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Thread: Average wages/salary in NZ

  1. #11
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    I always find the salary argument a difficult one. I do not work at the top of my profession as I choose not to have the stress involved. However do I work as hard as someone, say, a charge nurse in a care home, who is responsible for the well-being of a 4 dozen residents and 30 staff but who earns the same as me?

    The market decides the prices based on the skills involved and the ability to get the skill set involved. Some people can work harder, or choose to have more stress and responsibility in a position and get less as they are not gifted with innate ability in the first place and thus any choice, particularly for higher paying work is removed from them.

    But who works harder??? And should salaries/wages represent effort (which they don't appear to do) or market values (which they currently do)? I currently am thankful that they are at the latter as if I did not have innate ability I would be forced to work harder to recieve the same level of income...but is that really just?

    PS Before anyone mentions working hours I have done two 60+ hour weeks in the last fortnight....but I am assured that this is not normal, it is a peak demand and there will be time for my kids after next Wednesday!

  2. #12
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    how about scientists, nurses and teachers? Most of them work extremely hard, well educated and contribute immensely to society. I am more familiar with the science profession where most people I know work at least 70 hours week for poor pay. I guess society just does not value people like these, which is crazy! I am really not sure if we can value people based on the money they make.

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by unar View Post
    how about scientists, nurses and teachers? Most of them work extremely hard, well educated and contribute immensely to society. I am more familiar with the science profession where most people I know work at least 70 hours week for poor pay. I guess society just does not value people like these, which is crazy! I am really not sure if we can value people based on the money they make.
    Hang on, no-one's saying that these people aren't valued, what is being discussed is the cash price paid on these people. As I say, there is more to a job than the salary. So a teacher and a scientist may get a great deal of job satisfaction, where for the sake of arguement a computer network administrator (I'm guessing here) can't get the same level of satisfaction and fuzzy warm feeing at the end of the day.

    Equally, many of those scientists that are poorly paid have made the choice to stay in some area of research that intersts them, rather than going into a less interesting but more highly paid commercial lab.

  4. #14
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    Oh, I do hope the word 'vocation' isn't about to get used... You don't actually have to ENJOY every minute of every day in sublime fashion to be good at a job. And nobody ever said that you shouldn't get paid for things you enjoy doing (even partly).

  5. #15
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    Sometimes the pay structures just have no sense though. I work alongside PAs who to be quite frank have very few brain cells or qualifications between them, but can talk for New Zealand about babies, baking, shoes and handbags; they can stuff a mean brochure into an envelope and stick labels on them, make coffee and put biscuits on plates for meetings, and otherwise fill their days by booking crap and series of repeat meetings and reviews into other people's Outlook Calendars for the forthcoming year, stuff it up, move it, cancel it, invite you at midnight instead of midday, delete it six times by mistake and yet these people get paid $70k + per year. Your average skilled tradie guy gets $45k

    How can a PA be worth more than a teacher or a nurse?
    Last edited by Ngeru; 9th October 2010 at 12:12 AM.

  6. #16
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    I'm fully supportive of the tax moving away from an income based to a spending based model. It gives us far more choice of how much tax we pay. As for being jealous of the income of an individual -- never!! Footballers in the UK are an extreme example but it's still market forces.
    It's sometimes not just skill that nets the big income, it's how many are willing to do it. I'm in a mucky job, fixing trucks and I get in excess of 90k/ annum. Thankfully we are in short supply, ppl don't want to get hands dirty any more and I reap the benefit. In the UK a mechanic my age would be stocking shelves at Tesco. Three cheers for market forces!!
    If ppl earn high wages, it's because others think they are worth it. If ppl have enormous wealth therough building a business great, they have succeeded. If they have done it by only offering poor wages then why do ppl work for them? It must still be worthwhile, and if these lower paid ppl really want to do something about it is there a bar to starting their own business? They might begin to understand that the owners deserve all they get. I've done that too.

  7. #17
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    Ngeru is expressing what I am trying to say better. All I am trying to say is that a person's salary is not necessarily a good indicator of their education or how hard they have worked. Of course these people (teachers etc) are valued, but just not valued enough to be paid properly I guess.

  8. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ngeru View Post
    Sometimes the pay structures just have no sense though. I work alongside PAs who to be quite frank have very few brain cells or qualifications between them, ...stereotyping waffle.... and yet these people get paid $70k + per year. Your average skilled tradie guy gets $45k

    How can a PA be worth more than a teacher or a nurse?
    Ahh, but the trade gets that $45k tax free as they do it all off the books and don't forget that they make triple that by fleecing customers on materials. Or are we not supposed to just slag off other professions? Because the spin side of your secretary rant is that if you think that's 'all' every secretary does then you are really in a bubble. What you may not notice is that they allow a team of several people costing the company several times that (perhaps 8 people in their team, so lets say half a million bucks a year in salary as a very conservative estimate) to just get on with their main job. Not order stationary, fixing the photocopier which no matter how educated, skilled or inteligent the person needs to be fixed by the secretary as they are the only ones smart enough to load paper or unjam it, sort out the flight for the person that's got to the airport 5 minutes after the flight left, or needs to stay another night after a meeting ran on, arrange a WOF for a pool car when it ran out when somoeones away for 3 days in the middle of nowhere, etc etc.

    And please read the previous posts (by many, not just me). If you are saying in your final sentence is why are their salaries higher then it's answered several times. If your question is about valued to society then no-one is saying that they are not, but that inlcudes other factors than pure financial.

    I'm not sure about NZ, but in the UK pensions made a big difference. For all the complaining about salaries in the health sector (something that has been going on for a long time so people decided to be a nurse in the knowledge it wasn't a highly paid job) then pensions are conveniently not taken into account when the complaining starts. To get the same pension as is currently included (and I appreciate a hot topic back home) then someone in teh private sector needs to put c25% of their salary into a pension. But that gets glossed over when the poor public sector are blackmailing the country by going on strike. And note that as soon as the suggestion is made to bring that pension into line with the rest of us the strike ballot forms are being prepared as they 'value' of those quickly becomes noticed.

    Ok, so now I've ranted and offended several hard working public sector workers, that wasn't the original intention, but when there has been several posts which suggest that the only jobs with value are teaching and nursing then it needs saying that there are two sides to the story. And hey, what's stopping those teachers and nurses quitting and getting a secretarial job? If that happened in droves then market forces would end up dropping the average secretary salary and increasing the nursing wages.

  9. #19
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    Sorry, got a bit carried away about teaching.

  10. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by 4togo View Post
    Please enlighten me if you can justify the, in my eyes, obscenity of extraordinary wage differences in our society.
    I am not an oracle on wage differences but I do think sometimes we compartmentalize everyone rather than look at circumstances. Yes footballer wages are astronomical and defy belief but those wages are supported by advertising which itself is viable by those who follow the game. Conversely consider someone who starts something from scratch, works 18 hours a day for 30 years to pull it together and who now has a company employing 500 or 1000 or 10000 others earning decent money and turning a nice profit. Do you think they shouldn't get a decent bonus or extraordinary return for the hard work and dedication? I don't disagree with you in principle but I don't think everyone should be penalized for earning a seriously nice amount of money. Good on them.

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