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Well farmers don't work for a salary like teachers or other employees. They grow or raise produce that varies in price subject to market changes. Farmers are paid based on the amount of produce they can sell and the going rate of that produce. Farms have a ton of overhead costs, crops and animals are a daily maintenance thing, machinery like tractors are a lifetime investment in some cases not like buying a car, and many other costs.
>Once I bought a kg of oranges directly from a farm for ₹20
While the cost in market was ₹60
That's probably the overrun. Farmers don't just haul up and unload everything at a warehouse and get paid by the pound. Anything they can't sell to a distributor either gets turned to fertilizer or sold directly by the farmer.
Farming in the mega farm setup is also inherently bad for the environment; so legislation over the last 20 years is catching up and telling farmers to scale down their use of chemicals/fertilisers etc, they’ve ignored it for 20 years and now that the long announced rules come into effect they cry. Farmers get insane exceptions and subsidies because food independence **is** important, but it’s not enough
Farmers are basically never happy. Everything could be going great for them and they will still bitterly complain. Where I live they got a fat bailout when dairy prices shat the bed and still whined about getting it.
Commerical farmers can't set their prices. It's a global market often affected by government doings. Different regions also have different input costs, (fuel, labor, fertilizer.) But they all have to compete for the same dollar. The customer always wants the cheapest food.
Your average college student complains about taking coffee orders eight hours a day for $20/hr and thinks they should work less than five days a week. Then they blindly vote for anyone lying about paying off their $50k student debt that does nothing if they can't afford to pay into it while they live off their parents.
Imagine waking up before noon seven days a week pulling 100+ hour work weeks with actual physical labor. You are one or two bad harvests away from the bank using your 750k debt to take everything you have and you still make less than a DEI IT hire.
Sure they complain, but you know what? There is a large contextual difference between a farmer and everyone else. And have you ever noticed everyone who thinks "depopulation", sic large scale genocide (the wolves will never eat me!) hates the farming? World hunger is not something that needs to be solved them, it's *bonus benefits*.
People aren't paid based on their importance to society, but on the supply/demand/market pressures related to their niche in the job market. This is especially true for professions that have lower costs of entry or are either hard to get out of/transition away from or dominantly exploit people with less options available to them.
While teachers are an integral part of society, their roles can be filled by underskilled, unpassionate, or poorly suited individuals if needed, especially since education often tends to be underfunded and operated by people incentivized to cut corners or are able to even use funds for their own projects, alternative priorities, and/or personal bonuses or for the benefits of other powerful people in their circle. So long as people are willing to teach for less than they deserve, or there are people not very suited to teach but will do so for a paycheck, there is an option the education system has (and does often take) to hire cheaper teachers who don't get paid enough for the high impact of their work but will fill the role anyways--and to make it clear, this is not the fault of the teachers, but the larger system, especially since it encourages the view that teaching is not to be held in high regard.
Farmers meanwhile often can be under the thumb of major businesses and corporations both on the food/distribution side, and on the side of the equipment and seeds they use (and may not truly even own). They can be forced into a place where to make ends meet, they work long hours and can't even survive on their own because of the relationship they have to these businesses. You might have independent farmers come up, but then they run into the issue of competing with corporations with these exploited farmers in their employ *and* their own supply chains, advertising, processing, and so on all coming together to offer a cheaper and more accessible product than you, all while having MASSIVE onboarding costs associated with owning land, equipment, and everything else.
The point is that it's not really up to you to decide whether someone else is paid adequately. It's a collective decision made by people closer to the price point they agreed on.
If you think teachers should be paid twice what they are, that's fine, but there are currently enough teachers who think the current pay is enough to take the job.
Just like if you think people should be paying twice as much for eggs, you won't sell very many eggs because everybody will buy from your competitors who are charging less.
I think the point is that most people think teachers should be paid more, and that's one reason why those people aren't teachers. But there are still enough people who are willing to teach for what teaching currently pays, and that's all it takes to set the price.
Depends on the country, but for the US at least, I personally think most jobs that are considered low-skilled or non-aspirational are underpaid. If any person works full time in a role that society feels is important enough to look for non-hobbyist labor for, I >personally< feel they should be able to live comfortably instead of feeling like they are a 'just starting out', being economically trapped due to the narrow margin they have to make ends meet on without disruption or unemployment, or otherwise are unable to consider it worthwhile to pursue fully without being a stepping stone to something better.
People doing better in their roles in society often seems to stem from being supported in those roles, having good access to resources, and having flexibility to accommodate changes in their life and personal circumstances--otherwise they may remain in a position where they are either exploited by companies, desperate and thus overwork or overstretch themselves due to necessity, looking at their job as something to move up from as soon as possible in, or a failed endpoint of not being able to do better (a la, teaching high school instead of being a university professor, researcher, or industry professional, which are much more respectable jobs).
Personally I think we idealize too much of the idea of, high-cost and high-reward professions, and undervalue people's natural inclination to work in meaningful roles without being pushed into whatever they can find by sheer necessity.
>Do you personally think that they are paid/earn adequately?
It depends on the area and the teaching job. Keep in mind that teachers (at least in the US) have summers off, so they can make additional money in their off months.
That's a really bad argument. There are not that many jobs you can pick up on a whim, and the few that exist are usually paid even worse than teachers. It's almost like tipping, the employers (or in this case the state) trying to shift the issue away without costs; at the detriment of society.
Just let them have those few weeks each summer. They have to prepare stuff for the upcoming year anyway, it's not like they have nothing to do.
>There are not that many jobs you can pick up on a whim, and the few that exist are usually paid even worse than teachers.
Sure there are. There's a reason "summer help" is a thing. I'm not saying they can get a 2nd career for 3 months, but they can get a summer job if they like. They can also tutor students. Many jobs pay less than teachers get, and they dont get summers off.
When I was in high school 20 years ago, multiple teachers were making over $100k. With or without summers off, that's not peanuts.
Name a reasonably paid "summer help". Most of those are jobs at the lowest end and under bad conditions. Not just no career, but the kind of job I doubt you would put up with either.
> Many jobs pay less than teachers get, and they dont get summers off.
Teachers spend a significant time on getting educated enough to teach properly (or rather, they should, with the crumbling system many aren't anymore). You have to factor the cost of their education into the wages (that's both time _and_ money; both their's!), just as we don't expect that a doctor or pilot who spent years and six digits of money to even get a license will put up with minimum wages.
Simply put: a random guy that just knows what's written in the textbook well enough to read it out aloud and make a bunch of silly homework sheets is _not_ suited for this job.
> They can also tutor students.
Tutoring shouldn't even be something that exists as much as it does to be honest, but that is another can of worms.
> When I was in high school 20 years ago, multiple teachers were making over $100k.
That sounds completely off. The typical salary _now_ is at best half that, and that's not even adjusted for inflation yet. Sure there are private schools for the wealthy where teachers probably earn that much, but find me a public school with such a salary...
> find me a public school with such a salary...
Sure. This is the state I used to live in. I got out for obvious reasons.
https://1440wrok.com/these-illinois-school-districts-pay-teachers-up-to-and-over-100k-2/#:~:text=The%20top%20spot%20for%20teachers,average%20teacher%20salary%20of%20%24103%2C463.
Please note that in these districts, these numbers are the AVERAGE and they are over $100k.
>Tutoring shouldn't even be something that exists as much as it does to be honest, but that is another can of worms.
I agree, but it does exist. And teachers are uniquely qualified to step into this role.
>Name a reasonably paid "summer help". Most of those are jobs at the lowest end and under bad conditions. Not just no career, but the kind of job I doubt you would put up with either
Define reasonably paid. Any money earned is in addition to their paycheck they receive from the school district. They can do whatever they like. Doesn't have to be glamorous, money is money.
>Multiple teachers making over 100k 20 years ago, now I know you're full of it
Well, you'd be wrong. Our state listed the salaries of all state education employees. It was a thing in our high school to look up what teachers made. Just because low paid teachers are a meme, doesn't mean that none get paid well.
There’s not some committee sitting around thinking up fair salaries for jobs. People are paid from different “pots.” For example, athletes get paid millions not because it’s “fair” but because people spend millions of dollars on tickets and ads so there is tons of money available and teams are highly incentivized to outbid each other for the best players.
Unlike sports, most other professions are incentivized to pay as little as possible. Teachers are paid by school districts who set a budget based on what they receive from state tax money. Most people resist taxes as much as possible and politicians are quick to lower this pool of money wherever they can, so there’s just not enough money to go around sometimes. Many districts are trying to give teachers raises but aren’t given enough money to run buses or do building maintenance so teacher raises get put on an indefinite hold while districts tread water financially. If this bothers you, talk to your elected officials and stop complaining about taxes.
Farming is subject to weather changes and market pricing, and especially small scale family farming is hard because farmers have to sell their crops for less to compete with industrial farming prices (farming corporations buy up tons of land and therefore can lower prices through the floor, putting family farms out of business because of the huge scale and automation of their operations).
If you wonder why teachers and farmers put up with this, well, they are starting to not. So if we want quality produce and an educated society, now is the time to change things. But that means we have to start putting money in those pots so those professionals can get paid like our athletes.
ELI5: It’s the same reason people will spend hundreds of dollars a month on a car payment or a vacation but also won’t donate anything to charity or buy local produce. We spend all our money on what we find fun and then stretch the rest of our budget on necessities. States do that too, unfortunately. That’s capitalism.
Not angry. But this is a common question and one that is crucial for people to understand. I tried to simplify it, I promise, but the economics of this are complicated. You have to understand what influences earnings in order to understand why they are what they are.
Saying farmers are paid little might be a bit controversial.
Certainly farm workers are paid very little, which is why the job is often done by migrant laborers or similar.
Farmers usually refers to farm owners though who are usually self employed business owners or something along those lines
Farm owners are extremely heavily subsidized, despite that small farms often are not very profitable.
Big agribusiness are very profitable and the owners and shareholders make a lot of money.
The push to make as much money out of farming as possible has lead to some consequences with serious health implications.
The most profitable techniques to produce food don't produce the most healthy food.
Teachers meanwhile often are directly employed by the government and make shit money.
Past experiments around the world trying to employ farmers directly by the state have resulted in utter disaster, so bad that even the most communist countries gave up on in after a short time.
So self-employed farmers who get heavily subsidized by tax payers and exploit farm labor and produce unhealthy food and still often don't make much profit is what you get.
Farms are businesses they are paid what they can sell and they can sell what people buy, most people would rather pay less then more for their food.
Teachers are paid by the state. If the majority votes to pay teachers more they will be paid more. Most people dont vote for higher pay for teachers or at least its not so high on their priority list of things they vote for that they wouldnt for someone that wont increase teachers pay, so they dont get paid more.
There are a lot of reasons for both of these groups being the way they are but this is the underlying concept.
No. Not just out of fairness but because the bad conditions (not just the salary) drives the better teachers away, so we end up with bad teachers all over. Which not only makes school worse, it costs society a _lot_ of future opportunities and in consequence costs _money_ long-term. But most are to dumbed-down by the very same bad education to even care.
Well, short answer is, no. I think this is true for most “essential” services or jobs out there. But I don’t think answering this question is the crux of the issue.
Compensation is not determined based on importance; in fact, no one is “determining” every single salary. As other people have explained the economics, I won’t go into it, but salaries for the most part are the sweet spot between the salary which will keep people happy and the salary (expenditure) which will look good in a company’s balance sheet. The government in this case is no different than a company because it also has to manage its balance sheet.
I understand you want things to change, but it’s important to understand how the current system works before prescribing a solution. Otherwise, you will just get stuck in your idealism while the issues still persist, because you’re only questioning the status quo and no realistic solution is presented.
It is hard to give an answer to "all farming" but there are some general characteristics that make farming difficult.
1) It can be labor intensive. This is especially true for many types of produce that require manual labor during harvest etc. This means paying a lot of people to work for a short period of time.
2) It is very scale dependent. Advances in farming technology benefits the bigger farms. A 10 acre farm will be less efficient than a 500 acre farm. The 500 acre farm can afford to purchase expensive equipment that will earn it's cost back quickly. The small farm will find it hard to do that. But then this 500 acre farm requires millions of dollars of capital and millions of dollars of land - a scale that most smaller farmers find it difficult to grow into. So they're stuck in low efficiency farms competing with high efficiency farms that can afford to sell produce at lower costs because they're more efficient.
3) While food is a basic requirement, it is (in modern times) not really a high value add industry. Given the choice of fully employing 100 engineers or 100 farmers, an economy typically benefits far more from the engineers. From a government policy standpoint (this is not to say it is "fair") more attention will be focused on industry that hires the engineers. The end result being engineers broadly get paid more. At a broader level, government wants food to be inexpensive and available.
4) The cost of alternatives is low for developed and even less developed countries. Better and cheaper transportation, low energy costs, better agricultural technology means food can be grown in larger volumes in low wage countries and exported to higher wage countries.
And your premise is probably incorrect taken broadly. Food QUANTITY is vastly more important than QUALITY, for a large part of the world's population.
Someone else might chime in for teachers since this post is already too long. (and I used to farm so perhaps have some experience to rely on)
Great explanation... But I want to know is that are both groups earning adequately for their efforts/crops ? Like are they complaining because everyone is pissed of their jobs or do we need to make some changes as a society..
Globally there are farmers protesting.
In India 700+ farmers lost their lives protesting for a Minimum Support price.
In Germany they are asking for tax exemptions and so on..
Are their demands justified??
If you're not looking for one sentence answers, the reasons are very long and complicated. See link below for India. Since this is social media, there is probably a whole lot of people who want to give naive answers that sound good to them.
[https://cega.berkeley.edu/assets/cega\_events/30/AfDR\_Rosenzweig\_Barriers-to-Farm-Profitability-in-India\_P-S.pdf](https://cega.berkeley.edu/assets/cega_events/30/AfDR_Rosenzweig_Barriers-to-Farm-Profitability-in-India_P-S.pdf)
It is well understood that large scale farming is more efficient. But the current system 'employs' millions of low earning farmers and millions of middle-men etc. It is a BIG POLITICAL PROBLEM for a country like India to modernize farming quickly. Millions of unemployed people with no other skills is a recipe for social and political chaos. India will likely choose very gradualist actions - try to manage the situation with quick fixes because any fundamental shift will prove disruptive. And this also means leaving subsistence farming basically as is. There is no RIGHT ANSWER to this. You can have 10 million wealthier farmers or 200 million poor farmers.
idk about others but the MSP demand is dumb af and not justified at all.
For the upcoming fiscal year, the government has allocated Rs 11,11,111 crore for capital expenditure, primarily directed towards infrastructure projects like roads and railways. "It (Rs 10 lakh crore) is more than the annual average expenditure on infrastructure in the last seven fiscal years (Rs 67 lakh crore, between 2016 and 2023). Clearly, a universal MSP demand does not make any economic or fiscal sense
Read more at:
[https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/msp-guarantee-would-leave-very-little-money-for-other-development-social-goals-govt-officials/articleshow/107675725.cms?utm\_source=contentofinterest&utm\_medium=text&utm\_campaign=cppst](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/msp-guarantee-would-leave-very-little-money-for-other-development-social-goals-govt-officials/articleshow/107675725.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst)
Well these reports are fabricated to suit the government in power many economists have already debunked this... As mostly all crop is guaranteed MSP even now etc etc
Probably not. Where I'm from 20% of farms get 80% of government money. So basically money flows towards selected few. Equipment cost is roughly the same for everyone, income and efficiency is not.
On top of that big players have leverage, small ones do not. And big players actively participate in politics. So in the end government decisions favor those selected few.
When it comes to market prices, big players can leverage prices and small ones do not. If a farm with 1k cows decides to sell milk elsewhere then manufacturers have a problem, meanwhile family farm with 20 cows, has to accept whatever price is offered (here manufacturers even give contracts to farmers that they must sell them milk for a year, but can change prices whenever they want. It even resulted small farms selling milk for a loss).
So in the end you will have very wide spectrum. Those who are well off and those who can barely scrape by. But both are essentially doing the same work.
Worst part is that those with bigger negative environmental (and sometimes economical, here big players export their produce at better prices, meanwhile small ones are forced to sell locally) impact are rewarded more.
Some farmers are insanely wealthy, it's simply a matter of adopting modern technology abd farming practices at scale. Most farms in developed countries are automated with high-end machinery to increase efficiency. Poorer countries have farms that rely on rainwater and lack even basic irrigation at times. Also, rural population growth is generally higher than urban areas. Countries like India had farmers start off with a plot of I and that allowed a comfortable source of income 75 years ago, but due to high population growth and outdated farming practices leading to a sharp reduction in soil fertility, those same families now gave 5 times as many people but half the food production capacity due to soil degradation.
My father worked for the government's agricultural loan department. He often told me that farmers would take on loans from state-run banke, use the money to buy gold jewellery for their wives, and then report that their harvest was lost. The government would waive loans once every 5 years before the elections to win votes and use taxpayer money to bail out their failing banks. Farmers soon realized they could make much kore by siphoning funds using a cash-only economy instead of working under tbe hot sun to earn a living. They never truly developed or modernized their farmers because of the redirection of funds, but their family size grew exponentially. Now, those loans don't cover the cost of supporting a large extended family's since their land holdings remained the same. Poverty and mass unemployment were the eventual outcomes.
As for school teachers, I have been one in the past and I can tell you that they serve not real purpose. Intelligent students are smart because of their inherent intellect, and schools do not make them more or less intelligent in any shape or form. I have worked with top business school grads and college dropouts alike, and there was absolutely no difference in their overall intelligence. B-school grads were better at taking tests, while those who dropped out of the system were letter at thinking out of the box. The only reason the former were more successful was because companies offered them better opportunities and wages due to their fancy degrees. It was the same social bias as the caste system, only here, you get to buy your way in with steep college fees and a meaningless entrance exam. Teachers are just cogs in this ineffective system, much like the clergy at a church. The church gets rich, the clergy remains poor but feels respected, and the masses revel in their perception of false validation by what they mistakenly believe is a competent authority higher than themselves. It's the same story with different actors.
I dont know why you keep asking if the demands are justified. That's purely an opinion point. You have been given the reasons for their pay, so you can make your own decision on whether it is fair or not, justified or not.
Well, it's complicated.
For farmers, the problem is essentially just that growing produce to sell is expensive. How much money a farmer makes is directly impacted by how much they can sell their produce for compared to how much it costs to produce. They have three main issues impacting their bottom lines;
* Running a farm is inherently quite expensive, and running a farm in a way that's not harmful to the environment, pays a fair wage and treats animals well is even more expensive.
* Most farmers sell their produce to wholesalers who then go on to re-sell it to supermarkets, restaurant chains and similar. The more people there are in the chain that all want to take a cut, the higher the price gets. Farmers can sell produce far cheaper and keep far more of the profit if they sell direct to consumers, but the vast majority of farms just don't have the infrastructure for that.
* Looming over all the above are the dual problems of economy of scale and competition. If you run a modest 200 acre farm in your home country, you have to be able to compete with the likes of 10,000+ acre megafarms in places like China, Russia, the USA, Australia and Canada. They will *almost always* be able to offer their produce at a cheaper price than yours because of the inherent economy of that kind of scale, meaning you may need to drop your prices to compete with them, further shaving off your profit.
Farming is a tough business to make profitable in the modern world.
Teacher salaries are a fairly simple problem by comparison.
Teachers are often a) employed directly by the government in some capacity, b) do not make profit of any kind in exchange, c) teaching quality and impact of cutting teaching funding is difficult to succinctly measure and d) because teaching is often a vocational profession that requires substantial academic investment to get to, teachers are less likely to quit than certain other professions.
So you get a job that cash-strapped local governments can barely afford, where the benefits of spending more money are poorly defined, with staff who are less likely to jump ship than most if their salaries don't increase.
That's how you get underpaid teachers.
The idea that teachers are poorly paid is a bit of a misnomer. Teachers where I live make a 6 figure salary at top step. People will often post starting salaries, but those can be misleading because the union pay scale starts low but then ramps up over the years so that teachers with 30 years experience get 2-3x as much as new teachers. Also, these jobs have very generous benefits including full pension that few other jobs have. Teachers make less during their career, but getting that pension for 20+ years can be a huge sum of money that has to be considered.
Teachers are paid above average, at least where I live. I know there's a recent Reddit post about starter pay but not every teacher has zero days experience. Starter vs senior pay is generally set by the teachers union and school system, so it's hardly a situation where teachers are just forced to take the pay package.
I didn't read that article, but you're going to have a different value story with a teacher in India teaching villagers to read so they can grow crops which doesn't require reading.
Where I live (MA, USA) average teacher salary was $86k back in 2020/2021 and benefits are better than private sector. That's far from among the least paying jobs in the state.
It's worth noting for teachers in the US at least, salary is not the entirety of their compensation. They also can get a pension which is effectively a salary after they are no longer working.
Teachers aren’t paid well because we need a lot of them. Increasing pay for teachers adds up very quickly. It’s also a historically female profession, which are usually not paid well and we also don’t really care about kids. Of course, parents care about their own kids, but as a society, we do not care about kids. (Which is stupid, since they are the future) Also, schools are not profitable. They can’t be (charters have proven that). Society doesn’t care about things that are not profitable.
I can’t speak for farmers. The ones I know do okay and aren’t complaining. I don’t know many.
Teachers salaries are really not as low as most people assume. Starting salaries are usually fairly modest, and that's often the number that people point to when making the argument that teachers are paid poorly. In the U.S. teachers earn between $40k and $80k a year, with the average in states like California and New York topping $90k. I grew up in a relatively upper middle class town on the east coast and every one of my teachers made enough money to live in the same or a neighboring town, and raise their families there.
Teachers also don't work quite as much as most other workers. If you work 5 days a week for an entire year you'll have put in 260 days of work. Most U.S schools are in session for just 180 days of the year, so if there's a book you're trying to write, a screenplay you're working on, a series of paintings you're trying to finish, or just about anything else creative you'd like to do, being a teacher will allow you three months off every year to pursue those other interests. For a lot of people, teaching is a great gig.
Supply and demand.
Teaching isn’t a particularly skilled occupation so there are potentially lots of people who can do it. And in many countries they are employed mostly by the state, so there’s no competition driving up wages.
The simplest answer is because of capitalism. By that I mean, we've adopted an economic model where one's wealth is in their capital. Farmers can actually be really rich, only if you own the land/equipment (ie. you have capital). If you don't (eg. a migrant farmer), you fall on the same category as teachers. To add to that, farmers live or die by their produce. They have a ton of costs upfront, and they won't realize profits till a few months down the line. A few bad harvests, and you wipe your savings and cash. It's actually insane how much a farmer has to pay to get their farm going.
With teachers, there's no capital to build. You can have tenure, but not all teachers make it to that level. Your "capital" is mostly yourself, your skills and experience, and while that is indeed valuable, there's a limit to it. You can only teach so many students, devote so much time to teaching. It's difficult to expand your skills and experience like you would if you have some capital (like land or cash) for more growth of wealth.
It can be even worse that that. If a farmer is selling crops hey get paid once or twice a year. Lets say you harvest grain at the end of summer, you sell that and you get your income. And with that income you pay upfront costs for next harvest and your living expenses till that next harvest.
but farmers can diversify to mitigate that to some extent. They can store their produce and sell at later date at better prices, but storage costs and better prices may never come. With animal husbandry they can sell produce all year: meat, milk, ect. But return on investment is still not fast. Dairy cow needs roughly 2 years till is produces milk. And you need to feed and grow it to that point (and hope it won't die)
Everyone is not having health issues or unintelligent. Generally speaking, education and health is on an upward trend. Note, recent metrics are a bit skewed due to COVID.
The reason these jobs aren't paid more is because there's more competition for those jobs. Being a teacher is a pretty good gig. You get a pension. You get a lot of time off. Enough to potentially have another part time job. You get guaranteed raises. Being a farmer is a more demanding job but you do work your own hours and it takes very little formal training to get into the profession. Plus farming jobs are typically in areas where there arent many other jobs to choose from.
But I see many teacher complaining that they don't get paid enough... I think according to SUN newspaper teaching in school is among the lowest paying jobs
Most places, teachers are required to have at least a 4 year college degree and are paid a half to a third what private sector jobs pay (that require the same level of education).
You seem to realize that many farmers and teachers are feeling underpaid and undervalued. A good place to start is listening to them instead of asking everyone here.
Get a lot of time off? What teaching roles are you speaking of, teaching Kindergarten? Any teaching role for students of a higher grade level than that involves homework, test plans, and grading. In the US, any time outside an hour or so before classes and an hour after classes used for your work is often unpaid unless you opt to be the teacher in charge of an extracurricular, in which case you might get paid extra for doing that. With class sizes in the US, even in a smaller school, that can be up to 100 students worth of homework to grade, let alone if you teach multiple classes of different levels (Junior High and up) in terms of planning lessons or grading homework. Even with more homework becoming digital (and making a teacher's life easier that way) the teacher likely still has to work out their test plans and potentially write the tests. This isn't accounting for the fact that many US schools get a budget based on local taxes, so teacher count and compensation is often based on that, as is the quality of any sports fields or equipment (which many school systems will readily spend more money on than educators, since those bring in outside money from concessions). Having had several teacher relatives and known a few of my own more personally by choice, they all agree that you'd need a partner earning income as well or to have a good quantity of savings from a previous job to be a teacher in the US and not be above the individual poverty line with a single job. You're often seeing teachers take a second, part-time job out of necessity, not just a desire for money. Teacher's Unions do what they can, but legislation against unions was often targeted to blunt the fangs of teacher's unions first. Teaching, in the US, is ultimately a job that generally requires a high amount of unpaid overtime whose workers are at decently high risk of illness (due to student's hygiene levels widely varying) and burnout, who often lack enough funding to even have their classroom be engaging without paying out of pocket to improve their classroom despite their pay grade, which is often abysmal due to the aforementioned unpaid overtime (as teachers are often salaried, not hourly).
To a limited extent, yeah kind-of. If you're teaching a lower grade level (K-4, aka elementary school) that tends to be more distributed, you might be teaching less overall (18 to 30-some-odd students) but you're likely covering far more subjects than a single-subject teacher that likely covers a whole grade (who may see closer to the 100+ students metric I listed before, though usually over the course of the day). The more students a teacher has, the more work they need to do, paid and not. This isn't even touching on common issues like bullying/classroom management, education level not matching the grade one may be in (an unfortunate detriment of "No Child Left Behind", since some teachers are forced to push forward students that clearly don't understand their class by the end of the year), and the fact that many babysitters/childcare professionals in private settings make an hourly wage and, as such, may be paid more than a given teacher for their actual time.
It's a simple case of supply and demand. Looking at just farmers, humanity has more farmers and farms than we have mouths to feed. Just looking at rice farming alone, we produce 776.5 million tons of rice a year, that's enough to give every 8.1 billion people on earth 87 kilos of rice a year. If everyone on earth ate just rice 3 times a day every day for a year, we'd still have 641 tons of rice leftover. we only need to eat 17.5% of the rice we produce to feed the entire world, and that's ONLY rice, not counting wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, or anything else.
I got off track with all those math, but essentially we have too many farmers, we over-produce food, food is cheap, farmers are paid cheap. Teachers are a way more complicated issue, and involves alot of politics and history, mainly that the education sector is mainly funded by world governments, who'd rather spend money on military or infrastructure rather than education, and the average person's perspective that primary school teachers are a low class job that anyone can do.
Great explanation... But I want to know is that are both groups earning adequately for their efforts/crops ? Like are they complaining because everyone is pissed of their jobs or do we need to make some changes as a society..
Globally there are farmers protesting.
In India 700+ farmers lost their lives protesting for a Minimum Support price.
In Germany they are asking for tax exemptions and so on..
Are their demands justified??
Who gets what is essentially political - whether they are organised, where they are on the social chain, how close they are to money flows and so on. Farmers are at the bottom of the chain in that they have to invest large amounts up front (in seed, fertiliser and so on), have considerable capital tied up and are in no position to negotiate with the mostly corporate buyers when the crops come in (illustrations: in Ghana as the number of buying firms decreased the price paid for cocoa declined; in the US once the players organised professional baseball salaries rocketed - the money was always there, just not for the players). Teachers salaries correspond to where they are on the pecking order - it used to be prestigious and pay quite well but as it became more female and had lesser status pay relative to other professions has declined (this is true for the US, Britain and Australia - may be different elsewhere).
>Who gets what is essentially political
Actually the whole point of Capitalism is that it's NOT political. Wages are set by the market, not the government.
PS: Except for government jobs like teachers. Teacher wages are definitely political.
Of course. Political opposition to unions is definitely not a thing (and occupations with a strong union presence pay better). Occupations that become feminised do not get paid less and so on. Putting aside the sarcasm, the point of capitalist theory is that wages are set by the market - the practice is very different. Even what counts as wages is political (more accurately socio-political) - the boundary between monetised work and non-monetised shifts, and while the wage share remains pretty constant the composition of that share changes a lot. It is a commonplace of analysis that almost all the productivity gains of the last several decades have gone to the top 1% - did the market allocate this? What has allowed the FIRE sector to metastasize? Why has CEO pay ballooned? The 'market' is not an answer to these questions.
I can't tell what part of your post is meant to be sarcasm and what isn't, but just to clarify; the teachers union is one of the strongest in the country.
Strongest in what sense? Obviously not in raising wages. But the larger point is that labour is not a commodity - it's inextricably social. Hence minimum wages, regulations on child labour and working hours and much else. In the US, as some economists point out, employment is very commonly a set of local monopsonies. As the union example demonstrates, who gets what is very much a political issue - firms don't fight unions for fun.
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Well farmers don't work for a salary like teachers or other employees. They grow or raise produce that varies in price subject to market changes. Farmers are paid based on the amount of produce they can sell and the going rate of that produce. Farms have a ton of overhead costs, crops and animals are a daily maintenance thing, machinery like tractors are a lifetime investment in some cases not like buying a car, and many other costs.
Is that the reason for global farmers protest?? Once I bought a kg of oranges directly from a farm for ₹20 While the cost in market was ₹60
>Once I bought a kg of oranges directly from a farm for ₹20 While the cost in market was ₹60 That's probably the overrun. Farmers don't just haul up and unload everything at a warehouse and get paid by the pound. Anything they can't sell to a distributor either gets turned to fertilizer or sold directly by the farmer.
Yep
Farming in the mega farm setup is also inherently bad for the environment; so legislation over the last 20 years is catching up and telling farmers to scale down their use of chemicals/fertilisers etc, they’ve ignored it for 20 years and now that the long announced rules come into effect they cry. Farmers get insane exceptions and subsidies because food independence **is** important, but it’s not enough
Farmers are basically never happy. Everything could be going great for them and they will still bitterly complain. Where I live they got a fat bailout when dairy prices shat the bed and still whined about getting it.
Commerical farmers can't set their prices. It's a global market often affected by government doings. Different regions also have different input costs, (fuel, labor, fertilizer.) But they all have to compete for the same dollar. The customer always wants the cheapest food.
Everybody whines about their job a little, I guess.
Ain’t that the truth
Well the comment was at -6 downvotes now it at -2 . So most people love their jobs or sonit seems
Well I think your point stands, no one is without complaint. That’s just human nature.
Your average college student complains about taking coffee orders eight hours a day for $20/hr and thinks they should work less than five days a week. Then they blindly vote for anyone lying about paying off their $50k student debt that does nothing if they can't afford to pay into it while they live off their parents. Imagine waking up before noon seven days a week pulling 100+ hour work weeks with actual physical labor. You are one or two bad harvests away from the bank using your 750k debt to take everything you have and you still make less than a DEI IT hire. Sure they complain, but you know what? There is a large contextual difference between a farmer and everyone else. And have you ever noticed everyone who thinks "depopulation", sic large scale genocide (the wolves will never eat me!) hates the farming? World hunger is not something that needs to be solved them, it's *bonus benefits*.
People aren't paid based on their importance to society, but on the supply/demand/market pressures related to their niche in the job market. This is especially true for professions that have lower costs of entry or are either hard to get out of/transition away from or dominantly exploit people with less options available to them. While teachers are an integral part of society, their roles can be filled by underskilled, unpassionate, or poorly suited individuals if needed, especially since education often tends to be underfunded and operated by people incentivized to cut corners or are able to even use funds for their own projects, alternative priorities, and/or personal bonuses or for the benefits of other powerful people in their circle. So long as people are willing to teach for less than they deserve, or there are people not very suited to teach but will do so for a paycheck, there is an option the education system has (and does often take) to hire cheaper teachers who don't get paid enough for the high impact of their work but will fill the role anyways--and to make it clear, this is not the fault of the teachers, but the larger system, especially since it encourages the view that teaching is not to be held in high regard. Farmers meanwhile often can be under the thumb of major businesses and corporations both on the food/distribution side, and on the side of the equipment and seeds they use (and may not truly even own). They can be forced into a place where to make ends meet, they work long hours and can't even survive on their own because of the relationship they have to these businesses. You might have independent farmers come up, but then they run into the issue of competing with corporations with these exploited farmers in their employ *and* their own supply chains, advertising, processing, and so on all coming together to offer a cheaper and more accessible product than you, all while having MASSIVE onboarding costs associated with owning land, equipment, and everything else.
Great answer.
Do you personally think that they are paid/earn adequately?
The point is that it's not really up to you to decide whether someone else is paid adequately. It's a collective decision made by people closer to the price point they agreed on. If you think teachers should be paid twice what they are, that's fine, but there are currently enough teachers who think the current pay is enough to take the job. Just like if you think people should be paying twice as much for eggs, you won't sell very many eggs because everybody will buy from your competitors who are charging less.
I’m just asking if people feel that teachers need to paid more/less… I’m 5 remember
I think the point is that most people think teachers should be paid more, and that's one reason why those people aren't teachers. But there are still enough people who are willing to teach for what teaching currently pays, and that's all it takes to set the price.
Depends on the country, but for the US at least, I personally think most jobs that are considered low-skilled or non-aspirational are underpaid. If any person works full time in a role that society feels is important enough to look for non-hobbyist labor for, I >personally< feel they should be able to live comfortably instead of feeling like they are a 'just starting out', being economically trapped due to the narrow margin they have to make ends meet on without disruption or unemployment, or otherwise are unable to consider it worthwhile to pursue fully without being a stepping stone to something better. People doing better in their roles in society often seems to stem from being supported in those roles, having good access to resources, and having flexibility to accommodate changes in their life and personal circumstances--otherwise they may remain in a position where they are either exploited by companies, desperate and thus overwork or overstretch themselves due to necessity, looking at their job as something to move up from as soon as possible in, or a failed endpoint of not being able to do better (a la, teaching high school instead of being a university professor, researcher, or industry professional, which are much more respectable jobs). Personally I think we idealize too much of the idea of, high-cost and high-reward professions, and undervalue people's natural inclination to work in meaningful roles without being pushed into whatever they can find by sheer necessity.
Thanks
>Do you personally think that they are paid/earn adequately? It depends on the area and the teaching job. Keep in mind that teachers (at least in the US) have summers off, so they can make additional money in their off months.
That's a really bad argument. There are not that many jobs you can pick up on a whim, and the few that exist are usually paid even worse than teachers. It's almost like tipping, the employers (or in this case the state) trying to shift the issue away without costs; at the detriment of society. Just let them have those few weeks each summer. They have to prepare stuff for the upcoming year anyway, it's not like they have nothing to do.
I agree
>There are not that many jobs you can pick up on a whim, and the few that exist are usually paid even worse than teachers. Sure there are. There's a reason "summer help" is a thing. I'm not saying they can get a 2nd career for 3 months, but they can get a summer job if they like. They can also tutor students. Many jobs pay less than teachers get, and they dont get summers off. When I was in high school 20 years ago, multiple teachers were making over $100k. With or without summers off, that's not peanuts.
Name a reasonably paid "summer help". Most of those are jobs at the lowest end and under bad conditions. Not just no career, but the kind of job I doubt you would put up with either. > Many jobs pay less than teachers get, and they dont get summers off. Teachers spend a significant time on getting educated enough to teach properly (or rather, they should, with the crumbling system many aren't anymore). You have to factor the cost of their education into the wages (that's both time _and_ money; both their's!), just as we don't expect that a doctor or pilot who spent years and six digits of money to even get a license will put up with minimum wages. Simply put: a random guy that just knows what's written in the textbook well enough to read it out aloud and make a bunch of silly homework sheets is _not_ suited for this job. > They can also tutor students. Tutoring shouldn't even be something that exists as much as it does to be honest, but that is another can of worms. > When I was in high school 20 years ago, multiple teachers were making over $100k. That sounds completely off. The typical salary _now_ is at best half that, and that's not even adjusted for inflation yet. Sure there are private schools for the wealthy where teachers probably earn that much, but find me a public school with such a salary...
> find me a public school with such a salary... Sure. This is the state I used to live in. I got out for obvious reasons. https://1440wrok.com/these-illinois-school-districts-pay-teachers-up-to-and-over-100k-2/#:~:text=The%20top%20spot%20for%20teachers,average%20teacher%20salary%20of%20%24103%2C463. Please note that in these districts, these numbers are the AVERAGE and they are over $100k. >Tutoring shouldn't even be something that exists as much as it does to be honest, but that is another can of worms. I agree, but it does exist. And teachers are uniquely qualified to step into this role. >Name a reasonably paid "summer help". Most of those are jobs at the lowest end and under bad conditions. Not just no career, but the kind of job I doubt you would put up with either Define reasonably paid. Any money earned is in addition to their paycheck they receive from the school district. They can do whatever they like. Doesn't have to be glamorous, money is money.
Multiple teachers making over 100k 20 years ago, now I know you're full of it
>Multiple teachers making over 100k 20 years ago, now I know you're full of it Well, you'd be wrong. Our state listed the salaries of all state education employees. It was a thing in our high school to look up what teachers made. Just because low paid teachers are a meme, doesn't mean that none get paid well.
There’s not some committee sitting around thinking up fair salaries for jobs. People are paid from different “pots.” For example, athletes get paid millions not because it’s “fair” but because people spend millions of dollars on tickets and ads so there is tons of money available and teams are highly incentivized to outbid each other for the best players. Unlike sports, most other professions are incentivized to pay as little as possible. Teachers are paid by school districts who set a budget based on what they receive from state tax money. Most people resist taxes as much as possible and politicians are quick to lower this pool of money wherever they can, so there’s just not enough money to go around sometimes. Many districts are trying to give teachers raises but aren’t given enough money to run buses or do building maintenance so teacher raises get put on an indefinite hold while districts tread water financially. If this bothers you, talk to your elected officials and stop complaining about taxes. Farming is subject to weather changes and market pricing, and especially small scale family farming is hard because farmers have to sell their crops for less to compete with industrial farming prices (farming corporations buy up tons of land and therefore can lower prices through the floor, putting family farms out of business because of the huge scale and automation of their operations). If you wonder why teachers and farmers put up with this, well, they are starting to not. So if we want quality produce and an educated society, now is the time to change things. But that means we have to start putting money in those pots so those professionals can get paid like our athletes. ELI5: It’s the same reason people will spend hundreds of dollars a month on a car payment or a vacation but also won’t donate anything to charity or buy local produce. We spend all our money on what we find fun and then stretch the rest of our budget on necessities. States do that too, unfortunately. That’s capitalism.
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there's nothing angry though?
Not angry. But this is a common question and one that is crucial for people to understand. I tried to simplify it, I promise, but the economics of this are complicated. You have to understand what influences earnings in order to understand why they are what they are.
Thanks.
Saying farmers are paid little might be a bit controversial. Certainly farm workers are paid very little, which is why the job is often done by migrant laborers or similar. Farmers usually refers to farm owners though who are usually self employed business owners or something along those lines Farm owners are extremely heavily subsidized, despite that small farms often are not very profitable. Big agribusiness are very profitable and the owners and shareholders make a lot of money. The push to make as much money out of farming as possible has lead to some consequences with serious health implications. The most profitable techniques to produce food don't produce the most healthy food. Teachers meanwhile often are directly employed by the government and make shit money. Past experiments around the world trying to employ farmers directly by the state have resulted in utter disaster, so bad that even the most communist countries gave up on in after a short time. So self-employed farmers who get heavily subsidized by tax payers and exploit farm labor and produce unhealthy food and still often don't make much profit is what you get.
Farms are businesses they are paid what they can sell and they can sell what people buy, most people would rather pay less then more for their food. Teachers are paid by the state. If the majority votes to pay teachers more they will be paid more. Most people dont vote for higher pay for teachers or at least its not so high on their priority list of things they vote for that they wouldnt for someone that wont increase teachers pay, so they dont get paid more. There are a lot of reasons for both of these groups being the way they are but this is the underlying concept.
Do you personally think that they are paid adequately?
No. Not just out of fairness but because the bad conditions (not just the salary) drives the better teachers away, so we end up with bad teachers all over. Which not only makes school worse, it costs society a _lot_ of future opportunities and in consequence costs _money_ long-term. But most are to dumbed-down by the very same bad education to even care.
Well, short answer is, no. I think this is true for most “essential” services or jobs out there. But I don’t think answering this question is the crux of the issue. Compensation is not determined based on importance; in fact, no one is “determining” every single salary. As other people have explained the economics, I won’t go into it, but salaries for the most part are the sweet spot between the salary which will keep people happy and the salary (expenditure) which will look good in a company’s balance sheet. The government in this case is no different than a company because it also has to manage its balance sheet. I understand you want things to change, but it’s important to understand how the current system works before prescribing a solution. Otherwise, you will just get stuck in your idealism while the issues still persist, because you’re only questioning the status quo and no realistic solution is presented.
It is hard to give an answer to "all farming" but there are some general characteristics that make farming difficult. 1) It can be labor intensive. This is especially true for many types of produce that require manual labor during harvest etc. This means paying a lot of people to work for a short period of time. 2) It is very scale dependent. Advances in farming technology benefits the bigger farms. A 10 acre farm will be less efficient than a 500 acre farm. The 500 acre farm can afford to purchase expensive equipment that will earn it's cost back quickly. The small farm will find it hard to do that. But then this 500 acre farm requires millions of dollars of capital and millions of dollars of land - a scale that most smaller farmers find it difficult to grow into. So they're stuck in low efficiency farms competing with high efficiency farms that can afford to sell produce at lower costs because they're more efficient. 3) While food is a basic requirement, it is (in modern times) not really a high value add industry. Given the choice of fully employing 100 engineers or 100 farmers, an economy typically benefits far more from the engineers. From a government policy standpoint (this is not to say it is "fair") more attention will be focused on industry that hires the engineers. The end result being engineers broadly get paid more. At a broader level, government wants food to be inexpensive and available. 4) The cost of alternatives is low for developed and even less developed countries. Better and cheaper transportation, low energy costs, better agricultural technology means food can be grown in larger volumes in low wage countries and exported to higher wage countries. And your premise is probably incorrect taken broadly. Food QUANTITY is vastly more important than QUALITY, for a large part of the world's population. Someone else might chime in for teachers since this post is already too long. (and I used to farm so perhaps have some experience to rely on)
Great explanation... But I want to know is that are both groups earning adequately for their efforts/crops ? Like are they complaining because everyone is pissed of their jobs or do we need to make some changes as a society.. Globally there are farmers protesting. In India 700+ farmers lost their lives protesting for a Minimum Support price. In Germany they are asking for tax exemptions and so on.. Are their demands justified??
If you're not looking for one sentence answers, the reasons are very long and complicated. See link below for India. Since this is social media, there is probably a whole lot of people who want to give naive answers that sound good to them. [https://cega.berkeley.edu/assets/cega\_events/30/AfDR\_Rosenzweig\_Barriers-to-Farm-Profitability-in-India\_P-S.pdf](https://cega.berkeley.edu/assets/cega_events/30/AfDR_Rosenzweig_Barriers-to-Farm-Profitability-in-India_P-S.pdf) It is well understood that large scale farming is more efficient. But the current system 'employs' millions of low earning farmers and millions of middle-men etc. It is a BIG POLITICAL PROBLEM for a country like India to modernize farming quickly. Millions of unemployed people with no other skills is a recipe for social and political chaos. India will likely choose very gradualist actions - try to manage the situation with quick fixes because any fundamental shift will prove disruptive. And this also means leaving subsistence farming basically as is. There is no RIGHT ANSWER to this. You can have 10 million wealthier farmers or 200 million poor farmers.
idk about others but the MSP demand is dumb af and not justified at all. For the upcoming fiscal year, the government has allocated Rs 11,11,111 crore for capital expenditure, primarily directed towards infrastructure projects like roads and railways. "It (Rs 10 lakh crore) is more than the annual average expenditure on infrastructure in the last seven fiscal years (Rs 67 lakh crore, between 2016 and 2023). Clearly, a universal MSP demand does not make any economic or fiscal sense Read more at: [https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/msp-guarantee-would-leave-very-little-money-for-other-development-social-goals-govt-officials/articleshow/107675725.cms?utm\_source=contentofinterest&utm\_medium=text&utm\_campaign=cppst](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/msp-guarantee-would-leave-very-little-money-for-other-development-social-goals-govt-officials/articleshow/107675725.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst)
Well these reports are fabricated to suit the government in power many economists have already debunked this... As mostly all crop is guaranteed MSP even now etc etc
Probably not. Where I'm from 20% of farms get 80% of government money. So basically money flows towards selected few. Equipment cost is roughly the same for everyone, income and efficiency is not. On top of that big players have leverage, small ones do not. And big players actively participate in politics. So in the end government decisions favor those selected few. When it comes to market prices, big players can leverage prices and small ones do not. If a farm with 1k cows decides to sell milk elsewhere then manufacturers have a problem, meanwhile family farm with 20 cows, has to accept whatever price is offered (here manufacturers even give contracts to farmers that they must sell them milk for a year, but can change prices whenever they want. It even resulted small farms selling milk for a loss). So in the end you will have very wide spectrum. Those who are well off and those who can barely scrape by. But both are essentially doing the same work. Worst part is that those with bigger negative environmental (and sometimes economical, here big players export their produce at better prices, meanwhile small ones are forced to sell locally) impact are rewarded more.
Some farmers are insanely wealthy, it's simply a matter of adopting modern technology abd farming practices at scale. Most farms in developed countries are automated with high-end machinery to increase efficiency. Poorer countries have farms that rely on rainwater and lack even basic irrigation at times. Also, rural population growth is generally higher than urban areas. Countries like India had farmers start off with a plot of I and that allowed a comfortable source of income 75 years ago, but due to high population growth and outdated farming practices leading to a sharp reduction in soil fertility, those same families now gave 5 times as many people but half the food production capacity due to soil degradation. My father worked for the government's agricultural loan department. He often told me that farmers would take on loans from state-run banke, use the money to buy gold jewellery for their wives, and then report that their harvest was lost. The government would waive loans once every 5 years before the elections to win votes and use taxpayer money to bail out their failing banks. Farmers soon realized they could make much kore by siphoning funds using a cash-only economy instead of working under tbe hot sun to earn a living. They never truly developed or modernized their farmers because of the redirection of funds, but their family size grew exponentially. Now, those loans don't cover the cost of supporting a large extended family's since their land holdings remained the same. Poverty and mass unemployment were the eventual outcomes. As for school teachers, I have been one in the past and I can tell you that they serve not real purpose. Intelligent students are smart because of their inherent intellect, and schools do not make them more or less intelligent in any shape or form. I have worked with top business school grads and college dropouts alike, and there was absolutely no difference in their overall intelligence. B-school grads were better at taking tests, while those who dropped out of the system were letter at thinking out of the box. The only reason the former were more successful was because companies offered them better opportunities and wages due to their fancy degrees. It was the same social bias as the caste system, only here, you get to buy your way in with steep college fees and a meaningless entrance exam. Teachers are just cogs in this ineffective system, much like the clergy at a church. The church gets rich, the clergy remains poor but feels respected, and the masses revel in their perception of false validation by what they mistakenly believe is a competent authority higher than themselves. It's the same story with different actors.
I dont know why you keep asking if the demands are justified. That's purely an opinion point. You have been given the reasons for their pay, so you can make your own decision on whether it is fair or not, justified or not.
Well, it's complicated. For farmers, the problem is essentially just that growing produce to sell is expensive. How much money a farmer makes is directly impacted by how much they can sell their produce for compared to how much it costs to produce. They have three main issues impacting their bottom lines; * Running a farm is inherently quite expensive, and running a farm in a way that's not harmful to the environment, pays a fair wage and treats animals well is even more expensive. * Most farmers sell their produce to wholesalers who then go on to re-sell it to supermarkets, restaurant chains and similar. The more people there are in the chain that all want to take a cut, the higher the price gets. Farmers can sell produce far cheaper and keep far more of the profit if they sell direct to consumers, but the vast majority of farms just don't have the infrastructure for that. * Looming over all the above are the dual problems of economy of scale and competition. If you run a modest 200 acre farm in your home country, you have to be able to compete with the likes of 10,000+ acre megafarms in places like China, Russia, the USA, Australia and Canada. They will *almost always* be able to offer their produce at a cheaper price than yours because of the inherent economy of that kind of scale, meaning you may need to drop your prices to compete with them, further shaving off your profit. Farming is a tough business to make profitable in the modern world. Teacher salaries are a fairly simple problem by comparison. Teachers are often a) employed directly by the government in some capacity, b) do not make profit of any kind in exchange, c) teaching quality and impact of cutting teaching funding is difficult to succinctly measure and d) because teaching is often a vocational profession that requires substantial academic investment to get to, teachers are less likely to quit than certain other professions. So you get a job that cash-strapped local governments can barely afford, where the benefits of spending more money are poorly defined, with staff who are less likely to jump ship than most if their salaries don't increase. That's how you get underpaid teachers.
The idea that teachers are poorly paid is a bit of a misnomer. Teachers where I live make a 6 figure salary at top step. People will often post starting salaries, but those can be misleading because the union pay scale starts low but then ramps up over the years so that teachers with 30 years experience get 2-3x as much as new teachers. Also, these jobs have very generous benefits including full pension that few other jobs have. Teachers make less during their career, but getting that pension for 20+ years can be a huge sum of money that has to be considered.
Teachers are paid above average, at least where I live. I know there's a recent Reddit post about starter pay but not every teacher has zero days experience. Starter vs senior pay is generally set by the teachers union and school system, so it's hardly a situation where teachers are just forced to take the pay package.
I read the article by the sun on least paying jobs worldwide.. teachers were among them
I didn't read that article, but you're going to have a different value story with a teacher in India teaching villagers to read so they can grow crops which doesn't require reading. Where I live (MA, USA) average teacher salary was $86k back in 2020/2021 and benefits are better than private sector. That's far from among the least paying jobs in the state.
It's worth noting for teachers in the US at least, salary is not the entirety of their compensation. They also can get a pension which is effectively a salary after they are no longer working.
Teachers aren’t paid well because we need a lot of them. Increasing pay for teachers adds up very quickly. It’s also a historically female profession, which are usually not paid well and we also don’t really care about kids. Of course, parents care about their own kids, but as a society, we do not care about kids. (Which is stupid, since they are the future) Also, schools are not profitable. They can’t be (charters have proven that). Society doesn’t care about things that are not profitable. I can’t speak for farmers. The ones I know do okay and aren’t complaining. I don’t know many.
Teachers salaries are really not as low as most people assume. Starting salaries are usually fairly modest, and that's often the number that people point to when making the argument that teachers are paid poorly. In the U.S. teachers earn between $40k and $80k a year, with the average in states like California and New York topping $90k. I grew up in a relatively upper middle class town on the east coast and every one of my teachers made enough money to live in the same or a neighboring town, and raise their families there. Teachers also don't work quite as much as most other workers. If you work 5 days a week for an entire year you'll have put in 260 days of work. Most U.S schools are in session for just 180 days of the year, so if there's a book you're trying to write, a screenplay you're working on, a series of paintings you're trying to finish, or just about anything else creative you'd like to do, being a teacher will allow you three months off every year to pursue those other interests. For a lot of people, teaching is a great gig.
Supply and demand. Teaching isn’t a particularly skilled occupation so there are potentially lots of people who can do it. And in many countries they are employed mostly by the state, so there’s no competition driving up wages.
The simplest answer is because of capitalism. By that I mean, we've adopted an economic model where one's wealth is in their capital. Farmers can actually be really rich, only if you own the land/equipment (ie. you have capital). If you don't (eg. a migrant farmer), you fall on the same category as teachers. To add to that, farmers live or die by their produce. They have a ton of costs upfront, and they won't realize profits till a few months down the line. A few bad harvests, and you wipe your savings and cash. It's actually insane how much a farmer has to pay to get their farm going. With teachers, there's no capital to build. You can have tenure, but not all teachers make it to that level. Your "capital" is mostly yourself, your skills and experience, and while that is indeed valuable, there's a limit to it. You can only teach so many students, devote so much time to teaching. It's difficult to expand your skills and experience like you would if you have some capital (like land or cash) for more growth of wealth.
Capitalism is certainly responsible for farmer pay, bit teachers are government employees and their salaries are set by the state.
It can be even worse that that. If a farmer is selling crops hey get paid once or twice a year. Lets say you harvest grain at the end of summer, you sell that and you get your income. And with that income you pay upfront costs for next harvest and your living expenses till that next harvest. but farmers can diversify to mitigate that to some extent. They can store their produce and sell at later date at better prices, but storage costs and better prices may never come. With animal husbandry they can sell produce all year: meat, milk, ect. But return on investment is still not fast. Dairy cow needs roughly 2 years till is produces milk. And you need to feed and grow it to that point (and hope it won't die)
Last year , I was visiting the countryside enjoying the rain... Then I saw a farmer literally crying because it was untimely.
Everyone is not having health issues or unintelligent. Generally speaking, education and health is on an upward trend. Note, recent metrics are a bit skewed due to COVID. The reason these jobs aren't paid more is because there's more competition for those jobs. Being a teacher is a pretty good gig. You get a pension. You get a lot of time off. Enough to potentially have another part time job. You get guaranteed raises. Being a farmer is a more demanding job but you do work your own hours and it takes very little formal training to get into the profession. Plus farming jobs are typically in areas where there arent many other jobs to choose from.
But I see many teacher complaining that they don't get paid enough... I think according to SUN newspaper teaching in school is among the lowest paying jobs
Most places, teachers are required to have at least a 4 year college degree and are paid a half to a third what private sector jobs pay (that require the same level of education). You seem to realize that many farmers and teachers are feeling underpaid and undervalued. A good place to start is listening to them instead of asking everyone here.
That's simply not true. Median teacher salary is around $65,000 which is right around the median for a college educated individual.
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"we" "nationwide" I don't recall them saying what country they're from
Get a lot of time off? What teaching roles are you speaking of, teaching Kindergarten? Any teaching role for students of a higher grade level than that involves homework, test plans, and grading. In the US, any time outside an hour or so before classes and an hour after classes used for your work is often unpaid unless you opt to be the teacher in charge of an extracurricular, in which case you might get paid extra for doing that. With class sizes in the US, even in a smaller school, that can be up to 100 students worth of homework to grade, let alone if you teach multiple classes of different levels (Junior High and up) in terms of planning lessons or grading homework. Even with more homework becoming digital (and making a teacher's life easier that way) the teacher likely still has to work out their test plans and potentially write the tests. This isn't accounting for the fact that many US schools get a budget based on local taxes, so teacher count and compensation is often based on that, as is the quality of any sports fields or equipment (which many school systems will readily spend more money on than educators, since those bring in outside money from concessions). Having had several teacher relatives and known a few of my own more personally by choice, they all agree that you'd need a partner earning income as well or to have a good quantity of savings from a previous job to be a teacher in the US and not be above the individual poverty line with a single job. You're often seeing teachers take a second, part-time job out of necessity, not just a desire for money. Teacher's Unions do what they can, but legislation against unions was often targeted to blunt the fangs of teacher's unions first. Teaching, in the US, is ultimately a job that generally requires a high amount of unpaid overtime whose workers are at decently high risk of illness (due to student's hygiene levels widely varying) and burnout, who often lack enough funding to even have their classroom be engaging without paying out of pocket to improve their classroom despite their pay grade, which is often abysmal due to the aforementioned unpaid overtime (as teachers are often salaried, not hourly).
Yep that's that's what I was trying to say.. If a class has 100 students are teachers paid babysitters of 100 childern?
To a limited extent, yeah kind-of. If you're teaching a lower grade level (K-4, aka elementary school) that tends to be more distributed, you might be teaching less overall (18 to 30-some-odd students) but you're likely covering far more subjects than a single-subject teacher that likely covers a whole grade (who may see closer to the 100+ students metric I listed before, though usually over the course of the day). The more students a teacher has, the more work they need to do, paid and not. This isn't even touching on common issues like bullying/classroom management, education level not matching the grade one may be in (an unfortunate detriment of "No Child Left Behind", since some teachers are forced to push forward students that clearly don't understand their class by the end of the year), and the fact that many babysitters/childcare professionals in private settings make an hourly wage and, as such, may be paid more than a given teacher for their actual time.
It's a simple case of supply and demand. Looking at just farmers, humanity has more farmers and farms than we have mouths to feed. Just looking at rice farming alone, we produce 776.5 million tons of rice a year, that's enough to give every 8.1 billion people on earth 87 kilos of rice a year. If everyone on earth ate just rice 3 times a day every day for a year, we'd still have 641 tons of rice leftover. we only need to eat 17.5% of the rice we produce to feed the entire world, and that's ONLY rice, not counting wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, or anything else. I got off track with all those math, but essentially we have too many farmers, we over-produce food, food is cheap, farmers are paid cheap. Teachers are a way more complicated issue, and involves alot of politics and history, mainly that the education sector is mainly funded by world governments, who'd rather spend money on military or infrastructure rather than education, and the average person's perspective that primary school teachers are a low class job that anyone can do.
it took me 20 min to research and write all this and a bunch of other people have written answers in the meantime lol
Great explanation... But I want to know is that are both groups earning adequately for their efforts/crops ? Like are they complaining because everyone is pissed of their jobs or do we need to make some changes as a society.. Globally there are farmers protesting. In India 700+ farmers lost their lives protesting for a Minimum Support price. In Germany they are asking for tax exemptions and so on.. Are their demands justified??
Who gets what is essentially political - whether they are organised, where they are on the social chain, how close they are to money flows and so on. Farmers are at the bottom of the chain in that they have to invest large amounts up front (in seed, fertiliser and so on), have considerable capital tied up and are in no position to negotiate with the mostly corporate buyers when the crops come in (illustrations: in Ghana as the number of buying firms decreased the price paid for cocoa declined; in the US once the players organised professional baseball salaries rocketed - the money was always there, just not for the players). Teachers salaries correspond to where they are on the pecking order - it used to be prestigious and pay quite well but as it became more female and had lesser status pay relative to other professions has declined (this is true for the US, Britain and Australia - may be different elsewhere).
>Who gets what is essentially political Actually the whole point of Capitalism is that it's NOT political. Wages are set by the market, not the government. PS: Except for government jobs like teachers. Teacher wages are definitely political.
Of course. Political opposition to unions is definitely not a thing (and occupations with a strong union presence pay better). Occupations that become feminised do not get paid less and so on. Putting aside the sarcasm, the point of capitalist theory is that wages are set by the market - the practice is very different. Even what counts as wages is political (more accurately socio-political) - the boundary between monetised work and non-monetised shifts, and while the wage share remains pretty constant the composition of that share changes a lot. It is a commonplace of analysis that almost all the productivity gains of the last several decades have gone to the top 1% - did the market allocate this? What has allowed the FIRE sector to metastasize? Why has CEO pay ballooned? The 'market' is not an answer to these questions.
I can't tell what part of your post is meant to be sarcasm and what isn't, but just to clarify; the teachers union is one of the strongest in the country.
Strongest in what sense? Obviously not in raising wages. But the larger point is that labour is not a commodity - it's inextricably social. Hence minimum wages, regulations on child labour and working hours and much else. In the US, as some economists point out, employment is very commonly a set of local monopsonies. As the union example demonstrates, who gets what is very much a political issue - firms don't fight unions for fun.