Had a visit with my dental hygienist today. Pleasant young woman. Of the $180 I was billed for a cleaning that took an hour it's my understanding that she'll gross somewhere in the range of sixty bucks, which is towards the high end for her trade.
Told me her husband just secured a permanent teaching contract after eight years in the profession. Teachers are the patsies du jour for the folks who like to rant about overpaid public servants. It'll take him years before his annual income surpasses hers.
I don't think I could ever do her job. As far as I'm concerned she earns every penny. The idea of spending my working day poking around in some stranger's mouth doesn't work for me, although somebody's got to do it.
She says it's tough for folks like her to get a good gig these days. Apparently there's too many qualified people and too few jobs. That opens the door for the sort of thinking that believes you should always shop around for the low bidder. Surely with so many unemployed hygienists, you can get one to work for less than $60 an hour. Hell, there's probably recent grads who would take the job for $20.
Or even better, perhaps we can find a fully-qualified recent immigrant to do the job for $10!
As teachers are under the gun everywhere from Chicago to British Columbia to Ontario, it's not hard to find that sort of thinking. Teaching generally affords plumber-level pay without having to gets ones hands dirty. It's a decent middle-of-the-middle class income. Yet there is no shortage of pundits pointing out, quite correctly, that it wouldn't be hard to find qualified people willing to work for less.
What they're advocating is a race to the bottom. It's the favored logic of people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It's the sort of logic that legitimizes the corporate practice of moving jobs offshore or to right-to-work jurisdictions. It's the kind of thinking that allows Caterpillar to close profitable plants and destroy communities just to cut their wage bill in half.
It's the kind of thinking that makes us all poorer in the long run.
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