The website Mental Floss recently presented two lists: Top 10 Best Paying Jobs and Top 10 Worst Paying Jobs.
Let’s compare, shall we?
Number 1 on the “Top 10″ list was Anesthesiologists. I grew up across the street from one and he joked his profession’s tagline is: “We pass gas”. You can thank me for that cocktail-information-tidbit later.
Number 1 on the “Worst 10″ is, not surprisingly, the irritating punchline to a common joke. If you studied the arts you’ve heard it: “You want fries with that?”. That’s right: food service. Slinging hash won’t bring in the big bucks. (According to Freakonomics, slinging the illegal hash isn’t much better).
These lists are as you’d expect. The higher-wage earning jobs require lots of education, problem-solving creativity, and specialization. The lower-wage earning jobs require few if any unique skills or education and are strongly rooted in the service sector.
What I’d like to find is a list of changes within the lower-wage, service sector. For example: a few years ago there was mild controversy over a fast-food franchisee’s decision to use technology to further reduce his overhead costs. What he did was this: he hired someone in another state to run the drive-thru. The employee could enter the order into the computer in real-time. The benefit to the company was lower wages/taxation and no one could distinguish the fact when they got their burger.
Couldn’t you see this trend continuing? Soon we could be ordering our McMeals with order-taker operators in India. Why wouldn’t this happen?
So for those in this industry, there’s no harm it repeating it: we’re in a global economy now. You need to compete, or, you’ll encounter struggle even to find low-paying jobs!
If you remember this case, please let me know. I’d love to discover what happened.
August 21st, 2008 at 10:27 am
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