most labor cannot be usefully understood as a market transaction, period.

Or more specifically, the model only applies when workers are on the edge of subsistence. Then it becomes a simple transaction, because you need $X to remain alive, and if your wage is less than X you can’t do the job. But outside of that case, there’s basically no relation between how well someone is paid and how well they do their job.

In other words, with respect to a large part of the workforce, economic policy is based on a model that requires people to be on the brink of ruin in order to make sense.

I would distinguish between “passion” and “duty”, though both are bullshit justifications for exploitation. “Passionate” workers are exploited by pretending that because they enjoy their work, allowing them to do it is a benefit in kind. “Dutiful” workers are exploited by simply noting that if you care for others, you won’t be able to stop caring just because you got a pay cut.

The broad solution is pretty obvious. Society as a whole demands the value that nurses and teachers and artists produce; society as a whole should foot the bill. That’s not a socialist viewpoint, it’s just a matter of basic economic plumbing. The basis of getting paid has to be showing up.

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http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/news/Well-Paid_NurseNurse.pdf

This actually links to the Tufts rebuttal to the article about paying nurses less.

CEOs will always find a justification to pay their labor pools less.

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Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” movie started off with the story of airliner pilots starting off at $20K salaries. People love to fly.

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Is there a further article:

“Why having enough nurses of acceptable standard is better than having too few nurses regardless of how good they are”?

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