Just because you are in a profession where passion is important or a “caring” profession doesn’t mean you do not deserve to be compensated in a manner commensurate with your skill and your labor. It is still work. You are still working, no matter how spiritually fulfilling the work is. In order to keep doing this passionate work well, you need to be able to afford adequate housing, to feed yourself properly, to enjoy life outside of your job. People throw around the “for love not money” argument to justify paying those of us in these fields as little as is legally possible as if love is some kind of currency, and an overabundance of love somehow makes up for physical poverty. It does not. It. Does. Not.
Also, when you don’t compensate caring professionals adequately, true caring professionals are driven out of their fields because they cannot do their jobs at the level (with the devotion, emotion and intensity) that they believe they should be done and maintain their health, well-being and safety. When that happens, the field becomes flooded with people who do NOT care, but want an easy paycheck. Many “caring” jobs require little training/education–the entry bar is low.
This is how you get nursing assistants who will allow elderly patients to sit in their own waste for hours. This is how you get medical assistants who treat patients like an inconvenience and fail to document information properly, leading to improper care. This is how you get people who are in it for the money, not the passion.
And in fields like education, standards for credentialing are being lowered to allow entry by people with no training at all, just job experience in a related field. These are often people who were downsized or terminated from their jobs, who have no passion or aptitude for teaching but who want the paycheck and benefits the field offers (and “summers off”). Any decent teacher will tell you teachers don’t have summers off. We work, plan, keep up with developments in the field. We don’t get paid during the summer. This is how you get teachers who don’t know how to differentiate or care why it is done, who view all behavior issues as disobedience/criminality, who view struggles as laziness, who don’t care if their students learn or understand anything and can’t tell if they do. This is how you get paraprofessionals who don’t take care of dependent students, who spend class time checking Facebook and actively avoiding students. This is how you get paraprofessionals who bully special education students. Don’t think it happens? It absolutely does. Because the people who love the work can’t afford to do it.
This is how the caring professions are taken over by people who don’t care. They are the only ones who go to these demanding, exhausting jobs, come home and rest easy for minimum wage. Why? Because they don’t do the demanding, exhausting work. They do the absolute bare minimum, and because competent staff cannot be hired, they are never held accountable for it.
Caring professionals are not martyrs. We want to be able to continue to do the work we do. We cannot do that if we don’t make enough to take care of ourselves and our families. If we are not offered decent benefits to tend to the health problems that inevitably arise from pushing beyond your limits every day, if we are not allowed to recover and rejoice in our own lives. If you don’t care about that, then you do not care about the patients, children, friends, loved ones in our care.
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