How about a job with the BBC, nice studio, comfortable chair.......

The_Lone_Wolf said:
What's been buried Rick? They increased the retirement age?

danbaseley said:People always bring up nurses as people who are underpaid.

Which may well be true.

But how much should nurses earn?

Let's say £50,000 - this is a nice round figure that is not "silly" money - but rewards the vital part they play in our society.

Of course if every qualified nurse was paid £50,000 that would mean an annual bill of 18.8 BILLION pounds.

Those who balk at a £145 million pay bill for the highest earners in the BBC, might find that a little hard to swallow.

matthewvc said:i don't see why talent being rewarded is so bad.
bringing up nursing, teaching is moot as most people of a
reasonable intelligence and education level can qualify to do these jobs.

doing something like winning Wimbledon (which netted federer and garbine £2.2 million each)
takes exceptional talent, dedication and sacrifice from an early age, beating off swathes of competition
from amateur weekend warriors up to other highly gifted rivals.

outside of sport stars the majority of 6-figure incomes are pretty tough to obtain; need a lot of education, experience
and competition to get, or a lot of risk and good fortune if through your own business endeavours.

slimsim said:
Exactly!
Presenters are also like the top sports stars. Yes, some of them might get on people's tits but if they weren't good at their jobs then someone who was better would replace them. Simple!
I also think that six figure salaries aren't that uncommon. I've worked with a LOT of people earning more than £100k, and some earning vastly more, and nobody would dream of making them disclose their incomes to the nation. The BBC pay these people the salaries they pay because if they didn't they'd be working on Sky or ITV or some other channel that WOULD pay them. As has previously been said, it's all supply and demand, nothing more, nothing less.

slimsim said:
I also think that six figure salaries aren't that uncommon.

As has previously been said, it's all supply and demand, nothing more, nothing less.

Rick said:
It really isn't, you know (actually, the exception probably is athletes and performers, which ironically is what were were originally discussing). Maths and physics teaching are probably the most obvious examples of jobs where there is chronic undersupply at the (not-market-set) salary. Medicine and politics are fairly obvious examples of large salaries without even a hint of undersupply (medicine courses are hugely over-subscribed by people with the requisite grades). Medics have played a superb hand over the last twenty years to drive the divergence of their incomes from other stable-work professionals (and good luck to them).
In general frictionless market theories tend not to apply that well to the actual world; this is even truer in salaries than most other areas, where things are distorted by political action, people's understandable reluctance to change to a different career where that means starting again at the bottom, and people who set wages' equally understandable tendency to pay themselves rather well. And at one time there were effective trades unions, of course, from whom we still have SOME legacies (paid holidays etc).
I'm not complaining. I do well enough for my needs, and I have enough transferable skills and low enough debts that I COULD jump ship if I really wanted to. But the idea that remuneration is set principally by merit and market doesn't, in my experience and opinion, survive much contact with the facts.
(The idea that income, and indeed promotion, are driven as much by desire for them as anything else does, but that's a whole different conversation.)

unit94 said:Well the government has a billion pound bribe hole in their budget so they have to reclaim it somewhere to be fair

slow_lift_joe said:call it supply and demand, or call it what you like.

Footballers and celebrity people in this country are not heroes, they are not saving lives and they are not that entertaining, if fact most are inept and just plain lucky and in the right place at the right time.

I tell what talent is a heart transplant, a great medical break through.

This is just greed and it shows our values as a society.