What are essential service workers worth to you?

Question

Should essential service workers earn higher salaries and better benefits than the average blue or white collar worker?


Negotiations are quite often a sore spot between unions and municipalities when it comes to funding salaries. Fire fighters, Police services, health care workers and teachers often are not offered contracts to thier satisfaction sparking debates on whether or not the people who on a daily basis rush into fires, fight crime, save lives & prepare our children for the future are worth higher salaries, family friendly benefits and retirement options.

To clarify, service workers are typically designated to emergancy services. During severe weather or say the Black Out a few years past, Cities were instructed to stay home from work, except for esssential service workers. For clarification on whether a COTTON PICKER is essential, ask your local government.

Answer 1

An essential worker may be a cotton picker who gathers the materials to give you clothing. Or, it may be an agricultural laborer who harvests the crop for your next meal. Or, perhaps the construction worker who provides shelter for your family. Or even the garbage man who insures that pestilences and diseases are held in check with his timely collection. These are among the most critical of services that we too frequently take for granted.

These people are just as essential as teachers, cops, firemen and health care workers. In the final analysis, these are all vital services that would have a detrimental effect on society if they were not completed.

I conclude that teachers, cops and firemen are important, but not more important than many other occupations necessary to our well being. Everyone willing to work is entitled to a living wage which enables them to raise a family, buy a house, obtain reasonable health care and provide for their retirement needs.

Answer 2

In general, any worker is worth what the market will bear.
Now a union who builds cars can ask for a raise and extra benefits and if they don't get it they can go on strike.
the company can wait them out, while losing business to competitors, but eventually both side get together and compromise.

Essential services are different, The job is essential, like firefighters, police, acute care nurses, doctors, etc. They are not allowed to go on strike, so theyu don't have bargaining power. a Doctor can with draw services, but the others by law cannot. If the union of essential union workers can't strike it is hard to bargain, and the employer only has to deal with public opinion on the issue.

Essential services do have this limitation....I think their raises should be based on the average wage increase of union workers.

Answer 3

Without meaning to be difficult, the answer(s) to your two questions depend upon the definitions of "essential" and "average." then there is the matter of "essential" to whom? and "average" to whom? but really, commonsensical meanings of "essential" and "average" would imply that such salaries should certainly, in general, be higher that, say, the salary of the typical deficient CEO salary.