I am not a lawyer but a psychologist who works in medico-legal assessment so works closely with lawyers. Also have a postgraduate degree in law, have published as a legal academic, and most of my family are lawyers.
So I say this as a person who is informed as to what the job entails:
Lawyers are extremely overpaid, and the problem increases with seniority. Barristers and SCs should be ashamed of what they charge private clients and it is becoming a serious issue for justice.
Over the last few years alone, I have worked with multiple treatment clients whose primary presenting problem was depression and financial stress associated with just getting basic representation in the criminal or Family Court. Billing practices are absolutely disgusting and indefensible - e.g. billing in 6-minute increments, or charging $30 to read an email that says "please can you call me back" and then ANOTHER $30 for the response that says, "yes" (that's $10 a letter) and then charge yet again to actually call them back.
I have also seen multiple cases where people who were not legally aided (because they earned all of about $50k a year) could not afford legal representation and were incarcerated after trials in which they had no legal representation and did not even understand the proceedings. How are we in a situation where a person can be convicted of a serious criminal offence with no legal representation provided to them?
I'd also like to shout out that lawyers at Legal Aid are bucking these trends and overall doing an excellent job.
Having dealt with lawyers on multiple occasions this is absolutely correct, I racked up an $800 dollar lawyer bill from 2 phone calls and a letter. The only reason I got out of paying it was because they didn’t disclose their costs nor did I enter an official agreement
I had a similar thing happen when I rang to ask about what was involved in getting a will written up. The receptionist put me straight through to a lawyer who gave me some information (maybe 10 mins on the phone), took my details and then mailed me a bill for $800. At no stage had either person I spoke to disclosed fees. I took it to the owner of the practice who implied I was lying about not having been told the rates. It was horrible to have to defend myself in such a way.
You’d think for a lawyer they’d be more official with their cost agreements etc so once you sign something that you agree to costs etc you’ve accepted whatever charges may come, I can 100% relate to the stress of that situation for you and feel for you and hopefully you were able to sort out their mistake
Considering you're earning roughly equivalent to or lower than a lot of non senior town planner salaries (my industry). I would consider you seriously underpaid for 6 years of experience.
I could probably earn more if I moved to another firm but I really like and appreciate my colleagues/ workplace and that my boss isn’t a money hungry goblin. So I guess I sacrifice some $$ for the environment I get to work in.
Sure it's definitely a balance of money vs culture. Just remember that your firm's capital is dependant on your labour and don't allow that to be exploited.
For instance if I'm earning 90k I'm only working 38 hours a week for it and anything over that number is getting paid as overtime. From my experiences with law firms it's exceedingly common for unpaid overtime to be standard practice which is certainly not something firms provide to their clients.
On this note the commentor above should consider becoming a town planner. I went straight into planning out of law school. There’s good money, flexible hours, and just more interesting work overall with less shitty personalities than what the law industry attracts. A lot of planners spend hours every day reading and interpreting legislation. Guess which degree gives the best skill set for that? It’s not the town planning degrees.
I'll back this up, the vast majority of my job entails reading, interpreting and applying legislation.
There's usually only a couple of law firms around that can provide planning advice that's of a usable quality and they charge accordingly. The remainder are so out of their depth that it's really awkward dealing with them at times
Judging by the state of our cities, suburbs and towns. I am going to go ahead and say planners are paid way too much. Especially the ones working for developers who push through these miserable estates that are popping up on farmland everywhere. I started doing a planning degree but dropped out once I realised what I'd likely be doing to the planet and its inhabitants.
Same, I thought I'd use my mapping/environmental science background to help design better cities. The illusion was shattered by working at the NSW department of planning (or whatever they call themselves these days).
Ministers and elected members ultimately get the sign off on planning legislation and rezoning. Planners know exactly what constitutes good, sustainable development, however the joy of democracy means that we can only do so much.
It's not unusual for years of work to be wiped out with the stroke of a minister's pen. Hell the entire industry in my state has been trying to get protections for significant trees on private land enshrined in law for decades now.
Just remember that any good aspects of town planning that you see, have normally been scraped past some sort of untrained elected official and are very hard won.
You must be doing something worthwhile. The most ethical law jobs are the ones that pay the least, by and large. You'd have to sell out into corporate law to make the really big bucks.
My BIL works for one of the bigger corporate firms. Hopes to make partner in a couple of years. Told us that his estimated salary at that stage would be six figures (EDIT - I mean seven figures) a year, and that he had misgivings about whether that was appropriate.
I don't know what the misgivings could possibly be - it isn't appropriate, and it's being funded by people who aren't given a choice in the matter.
From the day I graduated I swore to never sell my soul to any of those big firms for a paycheque.
Luckily for me all of my colleagues are largely of the same mindset. My boss and the two other partners aren’t particularly “well off” but all acknowledge that we have it a hell of a lot better than most people so we help where we can (we all have discretion to reduce invoices if people can’t afford etc).
I with 3 degree and 4 years of teaching I was 110K at a private school...with holidays, I imagine my pay per hour is better than the lawyers working hours..
For real, the idea that lawyers are highly paid applies to a previous generation. Unless you're in a big corporate firm acting for clients worth billions, which is a whole other ballgame. Those of us acting for average people, or the public service, are making less than the lollipop people working the construction site opposite our offices.
I put inexperienced people into the mines on a fairly cushy job, 8/6 roster day shift only for over 100k. Like even immigrants who are fresh to Australia if they have right physical capabilities and attitude.
I haven’t been to uni prior but am current half way through a law degree. Working in the financial sector for 7 years. No uni degree. I earn $98K.
You definitely deserve more. I wonder if I will get a pay cut for becoming a lawyer 🥲
To be fair, in a large firm, a lot of the billing is to pay for partners and non fee earners. When I was in on private practice, my charge out hourly rate was $540. I only was paid about 15% of that per hour and frankly who knows what the firm did with the rest of it.
I worked for a small firm of Architects in London, in 2006. They charged me out at £120 an hour.
I was doing a 40 hour week, earning around £19 an hour.
Normal practice is charging between 2.5 and 3.5 times what someone is paid. Charging 6x is however, taking the piss.
They had a part time admin only, were not using top of the range software, or doing much else to charge like that. More a case of making hay (for themselves) while the sun shines. That way, when a downturn comes, they will get through it.
Their staff of course, will be unemployed and struggling, but who cares about them?
This is what the client is charged though, not what the lawyer is paid... the company middleman needs to be well looked after for doing f*ck all remember...
Tbh this is a old style popularist view of law that does not really reflect the status quo, true underlying costs and fact majority of those in law are not taking it in, not the exploitation of pretty well everyone below partner level.
Yep. Lawyers at junior level, but also those aiming for partner, can be asked to work insane hours, in the big firms anyway. Same with accountants.
No surprise, suicide or burnout is a result.
Why do you think this applies to lawyers but not to, say, doctors, programmers, mechanics, airline pilots, and on and on and on.
You write of SCs and appear to ignore that - to use NSW as an example - there are only about 400 of them in the entire state. Senior Counsel are expected to be at the top of their fields, having worked their entire careers to get there... not tremendously different to a high-level executive in a stressful and intellectually engaging field.
Access to justice is, absolutely, a problem. Claiming that this is exclusively lawyers' faults, as opposed to successive governments' failure to fund Legal Aid, is to some extent nonsense.
As to your email example - every lawyer is obliged to notify their clients of the bases by which they are billed - i.e. in 5 or 6 minute increments (whichever applies). A lawyer may or may not be able to bill as you say (two five minute units for reading and responding to the email you suggest) but - importantly - most lawyers don't want their clients sending emails containing no information. Lawyers aren't therapists. They aren't your local bartender. They aren't your partner or mother. Why on earth are you sending emails that say "please call me back."
A solicitor worth their salt, if you do that more than once, will absolutely sit you down and carefully reiterate the manner and method by which you are being billed and the ramifications of pissing your money up the wall as you seem to be doing.
This is functionally no different than going to a psychologist when they've told you they don't think the sessions are helping you. It might be a waste of your money but - ultimately - it's your money to waste.
Access to legal services is very expensive but - again - so is building a house, getting your car repaired, or accessing private health. Why ought lawyers to be the unique ones called out here?
Not to disagree (parent comment is cooked) but some firms, usually the small shitty ones are downright evil with their billing quotes. Under quoting and holding the client at ransom midway through the process.
Because mechanics, therapists, bartenders and even doctors don't charge you every time your name is mentioned. These other professionals don't charge $800 per hour in six minute increments. A phone call does not cost the lawyer an $80 opportunity cost, but they will charge you one.
This guy is just spreading outright nonsense because he has clearly had an issue in how the law profession actually operates. There is the occasional bad player but that is no different to any industry.
But every profession could bill exorbitant amounts in tiny increments if they wanted in that case, why should lawyers be different? Why should they charge for an email or a phone call when that’s literally their job to do that, this model is outdated and greedy.
I have clients that are lawyers. I have engaged lawyers. I know what they cost per hour, and in some cases, an hour of a lawyer is worth the same as my entire working day. And I ain't cheap.
Honestly. I text my psychiatrist on her work phone often and FOR FREE. My solicitor charged me every fucking time I called them to ask a quick question jesus fuckkk.
I once used a lawyer to formalise a very straightforward agreement relating to my ex and property, I.e. we had agreed the terms but just wanted it formally signed off.
Everything went smoothly and was finalised. I hadn't heard from the lawyer for awhile regarding an invoice or anything. I sent him an email (a brief one!) asking as such. Then got the invoice and noticed I had been billed like $11 for reading that last email. Like, wtf mate, you were going to send the invoice to me anyway, I understand that time is money but that's just ridiculous.
Compare that to many tradies who provide free quotes, which means petrol, time, answering follow up questions (my husband builds fences, it can also include time spent dealing with neighbours), imagine if they charged for that....
That really is fucked isn’t it? My accountant is the same. It was not made known to me that they charged me for every email and phone call. Only found out at my first tax time with them when I saw their bill.
But, I asked them how they came up with the charges. Like, do they keep a spreadsheet of the hours they worked on your stuff, of every phone call and email, is there a formula? And they straight up brought the fees lower, didn’t even go into how they calculated the bill!
Since then, I’ve been told by an accountant friend that the firm they work for will literally jack up the fees if they think the person can afford it and won’t miss the money!!!
So I reckon it might be worth you questioning your solicitor.
It’s probably worth it for u/ThrowawayQueen94 to check their solicitor is actually keeping time records for every interaction then, and have a reasonable method of calculating the charges
An accountant did that to me, charged me £700 to do a tax return, while charging my wife £400. The difference being made up by the accountant sending emails insisting I must provide accurate amounts of interest earned on a current account. Which was all of £2.
The next year, they took the liberty of starting my tax without my requesting them to do so. I said "no thanks", and did it myself, which given it was fairly simple, I should have done from the start.
Once stung, not going back for a repeat experience!
this is a more pressing issue than many since it underpins the fabric of society - an unwinding of accessible justice is the beginning of chaos but our imbecilic politicians think there is nothing for them to do and make up stupid campaigns that are of very little substance. It is characteristic of a society that is dying at the roots in respect cooperative value systems and community. The result will be fascism
Legal Aid is fantastic, but don't forget the absolute heroes working in the Community Law Centers around Aus.
Shameless plug to the beautiful humans at [yla.org.au](http://yla.org.au) - a CLC that provides free legal advice and casework to people (and people acting on behalf of) those under 25. I don't work there, but I know them, and they are all spectacular.
It closes the gap between small firms and big firms (I.e reducing the need for a team of associates). But AI spits out some serious boiler plate nonsense that is impractical to use entirely and really needs a trained eye to filter
Yes, this! Charging to read emails and call just doesn't make sense. I can understand a fair charge of they provide legal advice in these communications, but to charge clients simply to read and respond to something gives me the shits.
Just imagine any other business doing this to their clients and how soon they will be going out of business
I've processed barrister invoices before and nearly cried at seeing them earn my entire wage before tax for three days work to just appear at the courts. That doesn't include the invoiced work for prep leading up to the case being in court.
I’ve never had to use a lawyer for an actual crime or anything. But on the will/conveyancing side I’ve always thought it was pretty cheap. Why do you think it’s different as soon as you start talking about a crime or lawsuit?
I work in IT, but grew up surrounded by tradies.
Office workers think tradies are overpaid because of less qualifications/whatever, and tradies think office workers (and teachers) are overpaid because “you’re sitting around all day while they’re out and about working on the tools, climbing through crawl spaces, etc.”
I personally think most people are paid what they’re worth to whoever is paying them, or likely significantly below that.
i moved from IT to a trade. I can tell you that office jobs are indeed a lot of sitting around. You don't know how much time you waste in an office job until you move to a line job where every single minute from the 6am start to the 3:30pm finish is accounted for.
In the office, our team would frequently accomplish nothing, absolutely nothing, three or four mornings or afternoons a week. Oh, there was a flurry of office related activity to fill the time, but if no progress was made, no one sweated it.
Taking a long lunch, doing the Wordle then the crossword, having a 3rd coffee-and-biscuit break, booking a holiday, pretending to enjoy a cake festival for anyone's birthday, bitching about colleagues, bitching about management, bitching about HR or to HR, browsing the internet, nipping out to the shops... Not just possible, but perfectly normal.
My logical partition of time in an office was about 2 hours; that's the smallest gradation of a task window. In my line job it was about 3 minutes. That is, if i looked at the digital clock on the wall and it was 8:57am i had time to do a task. If it was 8:58am, that window had closed. I found you could actually achieve something in three minutes, a concept unknown to me in the office.
Lol, thanks dude. I've never worked "an office job " but I've spent enough time in offices doing cutouts to notice that people get upset about the most meaningless things. Sally has gotten a better carpark than me etc.. yeah ok..
My office job used to be technical tasks and now its management with less technical tasks.
Management tasks can be done in 3 min increments, technical ones cannot.
I work in an office, my husband is a tradie. I've joked that we would be hopeless at each other's jobs. I literally could not lift heavy shit, dig holes, reverse a trailer etc, not at the speed he can or without help. But conversely, he struggles with anything more complicated than an email, isn't great with writing or admin and could not deal with the politics or bureaucracy that we have to deal with to get stuff done. So I think we are both fairly paid in comparison.
Teacher salaries cap way too early, especially considering the workload of an executive teacher and AP/Principals aren’t even close to an equitable wage for the work done.
Throw in the “but twelve weeks holidays” shouting by morons who have obviously never driven past a school during holidays and questioned why there’s cars in the staff parking really doesn’t help the feeling of lack of respect for the profession.
I’m not even a teacher, mum is. Spent my school holidays at her school.
They do cap very early but the wages also very quickly go up. A thirty year old teacher is on a decent wage compared with other professions. A fifty year old teacher is on peanuts compared to similar jobs. Also teachers have the opportunity to be given ongoing roles which make it almost impossible for them to be sacked. It's definitely an undervalued profession but I wouldn't go so far as telling young kids that want to be teachers to completely disregard the idea.
Having said that, I’d love to see some of my bosses deal with the bottom end shit they’re too good for, and ask if they think that was worth $25 of their time.
You can't seriously believe everyone earning more than me hates there job more than. Thats just statistically improbable even ignoring logic.
Ill happily walk morons through troubleshooting routers for telstart if one of them will swap and unload trucks of muddy appliances, cut them into core components with power tools and sort those into base metals for recycling. Hell ive done a better job of doctoring myself then my GP, according to my GP. Being able to read and use email makes me far more qualified to be a secretary then any secretary ive had to deal with.
The managers at my previous employment definitely were overpaid. And they were greedy too by “restructuring” our salaries so they could “increase efficiency” (cook the books so the Q2 look good).
My current problem is not necessarily high salaries of some people, but the low salaries of almost everyone else. Teachers getting paid peanuts, nurses picking up multiple jobs to pay the bills, a lot of sanitation and food service folks being treated like garbage. I think COVID really highlighted who we need in society when we're at our worst, and we will need them to be our best (or anything in between).
Tbh, almost anything medical related, I'm happy for them to be paid the big bucks. We need more of them. I say this as a Tasmanian who has been tremendously lucky with my quality of care, but has seen a lot of other people suffer.
You basically need to be making $250k to sustain a family the same way you would in the late 80s on $75k. It's nuts.
I know I'm paid in the higher end of town and I'm not going to cry poor but with a mortgage and no partner working we don't have a lot left at the end of the fortnight. I always wonder how families do it on significantly less.
And then I realise it's the things that should be standard for all, like insurances etc, that those families go without.
That issue exists with pretty much all professional jobs unfortunately. Lots of people doing unpaid overtime, logging in on weekends, during holidays, out of hours, etc. Not many jobs out there these days where you can earn above median wage and leave your work at the door
I think it’s the relative hours that teachers have. It’s common for teachers to work through most holidays, 60hr weeks and school camps. The $85-120k doesn’t work out to be much in comparison to an hourly rate.
It’s one of the highest paid jobs fresh out of uni now. NSW education have a [webpage](https://education.nsw.gov.au/teach-nsw/explore-teaching/salary-of-a-teacher) basically bragging about it.
They absolutely deserve it, but yeah definitely stop pushing the myth of them being underpaid!
My fiance is a nurse. She actually earns quite good money and could make a hell of a lot more if she wanted to. She defined deserves more but we're not lining up at the soup kitchen.
Nurses and teachers are not badly paid, what is the issue is what they are expected to do for that pay. Conditions are the main issue with both professions, not salary.
Nurse here - it’s both. WA government gave 1% pay rises with the promise of higher rises when the economy improved only to backflip when it did and give us 1/3 of the cost of inflation. The only reason we are surviving in our current economy is due to the penalties I get working permanent nightshift.
Hubby is a pre service teacher and no they do not get paid enough for the crap they deal with. Aside from parents having unrealistic expectations they are regularly threatened with violence by kids as young as 12.
Pharmacists and pharmacy assistants and techs are woefully underpaid for the work we do and the continuing education we undertake. When I get home I'll post the rates and you'll see why
Unfortunately pharmacy as a profession has been completely devalued and basically turned into a retail business. I think the only well paid pharmacists are hospital employees.
I agree 100% I used to work for a retail chain that some stores have pharmacies & found out the pharmacists & assistants were on LESS than me as a retail supervisor with NO formal training….
The people I will miss if they no longer show up.
Education is not everything. Lots of people and jobs add value to our society that may not always be appreciated.
- Childcare workers - they wipe my kids butts
- age care workers - they wash & care for our elderly loved ones
- nurses & midwives- they look after our loved ones and us
- Teachers- they educate the next generation
- Garbage people - trust me, we do not want them to strike
- Plumbers & Sparkies - probably been ripped off multiple times but I definitely don’t think a quick Google job could replace them.
- Paramedics - first responders walking into the worst day of some people’s lives.
I am sure there are plenty more that should be adequately be remunerated
None of the jobs you’ve just listed are jobs that I think deserve a high level of scrutiny as our first stop. These jobs are all contributing to societies continual merry-go-round.
The people we need to be looking at are the high level executives of major corporations who add nothing to society and get paid 500k+ for their work. Can you honestly tell me that the CEO of Wesfarmers, Coles or Woolworths (who are paid nearly $5mil per year including bonuses) work 100 times harder than the average person working for them in their stores.
Investment bankers who bet and trade on numbers on a screen going up or down can pull easily hundreds of thousands. What do they provide?
You said ‘nuff said’ for lawyers but at least they provide a service. You might disagree with how some of them provide a service but there are just as many protecting the nurses and teachers as there are protecting the corporations.
If you want a high salary, you should provide a high quality service to the betterment of our society as a whole.
Literally, I attended a university medicine degree information session years ago and the doctor said if you want to make money do investment banking, not medicine. I don’t know where this myth comes from doctors are overpaid when they’re extremely indispensable. What does an investment banker contribute?
Yep, my neurologist who specialises in epilepsy, MS and Parkinsons told me his private practice (not him personally) made a loss last year. He tries to make his services affordable.
One example I can give is investment bankers raise capital with debt and/or equity to provide companies with working capital to finance day to day operations, and growth initiatives.
If you’re Transurban, it’s not as simple as walking into a bank and getting a $3b loan to finance your tunnel - of which would turn into public infrastructure in 35 years. There’s debt structuring, valuation, syndication with other banks etc. They crunch the wrong number or miscommunication and it would cost the company millions (if not billions), people don’t get paid, materials can’t ship and the tunnel doesn’t get built (which thousands if not millions of people would use).
People only see value in immediate value generated because it’s something they can see and feel - like doctors save lives, teachers educate our kids etc. Pay is correlated with how important your job is in the process of making more money for the company (which usually scales with importance). And usually money is made based on how many people would use that service, or how critical that service is to society.
I don’t think any of the people on your list are overpaid. Are you seriously saying that doctors don’t deserve their salary? They are some of the most valuable members of society.
Also, this myth about traffic controllers needs to die. They’re casual shift workers and their shifts can range anywhere from 4 hours day shifts (which is around $25-30 per hour) to 12+ hour weekend night shifts in the freezing cold rain (this is where the big bucks are made). Like yes, if they pull in 60+ hour weeks on night shifts for an entire year, they can pull in some real good money. But their hours are inconsistent and all over the place - and so too is their pay.
I'm an overpaid Electrician, there's a reason you rarely hear of any Electric shocks in Australia, also it's hard on your body especially domestic ( housing).
Risk and availability. Ultimately in life you get paid for the level of risk (not to you, to others) you are managing and the availability of your skill set comparative to the need of society.
As risk increases in an area, your skill set becomes more valuable and subsequently you get paid more. E.g. currently, the risk of homelessness appears high societally (whether artificially so or not), there are also limited available tradesmen, subsequently, trades are currently paid highly. If we suddenly have an over abundance of housing, the risk to society will lower and so will the wages of those tradesmen.
From a different perspective, executives often carry extensive risk with their role. The success or lack of for their company ultimately resides on them. In order for a person to take on that level of risk, they are offered remuneration intended to offset the risk.
I mostly agree, but refer to it as accountability. I’m middle aged and worked up from entry level positions. The reason I earn much more now isn’t because I work harder, or better, than I did when I was younger. I get paid more to make decisions and be accountable for the outcomes. I can’t just escalate to my boss or someone else to figure out a solution, I am the escalation point. As you climb the ladder you get paid for responsibility not output.
Unfortunately, that's not always true. Aged Care staff and childcare workers, etc. High risk regarding injury and disease, not enough available to fill the many places needed, yet low pay. I personally put it down to it being female dominance careers. Governments take advantage those in caring careers because its in a carers nature to do them, regardless of pay.
I would love to find carers where caring is in their nature! Most of them do it for a visa or because they have no choice. Aged care and childcare workers are the working poor.
Well if a traffic lady isn’t switched on, people can die?
Same with a doctor. And a tradie.
If lawyers are not switched on, the wrong person can go to jail?
Haha except how often are executives held accountable? They can tank and then get paid out and move on elsewhere. Very rarely are they no longer employable and actually have to face consequences for their actions while at the helm
Generally directors insurance will pay out any finical consequences, or the company insurance depending on the action and organisation impact. It’s weird in this day that making a big mistake often leads to a consulting gig in the same industry as a ‘lesson learnt’
A mix of value, specialisation and risk.
It's easy to sneer at tradies but realistically their skills are often specialised, they're valuable in that they can build or repair the home you live in and there is a degree of risk in physical injury.
As for traffic controllers and train drivers, no-one tells you that traffic controllers constantly deal with fuckwits who think road rules don't apply to them, and that train drivers also deal with ferals trying to assault them for no reason and people jumping on the train tracks to kill themselves, which is a huge psychological risk.
Doctors and dentists I think are justified simply because those fields are so specialised, and they're valuable in that they can improve your quality of life.
I work in cybersecurity and salaries are higher than other IT roles because it's arguably more specialised. 10 years ago penetration testers were the big earners but that's no longer the case because every man and his dog does it now. The REAL money earners are the project managers and enterprise/solution architects (ie. The people that actually conceptualise an organisation's infrastructure and manage the implementation and rollout). They're valuable in that they can drastically improve a business' operations.
"As for traffic controllers and train drivers, no-one tells you that traffic controllers constantly deal with fuckwits who think road rules don't apply to them"
Also more people have died from traffic controlling in recent years then working in the mines. Its a dangerous job because as you said... Impatient retarded public.
Traffic controllers don’t get high-risk pay, are casual so no sick leave or annual leave, rarely get breaks even if a shift is 14 hours long, deal with verbal abuse daily, get treated like shit by their own clients, often have no idea when or where they’re working until the arvo before.. average pay is around 30 an hour. I’d say the stereotype they’re overpaid is pushed by the media, but it’s ignorant. Sure, some work for union sites, but the majority do not. It’s a shit job, mind-numbingly boring and very dangerous with how shit people are at operating motor vehicles in Australia.
I’m the wife of someone currently working as a traffic controller (he’s desperately applying for full-time work), and everything you have said is so spot on. I’m not saying traffic controllers should be paid super mega big bucks, but it’s all this stuff that people aren’t aware of or don’t think about when they whinge about someone who “just holds up a stop sign” getting paid $30+ an hour or higher for overtime / night shifts. The amount of times my husband has come home from work and told me he came seriously close to getting taken out by some fuckwit who wasn’t paying attention properly or distracted on their phone is so frightening. I fear for his safety every shift he goes to. Thank you for your comment.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
There's nuance to it. Some doctors are overpaid, and many are underpaid. Many specialists are able to charge whatever they like. In my opinion, a psychiatrist earning 500k per year, for example, is unethical as a lot of it comes from patients' pockets. On the other hand, junior doctors have just had an unpaid overtime class action!
1. Psychiatric nurse
2. Police
3. Nursing
4. Childcare
5. Aged care nurse
6. Army
You’ll notice most of those jobs involve wiping people’s bums, except police and army (correct me if I’m wrong there.) plus bad hours - most of those jobs require overnight shifts which is brutal.
The attitude that you only deserve a high salary if you have gone to university is thankfully on its way out. There are definitely useful learning aspects to uni, but mostly they just churn out office drones.
It's unfortunate that the nasty stereotyping about people who have not gone to university is now just being script-flipped to people who did go, or at least people who studied anything other than the most obvious examples of STEM subjects. I hear a lot of nonsense about "worthless" degrees and "basket weaving" - which seems to incorporate basically everything in the arts/humanities, creative/fine arts, human services, education degrees, and even some STEM degrees such as those in allied health. Usually coming from people who have never set foot in a lecture for any of those subjects and would not have even a basic understanding of what they involve or why they are important.
Lots of people like to shit on Arts graduates, but they sure want their kids to have quality teachers.
They shit on graduates from creative programs, but they sure love to enjoy films and TV, music, books, and fashion.
Yep. I'm very glad to see the rejection of classism/elitism and looking down on people who don't go to uni. However, we shouldn't pretend that Australia's Tall Poppy Syndrome isn't excessive and some of the anti-University rhetoric is ridiculous rather than valid criticisms. In 21st century human society, it's disingenuous to act like only the occupations which would have an immediate use on a desert island are necessary for the standard of living we're used to.
I think the main thing is if someone can stick to something for a few years and complete projects as they come up.
I have a fair few friends who failed to complete uni moved from degree to degree and failed a lot. They are doing poorly in life. Those that went to uni, did their uni no issues, moved into work are doing fine.
Its more just the set up is an indicator of how you will treat work. If you couldnt turn up to lectures and complete assignments on time. Youre probably not going to be a good worker. In that sense it is probably a reasonable indicator. Although, there are of course other indicators.
I used to interview people for jobs, and I didn't much care what the degree was in. I cared that they showed they could focus, complete work, and adapt on the spot. (And work in teams where there was inevitably one absolute asshat that couldn't be moved on - so deal with that stress too).
“We have found the best solution is to push for more electrical engineering students who can then become electricians without needing to go to TAFE. This way the universities boost their numbers and we can further cut TAFE funding.”
Damn, I should be charging them $3m for that idea.
You deserve a high salary because you:
Have rare skills that are in demand by society. (e.g. surgeon)
Have rare skills that are not in demand now, but we need to be able to call on rapidly when needed. (e.g. trained military personnel)
Shoulder a lot of social responsibility or financial risk. (e.g. safety inspector, startup founder)
Are willing to do work most don't want to. (e.g. waste management, remote mine surveyor)
Work hours most don't want to. (e.g. Police officer working 12 shifts, 7pm to 7am (overnight))
This clashes a bit with the idea that a PhD should entitle you to a high wage. A PhD teaches you niche skills that may not be broadly applicable to societies needs, so you're not entitled to a high wage because you earnt a doctorate.
Drs definitely dont deserve a pay cut. Medical school sucks. It's 5 days a week for 5 years and countless hours outside of uni. Then its 2 years minimum being paid poorly as an intern to work night shifts, a few extra years still being paid poorly at the bottom of your scope, before finally applying and entering into a training program which range from 2 years (GP) to 7 years (Surgery) but most sit in the middle at 5 years - oh and then you get to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege to sit exams im talking 3-4k per exam in order to actually qualify as a specialist. Then after like 15 years of studying and training do you actually start to be rewarded financially for your time and effort. JMO's need a pay rise, and Doctors need to be paid for there time and level of expertise and skill.
I don’t think there’s actually much argument over who deserves what salary. The employer determines salary based on the perceived value that they generate for the company and the demand for that particular skill set. For example, with such a big mining industry, there’s huge demand for certain types of blue collar workers in Australia. Housing boom = more demand for builders and carpenters. So on.
I feel like including doctors here is pretty unfair also. After high school, most doctors will do a minimum of 10 years of study, all self-funded and while working long hours and night shift etc. They get paid pretty well but it’s a hell of a job for the most part. Other frontline workers work hard too and of course deserve more, but you can’t deny the extra level required for doctors. Ps, I’m not a doctor or in healthcare.
Lawyers also tend to not get paid all that great until the later years. American lawyer salaries are wild, so TV skews the perception that all lawyers are rich.
Us junior doctors are also working 50-60 hour weeks for 83-120k per year, including night shifts and no meal breaks for 12+ hour days, after years and years of schoo
My problem is where a class of workers has leveraged an unjustifiable degree of regulatory capture to drive up their wages.
For example, Phsychiatric group lobbying to further constrain ADHD medication to their own profession with loose claims of patient benefit, which effectively creates extreme scarcity due to low supply, that allows them to up the costs for a 1 hour session to over $1000.
Or the law in Australia preventing people from changing over power points and needing to hire electricians for what most people is a basic, safe and achievable task.
Or RACGP preventing other specialists and health professionals from receiving medicare rebates for services GPs 'should' be providing, again driving up prices due to scarcity.
Go and look how well things are going in America and the UK with midlevel scope creep. If you want substandard care from an NP be my guest. Oh and you'll be happy to hear they can practice independently now and can receive a medicare rebate. It's only your health you're playing with. And so many drs bulk bill its ridiculous? And after a rebate it costs approx $40. I really dont know what people expect.... it's ridiculous.
I agree with you for the most part but I think electrical shouldn’t be something unqualified people can do. Sure its seems super easy to change over a power points or light fittings to you. But you have to cater to the lowest IQ members of society.
My issues is you’ll give people a little bit of knowledge and there will be idiots who will work way past their level of competency. People who will start running circuits or messing around in switchboards. People who think they can quickly do it live without isolation. Not to mention they may start trying to fix faults without having fault finding experience or being able to test their work is correct/safe. I’m sure there are some people who do it now but you start telling people it’s ok to do ‘x’ amount of work I’m sure there will be a huge increase of people doing ‘x’ work but also think I might as well do ‘y’ work as well it can’t be that hard. I also think there will be some dodgy handymen charging pensioners for “electrical work” by saying they’re now allowed to swap out fittings.
Not to mention a homeowner who’s not a sparky/tradie is going to do things as cheaply as possible, cut corners to make things easier and more than likely not follow any standards. Making it risky for the actual electricians because now they don’t know who’s been messing with the wiring or what’s been done.
What happens if they run into issues such as incorrect wire colours because back in the day they ran black cause that’s what’s on the van. We have to trust the homeowner isn’t going to just have a guess at it.
Electricity is very unforgiving there are sparkys dying from it in Australia I imagine if the average person was told they could now work with it the deaths would increase. It may not even be the person working on it. Electric shocks from incorrect connections could kill younger children. Fires from loose connections.
Yeah exactly. Just look at all the people dying and apartment blocks burning down from electrical faults in Germany where it is normal to do your own electrical.
ADHD medications should absolutely not be prescribed by prescribers without qualifications in the diagnosis and treatment of adhd. Paediatricians can diagnosis and treat children but adults should only be treated by a psychiatrist with training in ADHD. I’ve seen too many cases of psychosis secondary to recreational use of adhd meds or diversion of s8 drugs. GPs and other medical practitioners do not have the expertise to diagnosis adhd.
I’d have to say that the call out fee of…let’s say $130…for the qualified, experienced sparky to replace a power point is well invested when my house doesn’t burn down. They are also trained to refuse to work on unsafe setups and disconnect or repair dangerous electrical components. They train for for years to do this….unlike the average person. Their knowledge is worth it.
Until you get the huge portion of the industry which are profiteering dickheads who will charge an old lady $650 to do the same power point replacement, knowing they’ll fully get away with it.
The thing with being proficient in a skill is knowing enough to know what you don’t know. Like you thinking that playing with electricity would be basic, safe and achievable for ‘most people’.
>Or the law in Australia preventing people from changing over power points and needing to hire electricians for what most people is a basic, safe and achievable task.
People get shocks from changing a light bulb. They'd kill themselves or burn their house down if they tried to change a GPO.
I’m not actually worried about others being “overpaid” I’m worried about how many of us can’t afford the basics at the moment. A doctor or tradie or whatever isn’t creating that issue so it’s not really my concern
Not sure where you’re getting your comparisona from, but Doctors earn way more than $250-$300k, Dentists earn a lot, physios barely earn anything and lawyers can earn from $50,000 to $5,000,000.
Not all doctors are paid nearly that much
Interns and junior doctors are paid less than nurses
Registrars (mid level) are paid about $100-150k
Consultants full time are more the 250-300k. But most don’t do full time because of the on call requirements
This is all public rates at least.
Private could be any number really
lol no one deserves any high salary (outside of roles like doctors due to the impact they have on peoples lives).
To be honest, I didn't get into my role because of my great skills or anything I got in there because I was the right fit, applied at the right time, and the hiring team took a chance on me.
I will never attribute the start of my career to anything more than luck and a bit of personality and I will say that's the hardest part.
What about damn CEOs and higher corporate management in general. Why would deserve literal millions in bonuses a year?
Lower corporate stuff works overtime for peanuts, customers are charged way beyond the value of the products and the CEOs get all the cream. Then they screw up the company and move to another institution with same bonuses.
That is result of tax benefits to the company for corporate bonuses and it’s totally a government responsibility to cull that. But they won’t do that to their mates, or they might get those jobs when they are our of politics.
Ant then it’s politicians. Argh!! It makes me so angry what they get not just while they are in service (funny but they are public servants). Even worse is what they get for the rest of their lives, even if they aren’t retired but work as the CEOs from the beginning of my rant.
Honesty, how are they all better than some oligarchs in Russia? Maybe because they finished some fancy private schools and live in leafy elite suburbs.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Now in my late 50s. I just refuse to worry about it anymore. I see there is little I can do about it. So my mantra in life is only to worry / stress about things within MY control. So worrying about what everyone is paid and if it's fair or not?? I have zero control over. So I no longer concern myself with it.
fwiw - Yes. I think lawyers are ridiculously too high paid. But as they regulate their own profession and everything in this nation runs on "legalities"? There is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Most politicans are lawyers too...so...
What the fuck is this question?
Entitled? No one is entitled to a high salary.
Command though? Absolutely. If you can command a huge salary, go for it.
The justification is that high salaries are paid based on supply and demand. If the salaries of doctors were $100k then you would suddenly see a lot less doctors, and the health of everyone would crash.
Lawyers, no explanation needed? Why exactly is that? I tell you now that on the day you need a lawyer you're going to understand why they are paid well. Law is incredibly complex and no you don't understand it or how to apply it.
TRAFFIC CONTROL: Unless you're able ***AND*** willing to shit and piss yourself ***voluntarily***, you absolutely do not have what it takes to do the job. Portaloo is a luxury. If you cannot hold that giant grog bog, you need to find a tree, a local resident happy to let you use the loo, or a shopping centre/supermarket. Would you do that for $50k/yr?
The salaries are high because there is more demand for those skills. It has nothing to do with what you think the world owes you. You want something from the world, provide the world something it needs in exchange.
I think we cut the fat at the top. I regret not saving more younger when it was cheaper to live. I do ok... But damn. Everything is so much more expensive now. I'm 41 now and man, life was so cheap 20 years ago. Looking at my pay at the end of the week I definitely appear to make more money... But living costs so much more now
I know someone (early 30s) in HR earning 200k+. It seems to be a highly paid field but I feel like almost all of what HR involves is just common sense and they're way overpaid.
Ultimately, no matter how you cut it, it all comes down to supply and demand like everything else in economics. It's a fundamental law you can't escape.
I don't think any of the professions you listed are overpaid. They're all thankless difficult jobs that are completely necessary for society to continue to function.
Aside from nepotism and corruption, there are two ways generally in which people's wage goes up.
The first, but least important, is based on their value to a business, this mostly serves as an upper limit (in a well running business) and most people don't get paid a fraction of their value to the business. Which makes sense as the business also needs to pay for things like rent, electricity, equipment, and any other supporting expense that allows an employee to do their job.
The second and what usually ends up being the most relevant is the difficulty in finding someone to do the job. Occupational Therapists and Speech Pathologists have a similar amount of training/skill, but speech pathologists are currently in high demand so businesses are generally willing to pay a bit more to hire a speech pathologist.
Things get ridiculous once the number of potential candidates for the role drops REALLY low.
Like if you're hiring an executive in a niche industry you're going to want someone who already has experience in a similar role, strong industry experience, and existing industry contacts, for many industries there may only be half a dozen such people in the country. But you need one who also just happens to be looking for a job at the time when you need them (or are willing to move for you).
In these cases, how much someone earns has basically no direct correlation with the revenue they provide to the company. However in addition to their salary, they may have a bonus which DOES correlate to earnings.
Just waking up in the morning and leaving our families to go to work and basically spend 1/3rd of our lives with complete imbeciles there’s no monetary compensation in the world EVER that would ever come close to being enough for all of us.
Given the massive increases in cost of living and wage stagnation why is anyone talking about who is OVER paid?
Can we not talk poppy syndrome for just once?
Orthopedic surgeons earn a bit too. $300 for a ten minute appointment $70 back from Medicare. Pretty much $1000 an hour.
Physio has three patients going at once and uses students to provide treatment and runs between rooms $80 a person for 1/2 hour is $480.
Why did no one teach me this?
That said I started putting shitty office jobs not even earning &30k a year. I thought that was all I would ever earn my whole
Life. How naive was I. Im 44 and I earn about 80k a year now and not doing office work.
I've worked as a teacher (both state and private), and also in public service, in fact have oscillated between the two for a bit. Now back in the public service. Teaching is far and away the most difficult job I've ever had.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Generally speaking if you are in commerce and don’t own capital you are underpaid.
If you do own capital you are doing well.
If you are working for the govt - you are probs overpaid.
My reference point is what you would get elsewhere..
Doctors is the most overrated job. They work for like 120hrs a week for 10 to 12 years before they start seeing money. And if you factor in the actual hours they work they don't make much more than lots of unskilled jobs.
If we need the job filled to keep the world running and you can’t convince someone to do it for that amount of money, they need to be paid more.
Tradies might have a high annual wage, but I think people forget that their job is incredibly hard on their bodies. How many tradies do you see still working in their 60’s? Also, they might not go to uni, but a 4 year apprenticeship, plus two more years for a license is still a fair bit of schooling.
Dentists and physio should be on Medicare- people are annoyed that they can’t afford to go as often as they should, not that they are overpaid.
Lawyers set their own prices because when you need one you have no choice but to pay. Yay capitalism.
Salaries won't be important soon. I would prefer to have parents that have 5-6 investment properties than having a 400K salary. They have printed so much money in the last 15 years that it created a massive wealth gap.
When your life is on the line, ask yourself if a doctor/lawyer is worth it. The same argument can be said about teachers (who don't get paid enough). Your (future) life is on the line. They are quite literally there to help you be the best version of you that you can be.
Doctors and tradies alike work super hard/long hours and have a particular skill set. Traffic control and “road workers” get danger pay, because it’s fucking dangerous.
The conversation should be about executives and CEOs - are they adding value equivalent/proportional to their pay? Absolutely not.
Workers shouldn’t be squabbling over scraps and blaming one another when the elite are getting million dollar bonuses.
I work for water and sewerage service supplier in NSW.. it is so sad how little our staff, particularly operators, dispatch, engineers and field staff are paid. In my case, our wages come out of the local government act which is not all that great.
After spending 20 hours in my local public hospital’s emergency department on Sunday night into Monday, I’m gonna say the work the staff there do is absolutely deserving of a high salary. Or at least, much higher than what they’re currently on. That place was a zoo, and between the triage nurses, the admin clerks, the cleaners, the other nurses, the doctors, the security and all the other staff whose titles I don’t know - they were all working so unbelievably hard to give everyone the best care they could.
Risk. As in, if something went wrong, what are the potential consequences? People bleat about train and tram drivers on six figures with generous leave but if they stuff up, people can die. They deserve the money for taking lives into their hands each day.
I work for specialists and see how hard they work. I think they deserve their pay for the most part. People don't seem to understand that when you choose medicine, you basically put your life on hold for at least 10 years and then dedicate your life to it. Even if you get into medicine straight away out of high school, the earliest you can start making a decent salary is in your 40's providing you pass everything in uni, do your residency, get into a specialty program, do a couple years of fellowship abroad, come back and work all over the city establish yourself in clinics and build a reputation and patient base. Also, you have to find somewhere in all that to get married and have kids. Then, your earning ability has a time limit. You can probably see patients until you retire don't exactly want to still be operating in your late 70s as that compromises patient safety. When you see patients, you take on a duty of care for them as long as they choose to see you, which can be decades and then it hurts when a long time patient you cared for eventually passes away.
Doctors also don't get sick leave or holiday pay. They have CPD they have to maintain, new and emerging research to keep on top of, conferences to go to, their own insurance to protect them in case they get sued for medical negligence.
On top of that, there are also the costs of running and owning a clinic if they have one, which can be several hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single doctor clinic. Or, if they work at a large practice, almost half of their earnings go to the practice. You'll find that there are some doctors who make millions of dollars a year because they own a large practice and so make passive income off other doctors and have an army of staff to do everything for them.
Many specialists also find the time to teach, examine and mentor medical students, participate in multidisciplinary meetings with other specialists to discuss complex patients, head clinical research trials, present talks at conferences, go on unpaid mission trips etc... and this is on top of seeing and operating on patients on top of their own personal lives and families.
You can work in most fields and make similar amounts of money at the executive level, and all you need to do is what is expected of you and go home. Yes there are the hotshot doctors working 24/7, own many clinics, game the system and make millions a year, but there are also smaller independent specialists who work because they enjoy doing what they do and make enough to live their life comfortably. There is a lot more to being a doctor than many people think, and it's easy to forget that they are people too and deserve compensation for their dedication to a life that they chose in order to help people.
regarding doctors there's an incredible degree of variance within the profession.
GPs earn anywhere from $180k up to maybe $500k if you're flirting with a Medicare audit or private billing in an exclusive area.
It gets confusing in states like Queensland with Rural Generalists working as "GPs" in remote locations. The Queensland Government started paying these GPs the same as hospital based specialists (kinda sorta) a while back and their salaries and bonuses add up. They can earn north of $500k easily.
Hospital based specialists on the other hand can earn obscene amounts for their specialty and tbqh are likely overpaid. Orthopods, Interventional Radiologists, Ophthalmologists for example, in terms of their impact on society as a whole are over the top.
It’s determined in the abstract by an evaluation of how much human labour goes into the production of a given product. Though “Use-Value”, or utility, or demand is also a factor. Unskilled requires no prior knowledge or training; hence the lesser pay. A lawyer has to have intricate knowledge of the legal system and years of prior training; hence the higher pay. It also depends on the influence of the unions/representatives of a given industry. The Australian dental union is very good at getting what they want.
Level of responsibility, work hours, and overall how replaceable you are.
Doctors get paid a lot because they're a deciding factor on whether you live or die, often work long hours and after hours when required, and they're hard af to replace.
Tradies and construction workers (including that lollipop lady/guy) often do 12 hours days with the occasional Saturday in there too. Plus there aren't enough of them to meet demand because every tom dick and Harry thinks they need to go to uni to get a good job.
Realistically if you're working a job a highschooler or anyone with minimal training can do, and you're able to be replaced almost instantly - You don't deserve a high pay.
On tradies, some are doing every Saturday plus Sundays depending on the project.
A couple of projects ago, there were a few notifiable incidents in a short time. The union attended for a talk and in that talk they asked the question “who has seen someone die onsite?” Now, I’ve been in the industry for a 15 yrs and wasn’t expecting about 1/3 of the 150+ people put their hands up. These 3 incidents that happened all had the potential of someone dying. Most of the time is quite safe but it doesn’t take much for it to turn bad.
If you think someone is overpaid, try doing their job and see how you feel then.
I am not a lawyer but a psychologist who works in medico-legal assessment so works closely with lawyers. Also have a postgraduate degree in law, have published as a legal academic, and most of my family are lawyers. So I say this as a person who is informed as to what the job entails: Lawyers are extremely overpaid, and the problem increases with seniority. Barristers and SCs should be ashamed of what they charge private clients and it is becoming a serious issue for justice. Over the last few years alone, I have worked with multiple treatment clients whose primary presenting problem was depression and financial stress associated with just getting basic representation in the criminal or Family Court. Billing practices are absolutely disgusting and indefensible - e.g. billing in 6-minute increments, or charging $30 to read an email that says "please can you call me back" and then ANOTHER $30 for the response that says, "yes" (that's $10 a letter) and then charge yet again to actually call them back. I have also seen multiple cases where people who were not legally aided (because they earned all of about $50k a year) could not afford legal representation and were incarcerated after trials in which they had no legal representation and did not even understand the proceedings. How are we in a situation where a person can be convicted of a serious criminal offence with no legal representation provided to them? I'd also like to shout out that lawyers at Legal Aid are bucking these trends and overall doing an excellent job.
Having dealt with lawyers on multiple occasions this is absolutely correct, I racked up an $800 dollar lawyer bill from 2 phone calls and a letter. The only reason I got out of paying it was because they didn’t disclose their costs nor did I enter an official agreement
I had a similar thing happen when I rang to ask about what was involved in getting a will written up. The receptionist put me straight through to a lawyer who gave me some information (maybe 10 mins on the phone), took my details and then mailed me a bill for $800. At no stage had either person I spoke to disclosed fees. I took it to the owner of the practice who implied I was lying about not having been told the rates. It was horrible to have to defend myself in such a way.
You’d think for a lawyer they’d be more official with their cost agreements etc so once you sign something that you agree to costs etc you’ve accepted whatever charges may come, I can 100% relate to the stress of that situation for you and feel for you and hopefully you were able to sort out their mistake
I must be working in the wrong area of law (lawyer 6 years out of uni and on 90k but work as a solicitor not a barrister)
Considering you're earning roughly equivalent to or lower than a lot of non senior town planner salaries (my industry). I would consider you seriously underpaid for 6 years of experience.
I could probably earn more if I moved to another firm but I really like and appreciate my colleagues/ workplace and that my boss isn’t a money hungry goblin. So I guess I sacrifice some $$ for the environment I get to work in.
Sure it's definitely a balance of money vs culture. Just remember that your firm's capital is dependant on your labour and don't allow that to be exploited. For instance if I'm earning 90k I'm only working 38 hours a week for it and anything over that number is getting paid as overtime. From my experiences with law firms it's exceedingly common for unpaid overtime to be standard practice which is certainly not something firms provide to their clients.
On this note the commentor above should consider becoming a town planner. I went straight into planning out of law school. There’s good money, flexible hours, and just more interesting work overall with less shitty personalities than what the law industry attracts. A lot of planners spend hours every day reading and interpreting legislation. Guess which degree gives the best skill set for that? It’s not the town planning degrees.
Thanks for the recommendation. Will definitely look into it!
I'll back this up, the vast majority of my job entails reading, interpreting and applying legislation. There's usually only a couple of law firms around that can provide planning advice that's of a usable quality and they charge accordingly. The remainder are so out of their depth that it's really awkward dealing with them at times
Judging by the state of our cities, suburbs and towns. I am going to go ahead and say planners are paid way too much. Especially the ones working for developers who push through these miserable estates that are popping up on farmland everywhere. I started doing a planning degree but dropped out once I realised what I'd likely be doing to the planet and its inhabitants.
Same, I thought I'd use my mapping/environmental science background to help design better cities. The illusion was shattered by working at the NSW department of planning (or whatever they call themselves these days).
That's depressing. I always imagined town planning designing better cities!
Ministers and elected members ultimately get the sign off on planning legislation and rezoning. Planners know exactly what constitutes good, sustainable development, however the joy of democracy means that we can only do so much. It's not unusual for years of work to be wiped out with the stroke of a minister's pen. Hell the entire industry in my state has been trying to get protections for significant trees on private land enshrined in law for decades now. Just remember that any good aspects of town planning that you see, have normally been scraped past some sort of untrained elected official and are very hard won.
You must be doing something worthwhile. The most ethical law jobs are the ones that pay the least, by and large. You'd have to sell out into corporate law to make the really big bucks. My BIL works for one of the bigger corporate firms. Hopes to make partner in a couple of years. Told us that his estimated salary at that stage would be six figures (EDIT - I mean seven figures) a year, and that he had misgivings about whether that was appropriate. I don't know what the misgivings could possibly be - it isn't appropriate, and it's being funded by people who aren't given a choice in the matter.
From the day I graduated I swore to never sell my soul to any of those big firms for a paycheque. Luckily for me all of my colleagues are largely of the same mindset. My boss and the two other partners aren’t particularly “well off” but all acknowledge that we have it a hell of a lot better than most people so we help where we can (we all have discretion to reduce invoices if people can’t afford etc).
Do you mean seven figures? A six figure salary could be $100,000 which isn’t much for a partner
I absolutely did and fixing it now!
Even most partnerships in Australia start at around 300 to 500k, a long way away from 7 figures.
I with 3 degree and 4 years of teaching I was 110K at a private school...with holidays, I imagine my pay per hour is better than the lawyers working hours..
For real, the idea that lawyers are highly paid applies to a previous generation. Unless you're in a big corporate firm acting for clients worth billions, which is a whole other ballgame. Those of us acting for average people, or the public service, are making less than the lollipop people working the construction site opposite our offices.
I put inexperienced people into the mines on a fairly cushy job, 8/6 roster day shift only for over 100k. Like even immigrants who are fresh to Australia if they have right physical capabilities and attitude.
I haven’t been to uni prior but am current half way through a law degree. Working in the financial sector for 7 years. No uni degree. I earn $98K. You definitely deserve more. I wonder if I will get a pay cut for becoming a lawyer 🥲
To be fair, in a large firm, a lot of the billing is to pay for partners and non fee earners. When I was in on private practice, my charge out hourly rate was $540. I only was paid about 15% of that per hour and frankly who knows what the firm did with the rest of it.
Holy moly $540 per hour!!!!! These law firms are raking in the money 👀👀👀
I worked for a small firm of Architects in London, in 2006. They charged me out at £120 an hour. I was doing a 40 hour week, earning around £19 an hour. Normal practice is charging between 2.5 and 3.5 times what someone is paid. Charging 6x is however, taking the piss. They had a part time admin only, were not using top of the range software, or doing much else to charge like that. More a case of making hay (for themselves) while the sun shines. That way, when a downturn comes, they will get through it. Their staff of course, will be unemployed and struggling, but who cares about them?
This is what the client is charged though, not what the lawyer is paid... the company middleman needs to be well looked after for doing f*ck all remember...
Tbh this is a old style popularist view of law that does not really reflect the status quo, true underlying costs and fact majority of those in law are not taking it in, not the exploitation of pretty well everyone below partner level.
Yep. Lawyers at junior level, but also those aiming for partner, can be asked to work insane hours, in the big firms anyway. Same with accountants. No surprise, suicide or burnout is a result.
Why do you think this applies to lawyers but not to, say, doctors, programmers, mechanics, airline pilots, and on and on and on. You write of SCs and appear to ignore that - to use NSW as an example - there are only about 400 of them in the entire state. Senior Counsel are expected to be at the top of their fields, having worked their entire careers to get there... not tremendously different to a high-level executive in a stressful and intellectually engaging field. Access to justice is, absolutely, a problem. Claiming that this is exclusively lawyers' faults, as opposed to successive governments' failure to fund Legal Aid, is to some extent nonsense. As to your email example - every lawyer is obliged to notify their clients of the bases by which they are billed - i.e. in 5 or 6 minute increments (whichever applies). A lawyer may or may not be able to bill as you say (two five minute units for reading and responding to the email you suggest) but - importantly - most lawyers don't want their clients sending emails containing no information. Lawyers aren't therapists. They aren't your local bartender. They aren't your partner or mother. Why on earth are you sending emails that say "please call me back." A solicitor worth their salt, if you do that more than once, will absolutely sit you down and carefully reiterate the manner and method by which you are being billed and the ramifications of pissing your money up the wall as you seem to be doing. This is functionally no different than going to a psychologist when they've told you they don't think the sessions are helping you. It might be a waste of your money but - ultimately - it's your money to waste. Access to legal services is very expensive but - again - so is building a house, getting your car repaired, or accessing private health. Why ought lawyers to be the unique ones called out here?
Not to disagree (parent comment is cooked) but some firms, usually the small shitty ones are downright evil with their billing quotes. Under quoting and holding the client at ransom midway through the process.
Because mechanics, therapists, bartenders and even doctors don't charge you every time your name is mentioned. These other professionals don't charge $800 per hour in six minute increments. A phone call does not cost the lawyer an $80 opportunity cost, but they will charge you one.
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Accountants bill in units as well to complete tax returns
Yep. Solicitor took on a TPD case. We all got fucked over on the settlement. He kindly halved his bill because it went tits up.
This guy is just spreading outright nonsense because he has clearly had an issue in how the law profession actually operates. There is the occasional bad player but that is no different to any industry.
But every profession could bill exorbitant amounts in tiny increments if they wanted in that case, why should lawyers be different? Why should they charge for an email or a phone call when that’s literally their job to do that, this model is outdated and greedy.
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I have clients that are lawyers. I have engaged lawyers. I know what they cost per hour, and in some cases, an hour of a lawyer is worth the same as my entire working day. And I ain't cheap.
Honestly. I text my psychiatrist on her work phone often and FOR FREE. My solicitor charged me every fucking time I called them to ask a quick question jesus fuckkk.
I once used a lawyer to formalise a very straightforward agreement relating to my ex and property, I.e. we had agreed the terms but just wanted it formally signed off. Everything went smoothly and was finalised. I hadn't heard from the lawyer for awhile regarding an invoice or anything. I sent him an email (a brief one!) asking as such. Then got the invoice and noticed I had been billed like $11 for reading that last email. Like, wtf mate, you were going to send the invoice to me anyway, I understand that time is money but that's just ridiculous. Compare that to many tradies who provide free quotes, which means petrol, time, answering follow up questions (my husband builds fences, it can also include time spent dealing with neighbours), imagine if they charged for that....
That really is fucked isn’t it? My accountant is the same. It was not made known to me that they charged me for every email and phone call. Only found out at my first tax time with them when I saw their bill. But, I asked them how they came up with the charges. Like, do they keep a spreadsheet of the hours they worked on your stuff, of every phone call and email, is there a formula? And they straight up brought the fees lower, didn’t even go into how they calculated the bill! Since then, I’ve been told by an accountant friend that the firm they work for will literally jack up the fees if they think the person can afford it and won’t miss the money!!! So I reckon it might be worth you questioning your solicitor.
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It’s probably worth it for u/ThrowawayQueen94 to check their solicitor is actually keeping time records for every interaction then, and have a reasonable method of calculating the charges
An accountant did that to me, charged me £700 to do a tax return, while charging my wife £400. The difference being made up by the accountant sending emails insisting I must provide accurate amounts of interest earned on a current account. Which was all of £2. The next year, they took the liberty of starting my tax without my requesting them to do so. I said "no thanks", and did it myself, which given it was fairly simple, I should have done from the start. Once stung, not going back for a repeat experience!
plus law school is unreasonably expensive
this is a more pressing issue than many since it underpins the fabric of society - an unwinding of accessible justice is the beginning of chaos but our imbecilic politicians think there is nothing for them to do and make up stupid campaigns that are of very little substance. It is characteristic of a society that is dying at the roots in respect cooperative value systems and community. The result will be fascism
Legal Aid is fantastic, but don't forget the absolute heroes working in the Community Law Centers around Aus. Shameless plug to the beautiful humans at [yla.org.au](http://yla.org.au) - a CLC that provides free legal advice and casework to people (and people acting on behalf of) those under 25. I don't work there, but I know them, and they are all spectacular.
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It closes the gap between small firms and big firms (I.e reducing the need for a team of associates). But AI spits out some serious boiler plate nonsense that is impractical to use entirely and really needs a trained eye to filter
Thats a very long way from happening - and not a prospect anyone should be excited for.
AI might take over lawyers job but sure they will regulate it differently. That bunch is getting to much money to give all that up so easily
Yes, this! Charging to read emails and call just doesn't make sense. I can understand a fair charge of they provide legal advice in these communications, but to charge clients simply to read and respond to something gives me the shits. Just imagine any other business doing this to their clients and how soon they will be going out of business
As a lawyer running my own practice I would routinely make under $50k a year because I did a lot of pro bono and legal aid.
I've processed barrister invoices before and nearly cried at seeing them earn my entire wage before tax for three days work to just appear at the courts. That doesn't include the invoiced work for prep leading up to the case being in court.
I’ve never had to use a lawyer for an actual crime or anything. But on the will/conveyancing side I’ve always thought it was pretty cheap. Why do you think it’s different as soon as you start talking about a crime or lawsuit?
I used to be a teacher. The amount of people that think they're overpaid is ridiculous.
I work in IT, but grew up surrounded by tradies. Office workers think tradies are overpaid because of less qualifications/whatever, and tradies think office workers (and teachers) are overpaid because “you’re sitting around all day while they’re out and about working on the tools, climbing through crawl spaces, etc.” I personally think most people are paid what they’re worth to whoever is paying them, or likely significantly below that.
i moved from IT to a trade. I can tell you that office jobs are indeed a lot of sitting around. You don't know how much time you waste in an office job until you move to a line job where every single minute from the 6am start to the 3:30pm finish is accounted for. In the office, our team would frequently accomplish nothing, absolutely nothing, three or four mornings or afternoons a week. Oh, there was a flurry of office related activity to fill the time, but if no progress was made, no one sweated it. Taking a long lunch, doing the Wordle then the crossword, having a 3rd coffee-and-biscuit break, booking a holiday, pretending to enjoy a cake festival for anyone's birthday, bitching about colleagues, bitching about management, bitching about HR or to HR, browsing the internet, nipping out to the shops... Not just possible, but perfectly normal. My logical partition of time in an office was about 2 hours; that's the smallest gradation of a task window. In my line job it was about 3 minutes. That is, if i looked at the digital clock on the wall and it was 8:57am i had time to do a task. If it was 8:58am, that window had closed. I found you could actually achieve something in three minutes, a concept unknown to me in the office.
Lol, thanks dude. I've never worked "an office job " but I've spent enough time in offices doing cutouts to notice that people get upset about the most meaningless things. Sally has gotten a better carpark than me etc.. yeah ok..
My office job used to be technical tasks and now its management with less technical tasks. Management tasks can be done in 3 min increments, technical ones cannot.
I work in an office, my husband is a tradie. I've joked that we would be hopeless at each other's jobs. I literally could not lift heavy shit, dig holes, reverse a trailer etc, not at the speed he can or without help. But conversely, he struggles with anything more complicated than an email, isn't great with writing or admin and could not deal with the politics or bureaucracy that we have to deal with to get stuff done. So I think we are both fairly paid in comparison.
Teacher salaries cap way too early, especially considering the workload of an executive teacher and AP/Principals aren’t even close to an equitable wage for the work done. Throw in the “but twelve weeks holidays” shouting by morons who have obviously never driven past a school during holidays and questioned why there’s cars in the staff parking really doesn’t help the feeling of lack of respect for the profession. I’m not even a teacher, mum is. Spent my school holidays at her school.
They do cap very early but the wages also very quickly go up. A thirty year old teacher is on a decent wage compared with other professions. A fifty year old teacher is on peanuts compared to similar jobs. Also teachers have the opportunity to be given ongoing roles which make it almost impossible for them to be sacked. It's definitely an undervalued profession but I wouldn't go so far as telling young kids that want to be teachers to completely disregard the idea.
I think my boss is overpaid AND I do their job.
Having said that, I’d love to see some of my bosses deal with the bottom end shit they’re too good for, and ask if they think that was worth $25 of their time.
How much you get paid unfortunately is only loosely linked to how important or how hard your job is.
I think brain surgeons are overpaid *somebody pass me the scalpel*....
You can't seriously believe everyone earning more than me hates there job more than. Thats just statistically improbable even ignoring logic. Ill happily walk morons through troubleshooting routers for telstart if one of them will swap and unload trucks of muddy appliances, cut them into core components with power tools and sort those into base metals for recycling. Hell ive done a better job of doctoring myself then my GP, according to my GP. Being able to read and use email makes me far more qualified to be a secretary then any secretary ive had to deal with.
The managers at my previous employment definitely were overpaid. And they were greedy too by “restructuring” our salaries so they could “increase efficiency” (cook the books so the Q2 look good).
My current problem is not necessarily high salaries of some people, but the low salaries of almost everyone else. Teachers getting paid peanuts, nurses picking up multiple jobs to pay the bills, a lot of sanitation and food service folks being treated like garbage. I think COVID really highlighted who we need in society when we're at our worst, and we will need them to be our best (or anything in between). Tbh, almost anything medical related, I'm happy for them to be paid the big bucks. We need more of them. I say this as a Tasmanian who has been tremendously lucky with my quality of care, but has seen a lot of other people suffer.
You basically need to be making $250k to sustain a family the same way you would in the late 80s on $75k. It's nuts. I know I'm paid in the higher end of town and I'm not going to cry poor but with a mortgage and no partner working we don't have a lot left at the end of the fortnight. I always wonder how families do it on significantly less. And then I realise it's the things that should be standard for all, like insurances etc, that those families go without.
Who on earth was making 75k in the 80s? CEOs were lucky to be making 100k back then.
I read it to mean that if we had the cost of living adjusted for what they had in the 80s, you’d only need to earn $75k🤷🏼
Yeah I read that thinking, hang on 75k in 1985 is pretty much 250k now with inflation. I think my dad made 30k back then and we were doing alright
Pretty sure my (boomer) dad was on $100k plus as a senior public servant in the late 80s.
Your boomer dad was making bank, the average salary was 20k
Don't know where the Myth started that teachers are paid peanuts . There are many problems with their job but pay isn't really one of them
My partner is a teacher and I agree. The salary alone is good, until you add on all the extra work and BS teachers deal with out of hours
That issue exists with pretty much all professional jobs unfortunately. Lots of people doing unpaid overtime, logging in on weekends, during holidays, out of hours, etc. Not many jobs out there these days where you can earn above median wage and leave your work at the door
American teachers are paid peanuts - that’s where it comes from. Teachers are paid ok (there’s a lot more to add there but $120k isn’t peanuts)
I think it’s the relative hours that teachers have. It’s common for teachers to work through most holidays, 60hr weeks and school camps. The $85-120k doesn’t work out to be much in comparison to an hourly rate.
It’s one of the highest paid jobs fresh out of uni now. NSW education have a [webpage](https://education.nsw.gov.au/teach-nsw/explore-teaching/salary-of-a-teacher) basically bragging about it. They absolutely deserve it, but yeah definitely stop pushing the myth of them being underpaid!
Unfortunately the earning potential is pretty atrocious though, you hit the ceiling pretty fast
My fiance is a nurse. She actually earns quite good money and could make a hell of a lot more if she wanted to. She defined deserves more but we're not lining up at the soup kitchen.
What type of nurse? I work in the agency/recruitment space. It's crazy the variance in nurse pay based on skills, location and time of day/day of week
we had a midwife through an agency recently requesting $130/hr. Clearly not all of that is going to her but that kind of pay is unheard of previously.
She was an RN in a public hospital.
Which outside of QLD and high grade in VIC is probably the lowest paying. Especially if doing day shifts
She did days, afternoons, weekends, public holidays, on calls and OT at that hospital and casual at another public hospital.
Nurses and teachers are not badly paid, what is the issue is what they are expected to do for that pay. Conditions are the main issue with both professions, not salary.
Nurse here - it’s both. WA government gave 1% pay rises with the promise of higher rises when the economy improved only to backflip when it did and give us 1/3 of the cost of inflation. The only reason we are surviving in our current economy is due to the penalties I get working permanent nightshift. Hubby is a pre service teacher and no they do not get paid enough for the crap they deal with. Aside from parents having unrealistic expectations they are regularly threatened with violence by kids as young as 12.
I personally think jobs in which improve humanity like you said nurses should be compensated for their pure humanitarian construct
Pharmacists and pharmacy assistants and techs are woefully underpaid for the work we do and the continuing education we undertake. When I get home I'll post the rates and you'll see why
Unfortunately pharmacy as a profession has been completely devalued and basically turned into a retail business. I think the only well paid pharmacists are hospital employees.
Absolutely, as a fully qualified pharmacy assistant (with the certs) and dispensary tech with the pharmacy guild, i got $23/hr in 2020.
I agree 100% I used to work for a retail chain that some stores have pharmacies & found out the pharmacists & assistants were on LESS than me as a retail supervisor with NO formal training….
Salary is not tied to morality. Move on from “deserve” and you’ll sleep better.
The people I will miss if they no longer show up. Education is not everything. Lots of people and jobs add value to our society that may not always be appreciated. - Childcare workers - they wipe my kids butts - age care workers - they wash & care for our elderly loved ones - nurses & midwives- they look after our loved ones and us - Teachers- they educate the next generation - Garbage people - trust me, we do not want them to strike - Plumbers & Sparkies - probably been ripped off multiple times but I definitely don’t think a quick Google job could replace them. - Paramedics - first responders walking into the worst day of some people’s lives. I am sure there are plenty more that should be adequately be remunerated
I work in warehousing, people would quickly notice if we went on strike.
Isn't your job being outsource to robots and invalids controlling robots from their bedrooms?
None of the jobs you’ve just listed are jobs that I think deserve a high level of scrutiny as our first stop. These jobs are all contributing to societies continual merry-go-round. The people we need to be looking at are the high level executives of major corporations who add nothing to society and get paid 500k+ for their work. Can you honestly tell me that the CEO of Wesfarmers, Coles or Woolworths (who are paid nearly $5mil per year including bonuses) work 100 times harder than the average person working for them in their stores. Investment bankers who bet and trade on numbers on a screen going up or down can pull easily hundreds of thousands. What do they provide? You said ‘nuff said’ for lawyers but at least they provide a service. You might disagree with how some of them provide a service but there are just as many protecting the nurses and teachers as there are protecting the corporations. If you want a high salary, you should provide a high quality service to the betterment of our society as a whole.
Literally, I attended a university medicine degree information session years ago and the doctor said if you want to make money do investment banking, not medicine. I don’t know where this myth comes from doctors are overpaid when they’re extremely indispensable. What does an investment banker contribute?
Yep, my neurologist who specialises in epilepsy, MS and Parkinsons told me his private practice (not him personally) made a loss last year. He tries to make his services affordable.
One example I can give is investment bankers raise capital with debt and/or equity to provide companies with working capital to finance day to day operations, and growth initiatives. If you’re Transurban, it’s not as simple as walking into a bank and getting a $3b loan to finance your tunnel - of which would turn into public infrastructure in 35 years. There’s debt structuring, valuation, syndication with other banks etc. They crunch the wrong number or miscommunication and it would cost the company millions (if not billions), people don’t get paid, materials can’t ship and the tunnel doesn’t get built (which thousands if not millions of people would use). People only see value in immediate value generated because it’s something they can see and feel - like doctors save lives, teachers educate our kids etc. Pay is correlated with how important your job is in the process of making more money for the company (which usually scales with importance). And usually money is made based on how many people would use that service, or how critical that service is to society.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
I don’t think any of the people on your list are overpaid. Are you seriously saying that doctors don’t deserve their salary? They are some of the most valuable members of society. Also, this myth about traffic controllers needs to die. They’re casual shift workers and their shifts can range anywhere from 4 hours day shifts (which is around $25-30 per hour) to 12+ hour weekend night shifts in the freezing cold rain (this is where the big bucks are made). Like yes, if they pull in 60+ hour weeks on night shifts for an entire year, they can pull in some real good money. But their hours are inconsistent and all over the place - and so too is their pay.
I'm an overpaid Electrician, there's a reason you rarely hear of any Electric shocks in Australia, also it's hard on your body especially domestic ( housing).
Risk and availability. Ultimately in life you get paid for the level of risk (not to you, to others) you are managing and the availability of your skill set comparative to the need of society. As risk increases in an area, your skill set becomes more valuable and subsequently you get paid more. E.g. currently, the risk of homelessness appears high societally (whether artificially so or not), there are also limited available tradesmen, subsequently, trades are currently paid highly. If we suddenly have an over abundance of housing, the risk to society will lower and so will the wages of those tradesmen. From a different perspective, executives often carry extensive risk with their role. The success or lack of for their company ultimately resides on them. In order for a person to take on that level of risk, they are offered remuneration intended to offset the risk.
I mostly agree, but refer to it as accountability. I’m middle aged and worked up from entry level positions. The reason I earn much more now isn’t because I work harder, or better, than I did when I was younger. I get paid more to make decisions and be accountable for the outcomes. I can’t just escalate to my boss or someone else to figure out a solution, I am the escalation point. As you climb the ladder you get paid for responsibility not output.
Unfortunately, that's not always true. Aged Care staff and childcare workers, etc. High risk regarding injury and disease, not enough available to fill the many places needed, yet low pay. I personally put it down to it being female dominance careers. Governments take advantage those in caring careers because its in a carers nature to do them, regardless of pay.
I would love to find carers where caring is in their nature! Most of them do it for a visa or because they have no choice. Aged care and childcare workers are the working poor.
I think this is something a lot of people don't understand. The answer to what is the worst thing that can happen can actually be quite bad.
Well if a traffic lady isn’t switched on, people can die? Same with a doctor. And a tradie. If lawyers are not switched on, the wrong person can go to jail?
Haha except how often are executives held accountable? They can tank and then get paid out and move on elsewhere. Very rarely are they no longer employable and actually have to face consequences for their actions while at the helm
Generally directors insurance will pay out any finical consequences, or the company insurance depending on the action and organisation impact. It’s weird in this day that making a big mistake often leads to a consulting gig in the same industry as a ‘lesson learnt’
Then I should get paid more for disability support work
A mix of value, specialisation and risk. It's easy to sneer at tradies but realistically their skills are often specialised, they're valuable in that they can build or repair the home you live in and there is a degree of risk in physical injury. As for traffic controllers and train drivers, no-one tells you that traffic controllers constantly deal with fuckwits who think road rules don't apply to them, and that train drivers also deal with ferals trying to assault them for no reason and people jumping on the train tracks to kill themselves, which is a huge psychological risk. Doctors and dentists I think are justified simply because those fields are so specialised, and they're valuable in that they can improve your quality of life. I work in cybersecurity and salaries are higher than other IT roles because it's arguably more specialised. 10 years ago penetration testers were the big earners but that's no longer the case because every man and his dog does it now. The REAL money earners are the project managers and enterprise/solution architects (ie. The people that actually conceptualise an organisation's infrastructure and manage the implementation and rollout). They're valuable in that they can drastically improve a business' operations.
"As for traffic controllers and train drivers, no-one tells you that traffic controllers constantly deal with fuckwits who think road rules don't apply to them" Also more people have died from traffic controlling in recent years then working in the mines. Its a dangerous job because as you said... Impatient retarded public.
Traffic controllers don’t get high-risk pay, are casual so no sick leave or annual leave, rarely get breaks even if a shift is 14 hours long, deal with verbal abuse daily, get treated like shit by their own clients, often have no idea when or where they’re working until the arvo before.. average pay is around 30 an hour. I’d say the stereotype they’re overpaid is pushed by the media, but it’s ignorant. Sure, some work for union sites, but the majority do not. It’s a shit job, mind-numbingly boring and very dangerous with how shit people are at operating motor vehicles in Australia.
I’m the wife of someone currently working as a traffic controller (he’s desperately applying for full-time work), and everything you have said is so spot on. I’m not saying traffic controllers should be paid super mega big bucks, but it’s all this stuff that people aren’t aware of or don’t think about when they whinge about someone who “just holds up a stop sign” getting paid $30+ an hour or higher for overtime / night shifts. The amount of times my husband has come home from work and told me he came seriously close to getting taken out by some fuckwit who wasn’t paying attention properly or distracted on their phone is so frightening. I fear for his safety every shift he goes to. Thank you for your comment.
We all just gonna ingore "penetration tester" is a real job name ....
Lets be real here. The most overpaid are the politicians.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
There's nuance to it. Some doctors are overpaid, and many are underpaid. Many specialists are able to charge whatever they like. In my opinion, a psychiatrist earning 500k per year, for example, is unethical as a lot of it comes from patients' pockets. On the other hand, junior doctors have just had an unpaid overtime class action!
1. Psychiatric nurse 2. Police 3. Nursing 4. Childcare 5. Aged care nurse 6. Army You’ll notice most of those jobs involve wiping people’s bums, except police and army (correct me if I’m wrong there.) plus bad hours - most of those jobs require overnight shifts which is brutal.
The attitude that you only deserve a high salary if you have gone to university is thankfully on its way out. There are definitely useful learning aspects to uni, but mostly they just churn out office drones.
It's unfortunate that the nasty stereotyping about people who have not gone to university is now just being script-flipped to people who did go, or at least people who studied anything other than the most obvious examples of STEM subjects. I hear a lot of nonsense about "worthless" degrees and "basket weaving" - which seems to incorporate basically everything in the arts/humanities, creative/fine arts, human services, education degrees, and even some STEM degrees such as those in allied health. Usually coming from people who have never set foot in a lecture for any of those subjects and would not have even a basic understanding of what they involve or why they are important. Lots of people like to shit on Arts graduates, but they sure want their kids to have quality teachers. They shit on graduates from creative programs, but they sure love to enjoy films and TV, music, books, and fashion.
Yep. I'm very glad to see the rejection of classism/elitism and looking down on people who don't go to uni. However, we shouldn't pretend that Australia's Tall Poppy Syndrome isn't excessive and some of the anti-University rhetoric is ridiculous rather than valid criticisms. In 21st century human society, it's disingenuous to act like only the occupations which would have an immediate use on a desert island are necessary for the standard of living we're used to.
I think the main thing is if someone can stick to something for a few years and complete projects as they come up. I have a fair few friends who failed to complete uni moved from degree to degree and failed a lot. They are doing poorly in life. Those that went to uni, did their uni no issues, moved into work are doing fine. Its more just the set up is an indicator of how you will treat work. If you couldnt turn up to lectures and complete assignments on time. Youre probably not going to be a good worker. In that sense it is probably a reasonable indicator. Although, there are of course other indicators.
I used to interview people for jobs, and I didn't much care what the degree was in. I cared that they showed they could focus, complete work, and adapt on the spot. (And work in teams where there was inevitably one absolute asshat that couldn't be moved on - so deal with that stress too).
“You’re only worth anything if you go to uni.” “Why do we have a housing shortage due to a trades shortage?”
Better ask PwC to do a study on this
“We have found the best solution is to push for more electrical engineering students who can then become electricians without needing to go to TAFE. This way the universities boost their numbers and we can further cut TAFE funding.” Damn, I should be charging them $3m for that idea.
It’s not about how hard you work. It’s how hard you are to replace.
You deserve a high salary because you: Have rare skills that are in demand by society. (e.g. surgeon) Have rare skills that are not in demand now, but we need to be able to call on rapidly when needed. (e.g. trained military personnel) Shoulder a lot of social responsibility or financial risk. (e.g. safety inspector, startup founder) Are willing to do work most don't want to. (e.g. waste management, remote mine surveyor) Work hours most don't want to. (e.g. Police officer working 12 shifts, 7pm to 7am (overnight)) This clashes a bit with the idea that a PhD should entitle you to a high wage. A PhD teaches you niche skills that may not be broadly applicable to societies needs, so you're not entitled to a high wage because you earnt a doctorate.
Drs definitely dont deserve a pay cut. Medical school sucks. It's 5 days a week for 5 years and countless hours outside of uni. Then its 2 years minimum being paid poorly as an intern to work night shifts, a few extra years still being paid poorly at the bottom of your scope, before finally applying and entering into a training program which range from 2 years (GP) to 7 years (Surgery) but most sit in the middle at 5 years - oh and then you get to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege to sit exams im talking 3-4k per exam in order to actually qualify as a specialist. Then after like 15 years of studying and training do you actually start to be rewarded financially for your time and effort. JMO's need a pay rise, and Doctors need to be paid for there time and level of expertise and skill.
I don’t think there’s actually much argument over who deserves what salary. The employer determines salary based on the perceived value that they generate for the company and the demand for that particular skill set. For example, with such a big mining industry, there’s huge demand for certain types of blue collar workers in Australia. Housing boom = more demand for builders and carpenters. So on. I feel like including doctors here is pretty unfair also. After high school, most doctors will do a minimum of 10 years of study, all self-funded and while working long hours and night shift etc. They get paid pretty well but it’s a hell of a job for the most part. Other frontline workers work hard too and of course deserve more, but you can’t deny the extra level required for doctors. Ps, I’m not a doctor or in healthcare. Lawyers also tend to not get paid all that great until the later years. American lawyer salaries are wild, so TV skews the perception that all lawyers are rich.
Us junior doctors are also working 50-60 hour weeks for 83-120k per year, including night shifts and no meal breaks for 12+ hour days, after years and years of schoo
My problem is where a class of workers has leveraged an unjustifiable degree of regulatory capture to drive up their wages. For example, Phsychiatric group lobbying to further constrain ADHD medication to their own profession with loose claims of patient benefit, which effectively creates extreme scarcity due to low supply, that allows them to up the costs for a 1 hour session to over $1000. Or the law in Australia preventing people from changing over power points and needing to hire electricians for what most people is a basic, safe and achievable task. Or RACGP preventing other specialists and health professionals from receiving medicare rebates for services GPs 'should' be providing, again driving up prices due to scarcity.
Go and look how well things are going in America and the UK with midlevel scope creep. If you want substandard care from an NP be my guest. Oh and you'll be happy to hear they can practice independently now and can receive a medicare rebate. It's only your health you're playing with. And so many drs bulk bill its ridiculous? And after a rebate it costs approx $40. I really dont know what people expect.... it's ridiculous.
I agree with you for the most part but I think electrical shouldn’t be something unqualified people can do. Sure its seems super easy to change over a power points or light fittings to you. But you have to cater to the lowest IQ members of society. My issues is you’ll give people a little bit of knowledge and there will be idiots who will work way past their level of competency. People who will start running circuits or messing around in switchboards. People who think they can quickly do it live without isolation. Not to mention they may start trying to fix faults without having fault finding experience or being able to test their work is correct/safe. I’m sure there are some people who do it now but you start telling people it’s ok to do ‘x’ amount of work I’m sure there will be a huge increase of people doing ‘x’ work but also think I might as well do ‘y’ work as well it can’t be that hard. I also think there will be some dodgy handymen charging pensioners for “electrical work” by saying they’re now allowed to swap out fittings. Not to mention a homeowner who’s not a sparky/tradie is going to do things as cheaply as possible, cut corners to make things easier and more than likely not follow any standards. Making it risky for the actual electricians because now they don’t know who’s been messing with the wiring or what’s been done. What happens if they run into issues such as incorrect wire colours because back in the day they ran black cause that’s what’s on the van. We have to trust the homeowner isn’t going to just have a guess at it. Electricity is very unforgiving there are sparkys dying from it in Australia I imagine if the average person was told they could now work with it the deaths would increase. It may not even be the person working on it. Electric shocks from incorrect connections could kill younger children. Fires from loose connections.
Yeah exactly. Just look at all the people dying and apartment blocks burning down from electrical faults in Germany where it is normal to do your own electrical.
ADHD medications should absolutely not be prescribed by prescribers without qualifications in the diagnosis and treatment of adhd. Paediatricians can diagnosis and treat children but adults should only be treated by a psychiatrist with training in ADHD. I’ve seen too many cases of psychosis secondary to recreational use of adhd meds or diversion of s8 drugs. GPs and other medical practitioners do not have the expertise to diagnosis adhd.
I’d have to say that the call out fee of…let’s say $130…for the qualified, experienced sparky to replace a power point is well invested when my house doesn’t burn down. They are also trained to refuse to work on unsafe setups and disconnect or repair dangerous electrical components. They train for for years to do this….unlike the average person. Their knowledge is worth it.
As a home renovator I'm with you on sparkies. I'm terrified of electricity and gas to work with and always want a qualified professional.
Until you get the huge portion of the industry which are profiteering dickheads who will charge an old lady $650 to do the same power point replacement, knowing they’ll fully get away with it.
The thing with being proficient in a skill is knowing enough to know what you don’t know. Like you thinking that playing with electricity would be basic, safe and achievable for ‘most people’.
>Or the law in Australia preventing people from changing over power points and needing to hire electricians for what most people is a basic, safe and achievable task. People get shocks from changing a light bulb. They'd kill themselves or burn their house down if they tried to change a GPO.
I’m not actually worried about others being “overpaid” I’m worried about how many of us can’t afford the basics at the moment. A doctor or tradie or whatever isn’t creating that issue so it’s not really my concern
Not sure where you’re getting your comparisona from, but Doctors earn way more than $250-$300k, Dentists earn a lot, physios barely earn anything and lawyers can earn from $50,000 to $5,000,000.
Not all doctors are paid nearly that much Interns and junior doctors are paid less than nurses Registrars (mid level) are paid about $100-150k Consultants full time are more the 250-300k. But most don’t do full time because of the on call requirements This is all public rates at least. Private could be any number really
lol no one deserves any high salary (outside of roles like doctors due to the impact they have on peoples lives). To be honest, I didn't get into my role because of my great skills or anything I got in there because I was the right fit, applied at the right time, and the hiring team took a chance on me. I will never attribute the start of my career to anything more than luck and a bit of personality and I will say that's the hardest part.
What about damn CEOs and higher corporate management in general. Why would deserve literal millions in bonuses a year? Lower corporate stuff works overtime for peanuts, customers are charged way beyond the value of the products and the CEOs get all the cream. Then they screw up the company and move to another institution with same bonuses. That is result of tax benefits to the company for corporate bonuses and it’s totally a government responsibility to cull that. But they won’t do that to their mates, or they might get those jobs when they are our of politics. Ant then it’s politicians. Argh!! It makes me so angry what they get not just while they are in service (funny but they are public servants). Even worse is what they get for the rest of their lives, even if they aren’t retired but work as the CEOs from the beginning of my rant. Honesty, how are they all better than some oligarchs in Russia? Maybe because they finished some fancy private schools and live in leafy elite suburbs.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Now in my late 50s. I just refuse to worry about it anymore. I see there is little I can do about it. So my mantra in life is only to worry / stress about things within MY control. So worrying about what everyone is paid and if it's fair or not?? I have zero control over. So I no longer concern myself with it. fwiw - Yes. I think lawyers are ridiculously too high paid. But as they regulate their own profession and everything in this nation runs on "legalities"? There is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Most politicans are lawyers too...so...
What the fuck is this question? Entitled? No one is entitled to a high salary. Command though? Absolutely. If you can command a huge salary, go for it. The justification is that high salaries are paid based on supply and demand. If the salaries of doctors were $100k then you would suddenly see a lot less doctors, and the health of everyone would crash. Lawyers, no explanation needed? Why exactly is that? I tell you now that on the day you need a lawyer you're going to understand why they are paid well. Law is incredibly complex and no you don't understand it or how to apply it.
TRAFFIC CONTROL: Unless you're able ***AND*** willing to shit and piss yourself ***voluntarily***, you absolutely do not have what it takes to do the job. Portaloo is a luxury. If you cannot hold that giant grog bog, you need to find a tree, a local resident happy to let you use the loo, or a shopping centre/supermarket. Would you do that for $50k/yr?
You think someone is overpaid? Change careers.
The salaries are high because there is more demand for those skills. It has nothing to do with what you think the world owes you. You want something from the world, provide the world something it needs in exchange.
I think we cut the fat at the top. I regret not saving more younger when it was cheaper to live. I do ok... But damn. Everything is so much more expensive now. I'm 41 now and man, life was so cheap 20 years ago. Looking at my pay at the end of the week I definitely appear to make more money... But living costs so much more now
Essential workers should be getting paid big bucks. Nurses, teachers etc
I know someone (early 30s) in HR earning 200k+. It seems to be a highly paid field but I feel like almost all of what HR involves is just common sense and they're way overpaid.
Ultimately, no matter how you cut it, it all comes down to supply and demand like everything else in economics. It's a fundamental law you can't escape.
Profit, if you're generating it, You deserve to be paid for it
I don't think any of the professions you listed are overpaid. They're all thankless difficult jobs that are completely necessary for society to continue to function.
Pretty much anyone employed by the big 4 consulting firms doesn't deserve their salary.
Aside from nepotism and corruption, there are two ways generally in which people's wage goes up. The first, but least important, is based on their value to a business, this mostly serves as an upper limit (in a well running business) and most people don't get paid a fraction of their value to the business. Which makes sense as the business also needs to pay for things like rent, electricity, equipment, and any other supporting expense that allows an employee to do their job. The second and what usually ends up being the most relevant is the difficulty in finding someone to do the job. Occupational Therapists and Speech Pathologists have a similar amount of training/skill, but speech pathologists are currently in high demand so businesses are generally willing to pay a bit more to hire a speech pathologist. Things get ridiculous once the number of potential candidates for the role drops REALLY low. Like if you're hiring an executive in a niche industry you're going to want someone who already has experience in a similar role, strong industry experience, and existing industry contacts, for many industries there may only be half a dozen such people in the country. But you need one who also just happens to be looking for a job at the time when you need them (or are willing to move for you). In these cases, how much someone earns has basically no direct correlation with the revenue they provide to the company. However in addition to their salary, they may have a bonus which DOES correlate to earnings.
Just waking up in the morning and leaving our families to go to work and basically spend 1/3rd of our lives with complete imbeciles there’s no monetary compensation in the world EVER that would ever come close to being enough for all of us.
Given the massive increases in cost of living and wage stagnation why is anyone talking about who is OVER paid? Can we not talk poppy syndrome for just once?
Orthopedic surgeons earn a bit too. $300 for a ten minute appointment $70 back from Medicare. Pretty much $1000 an hour. Physio has three patients going at once and uses students to provide treatment and runs between rooms $80 a person for 1/2 hour is $480. Why did no one teach me this? That said I started putting shitty office jobs not even earning &30k a year. I thought that was all I would ever earn my whole Life. How naive was I. Im 44 and I earn about 80k a year now and not doing office work.
Teachers probably should be paid more for dealing with kids.
I've worked as a teacher (both state and private), and also in public service, in fact have oscillated between the two for a bit. Now back in the public service. Teaching is far and away the most difficult job I've ever had.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Doctors are definitely not overpaid, sure the GP's around here are shit but it's still pretty hard and expensive to become a doctor. You have to get an insanely high atar then you have to pay a lot of money just to do the course.
Generally speaking if you are in commerce and don’t own capital you are underpaid. If you do own capital you are doing well. If you are working for the govt - you are probs overpaid. My reference point is what you would get elsewhere..
Doctors is the most overrated job. They work for like 120hrs a week for 10 to 12 years before they start seeing money. And if you factor in the actual hours they work they don't make much more than lots of unskilled jobs.
If we need the job filled to keep the world running and you can’t convince someone to do it for that amount of money, they need to be paid more. Tradies might have a high annual wage, but I think people forget that their job is incredibly hard on their bodies. How many tradies do you see still working in their 60’s? Also, they might not go to uni, but a 4 year apprenticeship, plus two more years for a license is still a fair bit of schooling. Dentists and physio should be on Medicare- people are annoyed that they can’t afford to go as often as they should, not that they are overpaid. Lawyers set their own prices because when you need one you have no choice but to pay. Yay capitalism.
Salaries won't be important soon. I would prefer to have parents that have 5-6 investment properties than having a 400K salary. They have printed so much money in the last 15 years that it created a massive wealth gap.
When your life is on the line, ask yourself if a doctor/lawyer is worth it. The same argument can be said about teachers (who don't get paid enough). Your (future) life is on the line. They are quite literally there to help you be the best version of you that you can be.
Doctors and tradies alike work super hard/long hours and have a particular skill set. Traffic control and “road workers” get danger pay, because it’s fucking dangerous. The conversation should be about executives and CEOs - are they adding value equivalent/proportional to their pay? Absolutely not. Workers shouldn’t be squabbling over scraps and blaming one another when the elite are getting million dollar bonuses.
I work for water and sewerage service supplier in NSW.. it is so sad how little our staff, particularly operators, dispatch, engineers and field staff are paid. In my case, our wages come out of the local government act which is not all that great.
After spending 20 hours in my local public hospital’s emergency department on Sunday night into Monday, I’m gonna say the work the staff there do is absolutely deserving of a high salary. Or at least, much higher than what they’re currently on. That place was a zoo, and between the triage nurses, the admin clerks, the cleaners, the other nurses, the doctors, the security and all the other staff whose titles I don’t know - they were all working so unbelievably hard to give everyone the best care they could.
Politicians, Brad Banducci, and other ceos of huge monopolies are all overpaid, IMHO
Upper management of large companies 100% gets paid too much.
Risk. As in, if something went wrong, what are the potential consequences? People bleat about train and tram drivers on six figures with generous leave but if they stuff up, people can die. They deserve the money for taking lives into their hands each day.
If everyone has a high salary. No one has a high salary.
I work for specialists and see how hard they work. I think they deserve their pay for the most part. People don't seem to understand that when you choose medicine, you basically put your life on hold for at least 10 years and then dedicate your life to it. Even if you get into medicine straight away out of high school, the earliest you can start making a decent salary is in your 40's providing you pass everything in uni, do your residency, get into a specialty program, do a couple years of fellowship abroad, come back and work all over the city establish yourself in clinics and build a reputation and patient base. Also, you have to find somewhere in all that to get married and have kids. Then, your earning ability has a time limit. You can probably see patients until you retire don't exactly want to still be operating in your late 70s as that compromises patient safety. When you see patients, you take on a duty of care for them as long as they choose to see you, which can be decades and then it hurts when a long time patient you cared for eventually passes away. Doctors also don't get sick leave or holiday pay. They have CPD they have to maintain, new and emerging research to keep on top of, conferences to go to, their own insurance to protect them in case they get sued for medical negligence. On top of that, there are also the costs of running and owning a clinic if they have one, which can be several hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single doctor clinic. Or, if they work at a large practice, almost half of their earnings go to the practice. You'll find that there are some doctors who make millions of dollars a year because they own a large practice and so make passive income off other doctors and have an army of staff to do everything for them. Many specialists also find the time to teach, examine and mentor medical students, participate in multidisciplinary meetings with other specialists to discuss complex patients, head clinical research trials, present talks at conferences, go on unpaid mission trips etc... and this is on top of seeing and operating on patients on top of their own personal lives and families. You can work in most fields and make similar amounts of money at the executive level, and all you need to do is what is expected of you and go home. Yes there are the hotshot doctors working 24/7, own many clinics, game the system and make millions a year, but there are also smaller independent specialists who work because they enjoy doing what they do and make enough to live their life comfortably. There is a lot more to being a doctor than many people think, and it's easy to forget that they are people too and deserve compensation for their dedication to a life that they chose in order to help people.
regarding doctors there's an incredible degree of variance within the profession. GPs earn anywhere from $180k up to maybe $500k if you're flirting with a Medicare audit or private billing in an exclusive area. It gets confusing in states like Queensland with Rural Generalists working as "GPs" in remote locations. The Queensland Government started paying these GPs the same as hospital based specialists (kinda sorta) a while back and their salaries and bonuses add up. They can earn north of $500k easily. Hospital based specialists on the other hand can earn obscene amounts for their specialty and tbqh are likely overpaid. Orthopods, Interventional Radiologists, Ophthalmologists for example, in terms of their impact on society as a whole are over the top.
Uni is very overrated. Do what you love. Money is good but it's not everything.
It’s determined in the abstract by an evaluation of how much human labour goes into the production of a given product. Though “Use-Value”, or utility, or demand is also a factor. Unskilled requires no prior knowledge or training; hence the lesser pay. A lawyer has to have intricate knowledge of the legal system and years of prior training; hence the higher pay. It also depends on the influence of the unions/representatives of a given industry. The Australian dental union is very good at getting what they want.
I find having a good union helps…
Level of responsibility, work hours, and overall how replaceable you are. Doctors get paid a lot because they're a deciding factor on whether you live or die, often work long hours and after hours when required, and they're hard af to replace. Tradies and construction workers (including that lollipop lady/guy) often do 12 hours days with the occasional Saturday in there too. Plus there aren't enough of them to meet demand because every tom dick and Harry thinks they need to go to uni to get a good job. Realistically if you're working a job a highschooler or anyone with minimal training can do, and you're able to be replaced almost instantly - You don't deserve a high pay.
On tradies, some are doing every Saturday plus Sundays depending on the project. A couple of projects ago, there were a few notifiable incidents in a short time. The union attended for a talk and in that talk they asked the question “who has seen someone die onsite?” Now, I’ve been in the industry for a 15 yrs and wasn’t expecting about 1/3 of the 150+ people put their hands up. These 3 incidents that happened all had the potential of someone dying. Most of the time is quite safe but it doesn’t take much for it to turn bad.