Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Things They Should Study: economic demographics of people who are opposed to good wages for garbage men

I've been wondering why people who think the garbage collectors are overpaid don't look at the job as something they themselves could potentially do. After all, my personal inclination when I see a job I think is overpaid is to think that maybe that's the job I should be doing. (So far, whenever I've looked into things, I find that the job is either harder than I thought, or you have to pay your dues for longer than I thought, or it doesn't pay as much as I thought.)

But today it occurred to me that the people being most inconvenienced by this strike are mostly the rich. The garbage strike affects residential collection, but not highrise apartments. In other words, primarily the house people. Houses in Toronto are expensive - we're looking at $400,000 at the very least. This is a city where a million-dollar home can look perfectly unremarkable. If you own a house in Toronto, you make far more money than I ever will. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in my apartment not noticing anything except that the bins on Yonge St. are rather full.

As a general trend, public sector salaries have a moderating effect. They tend to be higher than private sector at the low end of the pay scale (garbage collectors, daycare workers, receptionists) and lower than the private sector at the high end of the scale (investment bankers, senior executives, etc.) Anyone who can afford a house in Toronto would be at the high end of the scale, and therefore lives in a world where the natural order of things as demonstrated by empirical evidence is that public sector is paid lower than private sector.

So here they are, being inconvenienced by this garbage strike, not identifying with the garbage men because that work is so much more difficult and poorly-paid than what the house people themselves do. Then they find out, to their shock, that the garbage men are making so much more money than the rich house people pay, say, their cleaners.

Meanwhile, the people who can identify with the garbage men, who, if they learned the garbage men made more than they expected, would be inclined to think "Cool! I wonder how you get that job?", live in apartments and are hardly noticing anything is going on.

The mystery: how come so many newspaper columnists seem to have houses? Surely journalism can't pay that well.

3 comments:

laura k said...

I'm linking to several of your strike-related posts. Really excellent stuff.

"The mystery: how come so many newspaper columnists seem to have houses? Surely journalism can't pay that well."

Journalism doesn't, but columnists are the cream of the print journalism world. They are paid very well by writerly standards.

And many writers have partners who are doctors, lawyers or other non-writing professionals.

impudent strumpet said...

So all commentary (as opposed to reporting) is being written by the best-paid of the journalists. I wonder to what extent that affects public opinion/perception of the world.

Also, the idea of being able to upgrade socioeconomic status because of your partner's income completely blew my mind. It has literally never occurred to me that that's something that might happen to people.

laura k said...

"It has literally never occurred to me that that's something that might happen to people."

It happens frequently.