From the BBC:
Hospital cleaners are worth more to society than bankers, a study suggests.
The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.
It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy.
They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn. Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to “create stress”.
The study says they are responsible for campaigns which create dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption.
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Eilis Lawlor, spokeswoman for the New Economics Foundation, said: “Pay levels often don’t reflect the true value that is being created. As a society, we need a pay structure which rewards those jobs that create most societal benefit rather than those that generate profits at the expense of society and the environment”.
Reminds me of the greedy bunch of useless MPs!!!
“The point we are making is more fundamental – that there should be a relationship between what we are paid and the value our work generates for society. We’ve found a way to calculate that,” she said.
It’ll be nice to apply this method to all the 82 MIW and see for ourselves what kind of value are we getting for paying them such obscene salaries.
Minister Mental said in Parliament that we should pay our A-TEAM top dollar so that we don’t lose such ‘talents’ to the private sector. And one of the comparison he cited was to peg salaries comparable to banking industry.
While based on this research, it says that ‘Rather than being wealth creators bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse. Paid between £500,000 and £80m a year, leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate”.
Can we then says our MIW destroy SGD7 for every SGD1 they generate???? Yes??? Or No????
Unfortunately, monetary value is valued higher than society’s (or social) values sometimes.
No, actually, it is clout that is more highly valued than social value.
Carry on along the value-creation line of reasoning, shouldn’t our cleaners and policemen be paid multiples of what they are paid in the states, since at every juncture we are told that investors come because we are safe and clean? Surely, these individuals contribute significant percentage points to our GDP?
These people should be paid according to the annual count of comments by foreigners containing the descriptors “safe”, “clean”, “green”, “secure”, and the like, in relation to reasons for which they come to Singapore. They should be given a share of the tourism dollars by STB.
What post #1 AN said is very ture.
We need to VOTE OUT the silly billy goats of PAP ministers and MPs.
They have made our lives very difficult and wasted billions of $$$$$$ . We need to check their power,
LKY has made S’pore his experimental lab. Singapore is not a nation says LKY and Shanmugam. Both of them should be held to account for this seditious statement.
Bankers are not worth more than many other professions, I think many feel the same way too. But I guess we ‘need’ an official study to confirm our suspicions. If only they would take the study further, and do something about it.
The article misses a very critical point – that a person’s salary is not determined by the amount of wealth he generates for society as a whole but by supply and demand. The reason why elite bankers and tax accountants earn so much money is because there aren’t that many bankers and accountants to begin with and because their skills are in demand in society.
By pointing out that those who do socially beneficial jobs are earning a lot less than the good that they do to society, the article illustrates the perverse demands of people in British society. It is not the fault of the economic system or the way pay is structured that hospital cleaners earn so little, it is because societal demand for these services is very low compared to supply.
Lastly, artificially increasing the pay of socially beneficial professions will do more harm than good because demand for such services will only go down. The way to solve this problem is by education, so as to make the common person realize the value of the so-called beneficial jobs.
Echoing S (#7), if say we commensurate the cleaners in accordance to their supposed benefits to society and reduce the pay of bankers and ministers, there would indeed be a rise in the number of people wanting to work as cleaners. There would be thus less incentives for people to get an education necessary to be bankers or accountants, why study so hard and slog so hard when what we get eventually is peaunts, might as well just be a cleaner as they will be earning more. Would it even be viable? Again concurring with S, education, and developing a more understanding and sympathetic disposition to so called undesirable jobs should be the solution and not artificially raising their income.
Bankers bank on cleaners to provide a clean banking environment.
Bankers actually need cleaners more than cleaners need bankers.
To Commentator:
First of all, I dispute your claim that bankers need cleaners more than the reverse. I agree that the recent financial crisis has made everyone hate bankers, but it is A FACT, that any society needs a stable financial environment for it to progress economically.
Secondly, even if your claim were true – it doesn’t matter. The sad reality is that even if society needed cleaners a lot more than bankers, there are a lot more people who are able to work as cleaners compared to bankers.
When comparing relative pay, it is VITAL to compare the number of people in society vs the optimum number of those professionals that society desires. I agree that there are very many extremely beneficial jobs in society, but the reason why they are not well paid is because societal demand is lower than society supply.
Talk about economics, demand and supply.
Can we have this inference? That there’s a huge demand for Madoff’s services, and Madoff’s “talent” is limited, and so investors pay damn/ dumb huge amount of money into his portfolios. It turns out that Madoff’s supply of “con-man” service is of limited supply, and so the demand from hear-say blinded investors/ sheeps keeps increasing, and hence Madoff (the wolf) keeps paying himself millions of dollars.
It’s about people’s perception and the deception of these high-flyers. Because not everyone of these so-called high flyers can be Warren Buffet, but they are hungry to have paychecks like Buffet’s, and that many investors want but cannot afford to have returns like Buffet’s portfolios (which easily command more than US$100000 per share). So, now you have cheaper versions of Buffets, and worshippers who still believe that they are having a good deal.
The same analogy can be applied to Allen Stanford, Nick Leeson, Sunshine Empire, or our very own TH. Why ? Because they all have accounts that fooled investors or investors simply could not understand. Sounds familiar? So, just like the old days, when we have those “Yin Hui” (chit-fund) that served the villagers, we now have highly paid no-need-to-accountable trustees who serve the residents.
Anyone who invests in shares will know that “Investment is not a hard/ precision science”. So, why are we still paying millions for “probabilities”?
Assuming all humans are equal, it have to be equal because all r supposely to be equal in the eyes of the law.
A cleaner works hard, very hard, and get 1k dollar. A banker, works for less but gets many perks like sitting in the office and have aircon. Under the eyes of the law, a banker should earn 1k too. All r equal but why r they earning 1mil for god knows whatever reason?
Sg goal should be a just and equal society, not to create elites. Oh sorry, I am wrong. The poor and the workers r thrash.
See reality, people on top (experts, governments, professionals, managers, big bosses, etc.) are movers, they can command whatever salary they want cos they have the power to.
People at the bottom of the value chain has none of such power, their need is only “to survive” and they depend on the higher ups to let them to have the opportunity to fulfill that need.
Might sound cruel, but this is generally the way since man-times.