There is no practical, personal, or, more foundationally, moral or otherwise explicitly philosophical reason to want to work professionally, except in rare cases where this kind of work provides an escape from extreme boredom, other than receiving payment or other benefits in exchange for time and effort. Professional work is in itself nothing more than a means to the end of earning enough money to survive or finance a life of greater comfort, security, or luxury. While there still could and would be tasks to do in the absence of professional work, there would be no reason at all for people to devote so much of their lives to companies if it was not out of necessity (necessity in the sense that if they do not want to survive via more direct means like personally growing their own food, walking around without personal transportation, and so on, they must earn money).
Some professions pay more than others, and not always in a way that reflects their comparative importance for the stability of society or for their usual lack of philosophical depth. Athletes can be paid incredibly high amounts of money to primarily just perform roles in sports games that, aside from things like occasionally helping the poor escape poverty due to physical ability, are meaningless on their own despite the rabid obsession with them in many circles, while people doing far more objectively helpful or substantive things in their professional jobs might be paid far less. The usefulness or depth to a job is of course the only valid kind of criteria for cultural norms to associate it with higher or lower compensation respectively.
In addition to having comparatively low pay for their true scope or philosophical significance or even just usefulness, some jobs or industries truly do involve workplace exploitation relating to compensation. In the case of teaching for public schools (though this is not a philosophically important job in itself because logical truths are the only things that cannot be false and all people can access all knowable logical truths without education to prompt this awareness), the exploitation on the side of payment is sometimes greatly exaggerated. Those who have to deal with school shootings or violence, sexual harassment from students they can hardly discipline, and so on certainly do have an actual reason to hope for better pay as they risk their lives, or health (physical or mental), but anyone who considers how many months of the year a standard teacher is actually required to work has what they need to understand why it is perfectly fair to give starting teachers a smaller starting salary than plenty of other year-round jobs.
For a profession that is meant to not have any work for practically an entire season of the year, teaching in public schools does have pay that can be very fair for the actual time of the year a teacher spends working, albeit not counting the additional hours some teachers might get pressured to work at some schools off the clock. With summers free, they can pursue other paid work or choose to have the season off; in and of itself, the lower yearly pay is because teaching does not inherently involve working during all months of the year. Teachers can indeed be expected to do more than their pay and contracts call for, but smaller annual pay for only working in the spring, fall, and part of the winter is not workplace exploitation.
There are legitimate problems about teaching as a job in America that need to be addressed for the sake of safety and fairness. Paying less each year for less months/days of work a year is not among them. Negotiating starting pay in light of previous experiences or special skills can help offset this at the beginning anyway, with eventual raises lessening the issue. However, there is nothing irrational or unjust about simply paying someone less for fewer total months of work than people in almost every other profession regularly work on a yearly basis. This is in no way the kind of workplace exploitation that teachers and those with other jobs do actually face. Confusing things that are not problematic with what is irrational and exploitative is even one of the best ways to distract people from focusing on the graver issues of contemporary teaching.
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