[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
I’m underpaid given my level of education and the danger and difficulty of my work. Someone asked above why women overrepresented in my field…the pay is why, it’s a girl job, so pays less. More and more men are going into teaching as they move toward reasonable pay for work demands.
Interestingly, ALL of the senior management at my agency are male. Just as an aside…
[/quote]
I have to pick on this.
You’re not paid little because your job is a “girl” job. You’re paid little because your job is not valued by society. You don’t produce anything. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a volunteer fire-fighter and a paid EMT, and I don’t get much pay and even less sleep, and my job is far more dangerous than yours. I also know that, aside from the occaisional pat on the back, my job isn’t valued by society either. That’s ok.
I’m sure you work with a lot of children, and god bless you for that. We live in a society that celebrates victims and victimhood, but the only human beings who can legitimately claim victim status are children. But you also work with a lot of adults, I’m sure, and I know from experience that the more you do for some people, the less they do for themselves.
Once you enter into adulthood, you’re responsible for your own life. I don’t care about your low income or your shitty childhood or your abusive boyfriend. If you’re an adult, it’s your life, and you have to deal with the consequences of the decisions you make. I think that when your adult “clients” or “patients” or whatever you call them are transferring their dependence onto you, and I don’t think they are ever going to stand on their on feet. There is re-hab for people with physical disabilities. Is there such a thing as re-hab for people with emotional disabilities? I haven’t seen it. Once they exhaust your resources the vast majority will go right back to drugs or alcohol or their abusive relationships and nothing will change for them.
Frankly, I wouldn’t pay a cent more in taxes to increase your pay, because I don’t think providing a new crutch for the emotionally disabled is worth it. I believe you do valuable work with children, but I don’t want to pay you any more to do it. Your job used to be done without tax money by churches. The Church ladies who had finished raising their own children would go out into the community to help the less fortunate. That system wasn’t perfect by any means, but folks got by, and I think a lot of people who would be your emotionally handicapped clients today learned to limp by without you. Because there was no motorized scooter to carry them around, they learned to walk. Of course, there aren’t many real communities left, and the church ladies are too busy with their “careers” to do a lot of social work for free.
Also, all of your upper managers are men because women suck as managers.[/quote]
I would not argue that firefighting (your hobby) is not dangerous, however, I work with children at a community mental health center, where the paranoid schizophrenics come for their weekly shots, etc. If you picture me coloring sweetly with poor children, you are limited in your understanding of what I and others like me do. Although it is rare, I have been threatened by teens and by mentally ill parents, and one of the teens who threatened me (“I fantasize about killing you, or at least stabbing your eyes”) assaulted one of our front desk staff last year and two weeks ago kicked a nurse in the stomach at an inpatient facility. She required five point restraints off and on her first two days in the hospital. I met with her the day the incident occurred that landed her in the hospital. She called me a bitch and told me she hates me. We’ve worked together for four years now, so I just made a face at her and went on with what I was doing, which was informing her father that she was in a bad space. She weighs probably 200 lbs, to my 125 or so. I am respectful of the potential for danger she presents. (Edit: calling me a bitch had nothing to do with the hospitalization, something happened later that day.)
One adult male client came in with a hammer to attack his clinician, luckily also male, and another adult male client punched a female case manager in the face not too long ago. A woman coming in for an intake tweaked to the point of cracking our bulletproof glass. Another paranoid schizophrenic. One of the kids’ I worked with had a mom who burnt down the house of someone she didn’t like. She didn’t like me, also, because I was blocking her bid to get custody of her kids. Severely bipolar, history of significant abuse. I call the cops and child protection when I find out bad men have been putting their penises in little girls’ mouths, which can rile people. So I bear that in mind when I leave in the dark. I’ve also done both children’s and adult crisis assessments at the emergency room. There is always a guard if people are deemed a danger to self or others (which is what I am there to assess). Still, it doesn’t take a madwoman long to grab someone’s hair and claw her eyes, and frankly the guards don’t inspire a great deal of confidence. I always bear that in mind when I’m assessing where to position myself in relation to labile others and the exit. I’m not a fighter, so I make “non-threatening” an art. My job is not like slogging through the Korengal Valley with bullets spitting all around, but it carries some risk. Compared to, say, working in a corporate environment. Or even a prison, given that we deal with the same population, but without guns or night sticks or burly men or steel bars.
As for girl pay, I quite disagree. Again I point to teaching as being almost exclusively female at one time, but the economy continues to stagnate while teacher pay increases due to union stranglehold, and more and more men are thinking it’s a good gig. Nursing as well. I don’t complain about my pay. I chose it. It’s fine, I have other resources and I like my job. But it is historically chick work, born, as you note, out of charitable impulse. It will be interesting to see what will happen as our aging society needs more and more caretaking with less and less family available to give it to them. Will pay increase? If so, will men show up at the gates? Maybe. Anyway, I wasn’t whining, I was answering a question. Lot of school for low pay, depressing work (if you find it so), and risk of assault or yucky things transmitted (e.g. head lice, MRSA, hep b).
As for what I create, I create dignity and money. I civilize people so the state won’t have to pay to house them in prison. I teach parenting skills so kids will hopefully make it through some reasonable amount of schooling. I cock block by teaching girls self-respect, which reduces teen pregnancy. I give smart, sweet kids one person they can trust and sometimes I succeed in teaching them the word “college.” I tell kids and their parents that I know they can do it, whatever “it” is, and sometimes as a result they do. I’ve gotten both kids and parents through all manner of unexpected success, and they are now better able to contribute to society.
I also save lives. I don’t know whether you’re an encourager of suicide, but one of my kids is studying physics at the moment (because what else would he be doing at college at 10 pm but studying) because we got him through. WIth that kid, actually, I used AC’s sentence stems. I expect taxes from him eventually. One of the kids I work with once said, in response to being mocked (by an adult) for being in counseling, that “I don’t come here because there’s something wrong with me, I come here so I don’t wind up killing anybody.” That kid (my all-time favorite) also once told me that she was spending a lot of time just walking around, talking to herself. I asked what she said and she answered, “Mostly I’m like, what the fuck?” Which, yeah. Ethical, hard-working kid, messed up family, abuse, foster care. That kid will someday pay taxes, though.
So. I produce dignity, which in turn produces money, or at least limits the drain. And I save lives, but not the lives of smoking, drinking, gravy-guzzling 50-year-olds, like you do, who will live to suffer another costly heart attack, and then another. I save young physicists. YOU’RE WELCOME.
Edited for clarity. I needed to add a little more detail because it seemed lacking. lol
