The Most Important Jobs Are the Least Well Paid

Legends of Late Capitalism N°1: The rich are paid more because they contribute more to society.

Picture by geralt on Pixabay

There is a lot of masochism going around, and I’m not even talking about my sex life.

Imagine a world with such advanced technology that everyone could be working 15 hour weeks — and yet, instead of enjoying their free time, people were working long hours at pointless jobs and Burn-Outs had become an epidemic. Imagine a world where people whose jobs had an adverse effect on society were amongst the richest on the planet, while people who save lives or clean the streets have to go to food banks because their wages don’t cover their own basic needs. Imagine a world that made being unemployed a full-time job, and where those whose jobs serve no purpose actively resent the ill-paid underclass doing all the tasks actually necessary to society.

That world is our world, that world is Late Capitalism. We’re all mad here. Or all masochists.

One argument has become the default response when you denounce social inequalities, an argument that seeks to explain how there came to be such a colossal difference between the highest and lowest wages: those people deserve to get paid more because they contribute more to society. It’s what we tell ourselves to make our deeply unfair system seem morally justifiable. The problem is that it is complete bullshit.

Anyone that has ever has a job probably already had doubts about whether wage really is an indicator of the usefulness of a job. Maybe you’ve had one of those managers who does nothing but “delegate”, bully his underlings and go on very long lunches. Maybe you’ve worked at ill-paid jobs, been treated badly while doing something vital for everyone. Or maybe you’re at the office now, scrolling through your social media, with no actual work to do and feeling like your job is worthless — but like you can’t give it up because it’s quite good pay.

What you might not realise is this isn’t just a bitter feeling you have on a Monday morning, this isn’t just a fluke of all the places you’ve ever worked. Studies have shown that wages are completely detached from the value of a profession to society. The research which has gone the…