The Pay Paradox

Two bright young things discussing their first jobs sparked off a chain of thought. One is a trainee journalist at a national daily while the other is a trainee at a PR firm. The jobs demand similar skills "" a working knowledge of English as she is spoke and wrote, a certain Je ne Sais Quoi in company, and an ability to suffer fools patiently for long hours. Yet, the budding PR draws almost double the pay of the hack-in-waiting.

The plot thickens if you consider two other parallel professions advertising and publishing. Similar skills to the above, but very different paychecks. A publishing house editor makes roughly two-thirds as much as a journalist, while an ad-copy writer draws roughly a third more than a PR-person who, in turn, outearns a journalist.

Presumably market forces determine the disparities in relative compensations as indeed they must determine all such disparities. But those omnipotent market forces appear capricious and intractable. One keeps running into paradoxes if one attempts to construct a model.

The above disparities are usually explained in terms of value additions. Advertising has higher margins than PR work which in turn has higher margins than print media and dead-tree book publishing. But, the bureaucracy which has lower value-addition than any of the above is obscenely overpaid in those terms. Also, the carpet industry has higher margins than any of the above, besides demanding greater skill and longer hours from all those starved little kiddies doing zillions of knots per square cm down Mirzapur way. But, it is a savagely underpaid profession.

Maybe the payment paradox can be resolved by inversely factoring in the social esteem associated with a specific job or profession. After all, teachers get paid less than journalists despite having higher levels of skill. Perhaps, there is an inverse relationship between degree of social esteem and level of compensations. Lawyers get paid more than ad-men and journalists as a sort of compensation for being generally held in greater opprobrium. Politicians get even higher compensations for similar reasons. But, consider garbage collectors and sweepers. Both do socially necessary but dirty jobs which are also ill-paid. Corpse disposal is also underpaid unless one includes entrepreneurs like Gucci. Are bhangis then held in high esteem as compensation for low pay?

Compensations may also vary accor-ding to the prospect of physical danger or the ability of the individual to cause mayhem. For example, IAF pilots sho-uld get more than ground staff according to the Fifth Pay Commission. Airlines pilots do get paid more than stewards. But Blueline drivers get pathetic compensations, and returning to the oldest profession, the higher the class of sex-worker, the less the danger of physical abuse or contracting STDs.

One keeps returning to the oldest profession. It is the oldest service industry as well and its ridd-led with apparent paradoxes. Compensations are inversely gea-red with youth getting a premium, while experience comes at a discount. Male sex-workers get lower compensations than females. Both trends are in direct contrast with other service industries. Maybe one should ban prostitution and appoint a commissar to decree salaries after applying an appro-priate econometric model. But then how much, should the commissar be paid ?