I Works Hard

Trey Smith

In the comments section of my post, A Side Road, Baroness Radon wrote the following:

On a totally unrelated point, I am somewhat offended by your blanket statement, "Wealthy people believe in the brand of Christianity which states that wealth is bestowed by God on his favored people." I am not a wealthy Christian, but I know very wealthy Christians who would not say this at all, nor would I describe them that way: they attribute their wealth and success to their own hard work.

Her comment serves as a springboard for me to return to a point I have broached before. Why is it that, by and large, those individuals who work the hardest, often directly with their fellow human beings, and deal with the highest levels of stress are among the least paid in our society? Why is it that, the farther a person gets away from dealing with the targeted population, the more that person is compensated?

Let me use a field I am the most familiar with as an example: state-based social services. The front-line workers are those who deal daily with the human carnage of dysfunctional and, sometimes, broken families and individuals. In most states, this is a white collar job. You need to possess a college degree of a certain type -- it's not the kind of job a person can get just walking in off the street.

While these jobs generally are not physically strenuous, they are so mentally AND emotionally. The burnout rate is high because you must deal with so many people in pain. If you are dedicated to the people you serve, it's next too impossible NOT to take the job home with you. Consequently, it is very difficult to unwind and "let your hair down."

When I worked in this field as a front-line worker in the 1980s, I never earned more than $18,000 in any one year. In more than a few cases, the dysfunctional family I was tasked with helping made far more than I did. In my first job in the field, I brought homes LESS THAN $100 more than the maximum threshold to apply for food stamps at the other end of our agency!

But here's what I find so odd. The farther a person moves away from the direct work of helping dysfunctional families and individuals, the higher the pay scale becomes. The immediate supervisor of front-line workers made hundreds per month more than we did. The County administrator earned 50% more per year. The Regional Managers made 2 -3 times as much as we did and the folks in the state office generally started at $60,000 up to 6 figure salaries.

All of those individuals in the upper echelons of the pay scale were DEPENDENT on those of us out in the field. If we didn't exist, they wouldn't exist! Yet, they were paid handsomely, while we were tossed peanuts.

I don't want anyone to misunderstand my point. I'm not suggesting that the higher ups didn't work hard. I am certain that they had a lot of their own stresses to deal with. But they also enjoyed perks that we peons could only dream about.

The state often provided them with cars; we had to use our own. Many of the them had per diems for meals and whatnot; we paid for such things out-of-pocket. Each month they met for little confabs -- sometimes at snazzy resorts or retreats -- with catered meals and nightly entertainment. I was often lucky between investigations or home visits to grab a bite to eat at a fast food drive-through and, a good deal of the time, I was on 24-hour call.

As stated above, without people like me who toiled away in the trenches trying to save children from abuse and neglect or spouses from being battered to a pulp, the higher ups would have no budgets to crunch or manpower studies to conduct. Their entire livelihood depended on the tireless work of people like yours truly.

So, why is it that they deserve the big salaries and the front-line workers don't?

It seems completely ass backwards to me.