What should they be paid?

How about those of us who work for small/medium sized charities! in our charity all the paid staff (a tiny team of paid staff manage volunteers) have degrees (mine in law) but others have done legal conversion courses, I have various post grad legal qualifications too.
we all work long hours well into the evenings and often skip lunch due to sheer pressure of work, and often work at home on weekends too.
We do pro bono work for low income and vulnerable people who need advice and representation in things like home repossession hearings and social security tribunals, this is vital work as loss of home or income is life changing and damaging to families! yet our salaries are less than many of the ones cited above! I am in charge of a number of staff as well but do not earn as much as the Lidl managers mentioned and a bit less than the higher paid refuse collectors! I have 20 years in my profession and earn only what a graduate entrant might earn in many other jobs!
Unfortunately equity doesn’t really come into it!

Teachers can’t be paid enough in my eyes.
Nursing and most medical staff too it’s mostly pretty vocational and for that reason never paid sufficiently.
I also refuse to tip hairdressers.
Please someone explain why police are getting such a hard time here.... they can get the worst of the worst jobs to do!

Nurses. Hard work and long hours for peanuts. Also paramedics.

My daughter...who’s a counsellor for kids that have been excluded from main-stream schools... they are sent to her ( based in a special school) to try and talk through their problems ...she tries to help them get back to mainstream! I don’t think there is a week where she has not be threatened, kicked, spat at, punched , hair pulled out in handfuls , since she’s been doing her job. She has an emergency button running around the circumference of the wall of her office. Most weeks she has to push it at least once . She loves her job and the kids she tries to help..and pays the price for it...and all for about £24,000 a year! Yes, My daughter.

....as an adjunct...that’s about £12,000 less than a teacher who gets the nice, well brought up, teachable, mostly compliant kids! When these teachers can’t cope ...the kids are excluded and sent to someone like her... on two-thirds the money. I know this because her husband is a teacher . Odd isn’t it that the tougher the job, the less your thought of!

Wow Saggi I was just admiring your daughter, when I read the 2nd post.
Please let all teachers know about these nice, well brought-up, compliant children who are excluded as soon as they step out of line!!! Seriously do you have any idea what a pupil has to do to get excluded? Clearly not.

If I read the words 'I know this because..' aaarrrgghhh

Hear Hear couldn’t agree more 62 in November and then another 4 years to wait after that,unless they move it again!

Hear Hear couldn’t agree more 62 in November and then another 4 years to wait after that, unless they move it again!

I wouldn't like to teach some of the kids today. You're not allowed to box their ears !

So many responses, it takes so much time to read them all. Don't know if anyone suggested this one:

Here in the US, seniors (most on fixed incomes) must still pay (exorbitant, ever escalating) property taxes on their homes. Most have worked hard for years to own a home and have invested a good part of their life savings on said homes. It's not uncommon for seniors to become homeless due to unpaid property taxes.

I have repeatedly suggested to lawmakers that seniors, (age 65 or over) who actually dwell in their own homes, be exempt from paying property taxes on said homes.

Willa, so do we. It’s called council tax.

I've just spent the day with two newly-qualified medics who start their new jobs next month. Here's an example of a typical schedule. Four days of 8am-6pm shifts, two days of 8am-8:30pm shifts, four night shifts then, finally, four days off before it all begins again. They'll earn £22,000 for that.

I think we agree that workers should be rewarded according to their usefulness.
If, post-apocalypse, we had to form a new society, we would need most of the traditional skills - builder, farmer, teacher, nurse but could manage well without politician, banker and tech support.

Definitely higher pay for nurses ,paramedics and ambulance staff. They are the ones who work very long hours and are ,more and more, subject to attack and abuse.My SIL works in A and E as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner,after a great deal of extra study. He has been attacked whilst just trying to do his job. Doctors,Consultants and Surgeons do a great job,but do receive a more realistic salary.

Of course refuse collectors should earn a decent and fair wage, as should everyone who works in my opinion, but I’m the last person who would try to equate every single job’s worth, it’s just too difficult. And pretty much every job is worthwhile, people do not have to be on the front line of the services to be doing a worthwhile job.

However as my daughter is a GP I do have something to say about the pay of GPs. I have said this before on another thread and I will say it again here. My daughter spent twelve years training to do her job. Six years at university, two years doing F1 and F2, and a further four years working and training to be a GP. If anyone else wants to tell me she is not worth what she earns given her high level of training, I want to know why she is considered to be worth less than she earns. She does NOT earn £100,000 a year, she only works two days a week in her Practice, and one day a week engaged in some advisory/information dissemination, a necessary post due to reorganisation demanded by the government. When working in the Practice, she frequently works twelve hour days, despite having three very young children, twins of five years old and a baby a year and a half. Do not tell me my daughter is not worth her pay, she is!

Saggi

As a double income family earning around £60k with school holidays thrown in and teachers pensions too, your daughter and partner are doing better than ok, especially as they have you to do babysitting duties.

SueDonim
When I was a student nurse I worked nights 8-8, 10 on and 5 off but we had to sign in for breakfast and then change into clean uniforms before going to lectures and sign in there too.
Only then could we go to bed and rooms were checked to see we were there.
Days were 8 on 2 off. 7-7 with 45 mins for lunch.
Believe me, we worked harder than nurses do now and wards were immaculate, much cleaner than now.
I earned £11 pm...after live-in, pension and NI deductions in my first student year and there were no fat nurses.

Nobody has agreed with my suggestion that public toilet cleaners should by highly paid.

CPS barristers getting paid at what works out at less than minimum wage... Definitely need to be paid more considering the hours worked, nature of work etc.
I pay more for a days childcare than some CPS barristers will earn for a full day a court.

Watermelon, I half agree with you but if we are talking basic survival then food producers/providers should be high on the list along with those who provide shelter, water and warmth.

GabriellaG54 it might depend on the type of nursing but I have to say, the nurses on the orthopaedic ward I was in for nine days worked their socks off. It was such physical work, too, as only one patient on the six bed ward was mobile, everyone else had to be moved and, apart from me, turned in bed etc. They were 12 hour shifts and the doctors were often there when I went to sleep and the same ones there when I woke up in the morning.

I don't think long hours are good for anyone. I had to wait four days for my operation. I could have had it earlier but it would have taken place late at night. I told the surgeon I'd rather he went home and had some rest before he stuck his scalpel into me!

I think we agree that workers should be rewarded according to their usefulness.
To a certain degree but I do think that those who have worked hard for years for their qualifications should be rewarded accordingly.

I don't particularly want the surgeon who operates on me to be paid on a par with a refuse collector.
Both essential jobs I agree but one has taken many years of training to achieve their level of expertise.

To my mind, there are so many socially and materially unproductive (but often highly paid) jobs now, which never existed before and which the world would probably not miss : marketing executives, public relations officers, personal trainers, image consultants, brand managers, event organisers, telemarketers, "chuggers", marketing psychologists and lobbyists (the last two being not only pointless but, in my opinion, manipulative and unethical), etc, etc.

It seems to me the jobs that are absolutely essential or which we would find it very inconvenient to do without - such as farmers, engineers, teaching assistants, cleaners, gardeners, carers, child care workers, nurses, street cleaners, dustmen, factory workers, bus, train and coach drivers, laboratory technicians, shop workers, paramedics, fire officers, emergency call centre operators, etc, etc, often have lower status and are under paid.

I think one of the reasons the modern world has become more and more obsessed with the notion that making money (by almost whatever means) is the most important thing; thus year on year profits must continue to increase. Therefore all sorts of strategies must be used to persuade people that they must buy stuff they don't need - and to keep buying it in order to ensure that our economy is "healthy". This calls for a whole range of marketeers - from marketing strategists, psychologists, brand managers, etc etc, to more niche specialties such as food photographers.

A very mixed up world - on the one hand being urged to keep buying goods and services in order to maintain "growth". On the other, being frowned upon for over-consumption of valuable resources, leading also to disposal problems - both of which damage the environment.

I have a GP in my family - work begins at 7.30 am and they are not home until 9.00 pm or frequently later (with a twenty-minute commute). There is no lunch break (or often, time to go to the loo).

Additionally, there are 'phone calls re. patients (often mental health or child protection related) during the weekend/late in the evening, five weekends away from home spent considering future plans for the surgery (no time during the working week) and several weekends undertaking 'flu jabs etc.

There are committees (necessary for the health service to run smoothly) to chair/attend and on and on.

This GP reckoned that averaged out, they earn less than the average wage per hour.

Why do they do it? Good question! They care about us and want the very best for their patients. They could do without the 'doctor-bashing' that comes round every few years.

I can assure you that the oft quoted £100,000 per annum is a newspaper-led story.

To be accurate, there are a handful of GP's who can attain this salary and they earn it for much out of hours work in rural communities where they are the only source of health care, thus they do the job of GP, hospital, district nurse etc - everything - at any hour or the day or night.

If the press are not 'doctor-bashing' they are 'teacher-bashing' (but only when there's not much news about...).

We, as patients, are waiting longer for appointments because many of us use our GP surgeries incorrectly, (we used to visit a few times a year and now it is treble that). We know our 'rights' and demand to be seen when we could visit the local chemist. The pressures with paper-work are incredible (did you know that each time a child is at home when sick and not attending school, the school expects a GP to produce an evidential 'sick-note'?) and the Government is reducing payments to surgeries for treatments (do you expect a GP to pay for your UTI test from their own pocket if not Government funded?) which hardly helps the situation.

Do you know that the Government has messed around with GP's pensions, so what was promised has disappeared? There would be riots and strikes in other sectors were this to happen.

Give these hard-working, dedicated caring people a break.

(Can you tell I'm cross...?!)

Candelle, why are you cross? With us? I would say that the majority of responders on here are full of admiration for all the medical profession.
It’s just that others are also important.