.. actually, no - reading your post again, you seem to be attacking a straw man rather than the actual issue. It’s not a case of “your pay as a government worker is independent of any variable expect the number of years you physically sat in a classroom”. The jobs, while differing almost completely in terms of skills and tasks required, are of broadly similar levels of seniority. I don’t believe the suggestion is that Linus Torvalds would be paid the same as some random SA because they have the same schooling.

- Chris

See http://www.workrights.ca/content.php?doc=143&xwm=true for some details.

The men were middle managers and the women were middle managers. In the same company (here: local government). Which, for the ombudsman, means equal responsibility.

And since the law says you can’t discriminate between two persons when everything else is equal (equal job, equal pay), the only reason the nurses should earn less is because they are nurses, not engineers.

One thing few has mentioned are: why do each profession have labour unions if everyone should earn the same?

That may be true but I think it would be a hard push to claim that Nurses don’t work as hard as engineers or don’t have a similar level of knowledge.

I suppose it comes down to the fact that things like nursing aren’t direct economic producers in the same sense that engineering is despite being just as necessary.

An engineer can point at what he helps build and the money it is worth or creates and make a good claim for their fair share.

What can a nurse do, point at the “value” of peoples lives or gesture vaguely at the knock on economic production his/her care helps people to achieve?

Perhaps realising that nursing doesn’t fit well with conventional economics and basing their pay on a profession which requires a similar level of skill and work demands isn’t so insane after all. Perhaps it’s an idea that’s been arrived at after some actual thought, rather than a knee-jerk “everyone deserves money” response.

That is what this proposal (and very similiar ones in Sweden) try to adress. I’m generally sceptical to social constructivist ideas, but the analysis seems reasonable…

A profession should have high wages if: 1) It’s in demand, 2) it requires a difficult education and 3) practitioners can loose the right to work in the profession for reasons of incompetence.

After all, if you require equal pay for equal education, it implicitly means non-equal pay for non-equal education. And since it makes no sense to pay less for more educated people…

@Benoit: I suppose Christian isn’t asking for keeping nurse salaries down, but instead not requiring it to be equal to some other (seemingly random) professional group for a seemingly random reason (the length of two very different educations).

It’s a known fact that nurses are paid crappily (finnish nurses had a strike (threat) on the issue recently), but it’s not sensible to fix the issue by equalizing two very different professions. In fact if you consider the software engineering field (where I work), I bet nurses are more deserving for the money than we are judging by the benefits produced to society…

I’d like to ask, why do you believe in the first place that nurses should have lower salaries than engineers?

Are nurses less useful to the society? surely not!
Is it easier to become a nurse? Apparently not, since studies have the same length.
Is being a nurse an easy task? Hell no!

You cant say that the market should determine the wages when the almost they entire health care industry is public. I do think that education does reflect the experience in some sectors like nursing, doctors, psychologists, historians, engineering, philosophy, teacher; while others like programming, math are vastly underrated in education. That just means that we have to find a peer review system that works for those disciplines. And I believe that we can improve all of the rating systems that we have today, we don’t have to follow tradition; but we can learn from it.

It does not mean that we should discount the education of others. Even though they are not as easy to assess worth. I do think most people would pay a lot to be physically well and nurses play an integral part of that. We have a very mixed system, even if we exclude the public sector; so don’t jump up and down and cry wolf if somebody tries to change something and call them a communist.

Especially since that is what most people do when they talk about opensource software ( Are you saying that everybody can change it and it’s free, heresy ).

It is, however, important to realize a few things.

Women ARE discriminated in the workplace - both when it comes to their salary and their career.
I’ve seen it many times where I work. It can’t be denied. It is, however, important to note that during the last years things have really improved a lot (at least in Sweden).

Another thing I’d like to poke at is this notion that the simple fact that you have a degree is worth something per se. It is not. 50%, a number I pulled right out of my ass, of my university class mates somehow - probably through heavy use of voodoo - managed to pass their classes and graduate. I for one would rather hire someone out of highschool as long as they had a bit of amibition than any one of those 50%.

A lot of thinking made med conclude that a degree is hardly worth the paper it is written on. What is worth something is what you make out of your degree - not very different from an financial investment.
After that conclusion I’ve come to think of education as something you invest in. Education gives you tools to improve as an individual - potential to grow.
Salaries should be based on performance - not potential. It is up to the individual - provided that they have the basic skills - to increase their performance and thus their salary.

Ask around. I’ve come to be astounded by the amount of brilliant people around that have little or no formal education. Some of them have a tendancy to “go back to school” later on in life motivated by wanting a bigger salary. This is amazing to me - they waste years of productivity to try to improve generally when they, when needed, can absorb the required knowledge in very little time on their own. Crazy.

Oh, and yes - I do have a degree; despite my moronic ranting - blame the swedish education