Michael Gove’s excellent education proposals are, rightly, receiving lots of praise.  I’ve just read the Coffeehouse article, and my eye was caught by the first comment, which included this:

From my wife’s experience, teaching is a badly paid and high stress environment (with virtually no support from parents, and none from her own management). She left a job with better money and lower stress in order to do it. A man in her position could not have possibly supported a family on the salary.

So a man needs to earn more in order to support his little wifey who can’t support herself? People who still think like this make me seethe.  If you do a job, you should be paid the going rate – the rate that the market will support.

I have, I think, mentioned this before, but I was once in discussions about a payrise and was told that really I had no need for one because I might get married eventually, so someone else would pay the mortgage. It was years ago.  It still rankles. I still wish I had made a formal complaint about it at the time.

As Andrew Lansley tried to explain in an interview with the Health Service Journal and subsequent clarifications, “pay [should be]… defined by what is necessary to recruit, retain and motivate the staff, and also what is affordable”.  Sky and Paul Waugh are saying this is another Lansley gaffe; I don’t know… The last one turned out to reveal some pretty useful information.

Anyway, as a Conservative, the DWP’s recent exercise in fake job applications made me splutter like a Telegraph-reading ex-colonel.  But as a supporter of equality, I actually think it was a useful experiment. Clearly there are still places where your identity matters more than your ability.

All salaries should reflect what the market will support – the value we place on the output, the number of applicants, the skills required, the results we will achieve are what should count. In the immortal, if somewhat corrupted, words of Michael Jackson, it doesn’t matter what colour, gender, orientation, ethnicity or whatever you are.  It does matter what you’re capable of.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm , written by Fiona Melville and is filed under Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.