> It's a matter of fairness. Riskier jobs should have higher salaries.
Interesting argument which I doubt anyone here agrees with. After all, that would mean builders, miners, street sweepers and the like would be paid the highest, midwives somewhere in the middle and us right at the bottom.
Not sure who 'us' is; HN readership is pretty diverse. I'm a scientist and earn roughly the same as a midwife in Australia.
Having said that, my first child nearly died during birth, and having a very good midwife who knew the signs, made all the right decisions, got the emergency doctors in at the right time - that service was utterly invaluable.
I'm all for the average midwife being paid somewhat more than me if it leads to more of these outcomes.
Midwifes have to make the correct decisions in a stressful situation in an extremely tight time period (seconds to minutes when it's the business end of things, so to speak), with limited information (no heartbeat readings at the end, can't see what's happening, just feel). Mother is screaming at the top of her lungs, partner has no idea what's going on (presuming not same sex). I seriously can't think of any job where the pressure is so intense for every single day of work, without exception. Maybe in triage, but that'd be about it.
A water treatment worker checks that various readings are within limits, and makes adjustments according to a set of standard operating procedures (presuming here, to be fair). I'd also presume there'd be a good number of check points during the journey of dam water to the final product in the pipes. There's no redundancy with midwifery that I can see.
The jobs are clearly very different but what we are discussing is doing direct compensation for the risk that third-party people are exposed to in the case of a failure. The theory is that by giving the operator higher pay you reduce the risk to third-parties, in which case water treatment failure is one of the top risks that can effect a very high number of people. A midwife that makes a erroneous decision kills one or two people, a erroneous decision in the water system of a city can kill and serious harm thousands if not hundreds of thousands. Similar is true for nuclear plants but those tend to be already well compensated.
If we ignore the risk aspect to third-party which parent and grand parent comment brought up, and instead focus on pressure, I can think of a few ones which might be worse than midwife and with lower pay. Highway road workers would be one. Having trucks going by in almost highway speed just meters next to you while you are focusing on the work is the kind of hell on earth that I would not want to expose myself to, and it doesn't even pay well.
Other high pressure jobs on the top of my head would be rescue swimmer, as the profession require careful psychoanalytical pressure testing to enter the training program. It also takes a special kind of person to work as a explosive chemist or at the bomb squad. I would also mention the military as an natural example of high pressure job. Each three has widely different degree of compensation compared to each other and even within the professions itself, and compared to midwifery it is all over the place.
There is no clean formula for X(Pressure) * Y(Third-party risk) = Z(Pay), and implementing one would change the compensation for a wast number of professions. I strongly doubt that midwifery would be the one that would see the biggest effect, but I would love to see a study exploring it.
The money goes primarily to the engineers who put in place the systems, and to the designers of those systems and the companies that built the pieces of it. The day to day work, whether in the control room or on the tools, itself should be relatively simple, and it should (in theory) be difficult to stuff things up if the system is designed well.
If one extends this to indirect risk (i.e. financial risk to everyone involved), the paradigm gets closer to the current one: those whose jobs involve significant financial risk to themselves (investors/owners) or others (executives, managers, and -- to a lesser extent -- "talent", via the risk of shareholders losing their investment and/or employees losing their jobs/livelihoods) are paid comparably to the size of the hammer they swing with respect to risk.
Risks to other people is also known as responsibility and that should also be accounted for. But sometimes there is an imbalance. You can be putting others at risk but not be properly considered responsible. I think there is a lot of that in software, particularly when people's privacy/data is at risk.
Personal risk is a bit different because everyone has a choice about what is acceptable for them. Risk to others should not be your choice. The responsibility should be fixed and defined and therefore it's probably easier to make logical arguments about compensation rates.
> Not sure who 'us' is; HN readership is pretty diverse
Do you really believe that? 99% of us work in offices. You're in a bit of a bubble. Try going to a working man's club or the equivalent in your country to get a glimpse of the rest of society.
>Do you really believe that? 99% of us work in offices. You're in a bit of a bubble. Try going to a working man's club
I've worked as bar staff in one. Talking about a tribal bubbles, that place was insane. I have also worked in offices, factories and fields. Currently doing geeky stuff with nightclubs for a pittance and massively preferring it when compared to some of the vastly more high paid work I have done.
There is groupthink on here, but I would say that HN perhaps isn't as cookie-cutter as you may suppose.
What's your point? I didn't say anything about what HN is, I just said that it is in no way a "diverse" group of people. Honestly can't see how anyone could think this is diverse.
I dont see it as her claiming that riskier jobs always should be paid more than safer jobs. Only that the risk factor should have a larger impact on the salary.
> Interesting argument which I doubt anyone here agrees with.
Quite the contrary, I think everybody agrees that risk is one important factor in salary expectations.
But workforce availability is another important factor!
If more people are available to work on scaffoldings rather than in a cosy office, well, scaffoldings will pay less!
And yes, I do understand that working in a office usually requires some training that not eveybody has the priviledge to afford: I'm just stating the facts, but I don't want to imply that this situation is fair.
Even if you concede that point we're left with the question of why midwifery is especially risky in Ethiopia. Do they not have access to basis safety equipment?
Paying a government-funded profession based on risk creates perverse incentives. You'd have midwives campaigning against introducing surgical gloves because they've got a family to feed and don't want to lose the risk pay.
> Paying a government-funded profession based on risk creates perverse incentives
This is horrendous and depressingly, probably true. It's important to see the incentive structure from both sides and to try and consider the unintended consequences of seemly good actions.
That doesn't detract from the position that midwives probably deserve higher pay. Tragically, the system we live in is that those that help increase capital get more pay, while those that actually do the meaningful foundational work (help bringing people to life, saving lives, teaching, all the things required to actually have a workforce that can generate capital) don't get paid enough.
Train drivers tend to be paid very highly, and I've heard the reason for that is a kind of risk. If something goes wrong (which it really can do catastrophically) then they shoulder the risk.
To look at it from the other side, don't apologists for capital say that the boss should collect profit (and in perpetuity too) because of the "risk" she took to start the company?
I don't think train drivers earns high pay because of risk, but rather it takes a long time to properly train train drivers (especially freight trains), there is scarcity of skill, and the potential damages of a train crash warrants paying more for better skilled drivers to minimize the chance. The risk the driver takes on doesn't really get factored in.
I get that you're tackling this specific argument, but it's important to remember the context too.
She makes between $56 and $85 dollars a month. Working 12 months a year, for 50 years, she'll make a total of around $42,000 dollars. It's hard to argue that is remotely fair.
Back when I worked in an office, I saw more than one coworker get carted off (heart attack) from sitting at a desk all day. These days I move around a lot and I regularly have to put on a harness for working at height, and I've never seen or heard of anyone actually falling into their pro, much less getting hurt from a fall. Heart disease is still the #1 killer in America, by a fair margin, and has been for many decades. Is my new job "riskier"?
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with the statement, but only because I'm no longer convinced that capitalism is a viable system for allocating resources. In fact, I think this is a great argument against it. Dangerous jobs often do pay more, so people who need money will take these jobs -- even though the people who are desperate for a good paycheck are also often the least able to deal with the consequences of this risk. Financial desperation makes people ignore the long term, and people simply aren't good at understanding very-low-probability events. Dangerous jobs mean people will get hurt, which further limits their earning potential, and limits economic mobility. It's a terrible feedback loop.
But then, salaries have never made much sense to me. I'm not able to look at two friends and say "Yeah, X makes 10 times as much money as Y, and deserves it". Most of the people I know doing the most worthwhile things for society are also those earning the least money.
The very word "should" implies that there should be some one valid opinion or source of truth on that matter. I'd rather take decentralized market-based approach where the prices of it is decided by all the small decisions of a lot of ordinary people rather than try and debate it in attempt to come to some agreement with anyone.
Interesting argument which I doubt anyone here agrees with. After all, that would mean builders, miners, street sweepers and the like would be paid the highest, midwives somewhere in the middle and us right at the bottom.