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.
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.
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.
I’ve been a professional baker for nearly 30 years. During that time my wages have been stagnant, benefits minimal, time off a quaint, odd concept. Thanks to food TV and the romanticization of restaurant work, people think what I do is wonderful. It must be wonderful, or why would I do it when I’ve been expected to want to work 60-80 hour weeks, scrub floors, walls and equipment, work when sick, work when injured, etc.etc.
The other day I overheard an guy my age complaining about the lack of “work ethic” in the younger generation of cooks”. I wanted to jump in with “what? They aren’t willing to let your kitchen be the only thing in their lives? They want to be able to see friends, have a family life, pursue other interests?”
And most of the industry thinks that exploiting workers is dandy, and the world thinks it’s great because putting up with it shows how much you must love what you’re doing.
I tell younger workers to remember that the boss isn’t there to be their friend, and that a job is where you rent your skill set for money.
I chalk this up as one more sociological toxin first brewed by the Classical Greeks, to wit; emotions are uncontrollable and therefore inferior to logic and rationality. American society has demonstrated a profound, willful ignorance of emotion and how it works for most of its existence, starting with decrying the attitude among the ‘indentured’ that they are still human and deserving of better treatment.
Today, you see it in the spectrum of objectively cruel and senseless laws or governmental policies designed to reduce or elimimate rights from various groups other than wealthy, influential Caucasian Christian males. And all because the ‘lesser folk’ both ‘need to be reminded of their place’ and ‘they lack the power to effectively resist us’.
I cannot WAIT to become a minority (Caucasian cis-male, pansexual but socially inept), just to see what will happen when the Old White Boys can no longer maintain their deathgrip on the reins of power. Because frankly I expect a vast improvement in quality of life for all, when the racist bigots who would sooner destroy a “nicer” neighborhood inhabited and run by non-whites than change their own behaviors to improve their neighborhoods…
