Next year, call it Labour Market Day
After all, the wages people earn reflect what others will pay them
I spent part of Labour Day, as I trust all Canadians did, contemplating the virtues of the labour market.
The Book of Genesis says men ( by which its author also presumably meant women, too) earn their living by the “sweat of their brow” (or “eyebrows,” as a student in a labour economics class once put it on his exam). Most work is less sweaty than when Genesis was written, but even the left-leaning rock star French economist Thomas Piketty, whose book Capital in the 21st Century has been such a publishing sensation this year, recognizes that these days most people do earn their incomes — sometimes even very high incomes — by working rather than clipping bond coupons or in other ways living off their capital.
What jobs are best-paid? Statistics Canada publishes some data on occupational earnings, but nothing very detailed. By contrast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has a handy downloadable table of earnings in each of 800 different occupations.
Top of the list are anesthesiologists, who average $235,070 per year (all values quoted are in 2013 U.S. dollars). That’s an interesting coincidence because in Forbes magazine’s list of toppaid athletes for 2014, another guy who knocks people out, boxer Floyd Mayweather, was first at $105 million.
We hear a lot about how well the highest-paid athletes do — P. K. Subban’s recent $72-million signing with the Montreal Canadiens, for instance — but in fact “athletes and sports competitors,” of whom there were 13,880 when these data were collected in May 2013, averaged just $71,850, while “Athletes, coaches, umpires and related workers” did even worse: $39,310, compared to the all-occupation average of $46,440. By contrast, “Agents and business managers of artists, performers and athletes” averaged $96,410. That’s pretty good money, but it’s not actually as good as economists, who averaged $101,450.
We know from the news that the Fortune 500 execs often have multimilliondollar compensation. On the other hand, chief executives as a class averaged $178,400. Most of us would love to earn that kind of money. Whether we’d love the headaches that come with sitting where the buck stops is another thing.
Chief executives, 11th on the BLS list and the first nonmedical entry, fall between psychiatrists ($182,660) and general pediatricians ($170,530). We hear a lot these days about how society’s values are all screwed. But if the top 10 salaries are in the helping professions, maybe not quite so screwed up.
Who’s at the bottom of the list? Fast-food cooks ($18,870), “combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food” ($18,880), shampooers ($18,910), “fast food and counter workers” ($18,980) and dishwashers ($19,180). These occupations employ 7.5 million people, versus only 103,810 in the top five.
What’s in the middle, near the overall average of $46,440? In descending order, audio-visual and multimedia collections specialists ($46,840), chefs and head cooks ($46,620), chemical technicians ($46,590), construction equipment operators ($46,410), and production, planning and expediting clerks ($46,390).
Checking the income rankings, many of us probably are tempted to make moral judgments: Shouldn’t multimedia collections specialists make more than construction equipment operators? Or vice versa?
The order in this apparent chaos is supply and demand. True, some occupations partly write their own ticket by persuading governments to restrict entry by making licensing difficult. Milton Friedman used to call the American Medical Association “perhaps the strongest trade union in the United States” — which may have something to do with why medicine is at the top of the BLS list. But for the most part what people earn reflects what other people are willing to pay for whatever it is they help produce. Maybe we could change the name of the holiday we just celebrated to “Labour Market Day.”