Powerline assesses the New Yorker union webpage. His favorite line (and mine) is "prestige without the pay is élitist." If you don't pay me a wage commensurate with my staggering prestige, you force me to taint myself with elitism, and that would be wrong.
So... prestige plus pay is surely more elitist, right? The obvious course for avoiding elitism is to eliminate the prestige, not to increase the pay.
ReplyDeleteI have seen this in other places. Social work has the second-lowest GRE scores for graduate school (Education is worse) and the workload is the lowest of all, yet I repeatedly heard MSW's complain at how unfair life was because they weren't paid as much as people with other Master's degrees. It's very Screwtape, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI have a relative who resented how little she was paid as a social worker. She also was proud of her willingness to choose a job without reference to whether she could make a good living doing it, and very willing to accept financial help from someone who lost prestige by doing a less attractive job that paid better. It all amounts to finding a way to feel good about cadging.
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