Do you, or did you, love your job? Do you/did you feel you are/were justly compensated for your labor?
“The implication that love is a suitable stand-in for job security, workplace protections or fair pay is a commonly held belief, especially in so-called dream jobs like writing, cooking and working in the arts, where the privilege to do the work is seen as a form of compensation itself.
“But the rhetoric that a job is a passion or a “labor of love” obfuscates the reality that a job is an economic contract. The assumption that it isn’t sets up the conditions for exploitation.”
Those two paragraphs are from an Opinion piece in The New York Times written by Simone Stolzoff, the author of the book “The Good Enough Job: ReclaimingLife from Work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/opinion/employment-exploitation-unions.html?smid=url-share.
After four years of subsistence-level pay as a reporter/bureau chief for The New Haven Register when I started my journalism career in 1972, I was able to merge love of my job with financial fulfillment as an editor and publisher of Chain Store Age. For most of that time Gilda focused on issues critical to the health concerns of families, as a newborn intensive care nurse, as a medical college research coordinator for infectious diseases (HIV/Aids, Hepatitis, Lyme disease), and as a nurse practitioner for spine surgery.
I openly admit Gilda’s contributions to society far exceeded mine. Yet, her financial reward fell victim to the archaic belief that “public service” workers—police, firefighters, EMTs, nurses, sanitation workers, teachers—need not be more appropriately compensated because they derive an immeasurable amount of personal satisfaction from the work they perform.
That paternalistic belief permeates business executives, as well.
Gordon Segal, the co-founder of Crate & Barrel, is one of my retail heroes. Yet, I was startled to hear him explain during a security analyst presentation decades ago that he could manage store payroll expenses of his in-store merchandising design teams as they accepted lower than expected salaries because they fulfilled their creative needs through the displays they produced.
It’s the same thinking school districts employ when doling out teacher salaries. The reward is in teaching the children, it is said, never mind that teachers must also feed their own children, pay the rent and other bills while oftentimes supplementing inadequate classroom supplies with their own funds.
My first boss at The Register hated teachers, mainly because their contracts included guaranteed annual raises. I never knew what Don earned, but in my third year at the paper I became, like him, one of the Register’s seven bureau chiefs. My 1975 salary—$200 a week/$10,400 for the year ($1,164.54 in today’s dollars; $60,556.08 for the year), plus a holiday bonus of a supermarket gift certificate for a 15-lb. turkey.
It should come as no surprise that low wages prompted a unionization drive. In response, The Register froze salaries for two years during “discussions.” I left the paper in 1976, several months before a contract was signed. Had I stayed, as a bureau chief my salary would have been around $450 a week, the equivalent today of $2,333.56 ($121,345 for the year).
I never regretted leaving.
