“He has to be able to transform pressure in something that is good for him. He has to make an advantage of pressure. If he can do that, then he can become a cook. If he can’t, the sooner he stops, the better.”
So told me today the owner of a spanish restaurant, when I said that my son is about to start a cook education. And of course, memories came crowding in. Once upon a time, the running of a salad bar was bestowed upon me. I was in third or fourth years of university, and the whole enterprise had already somebody that would make most of the salads, and somebody else that had experience doing the weekly shoppings. On the outlook it wasn’t that much of a big deal. Yet I don’t think I made it work for more than six months. Very soon I realized, with the rest of the team, that we were capable of doing some extra heavy work, but we did not have the mental capacities to solve the one thousand and some small problems that raised every day, let alone the strategical decisions of costs and investment to keep the whole thing running. We went away for a holiday and at our coming back the main food processor had been stolen, which was more or less a relief. We could close the whole proyect without much shame. “It wasn’t our fault” we said to each other.
Ever since I have kept a deep respect for people capable of making a whole restaurant run.
And yet I wonder. I wonder how comes that we have allowed some professions, some basically fundamental professions, to become high stress (and frequently low paid) occupations. Have you ever seen a teacher making great money and having a relaxed weekend? Discount the surgeon and make the same question about a medical doctor. Even worse: How comes that most of our societies do not recognize the job of cooking food every day for a whole family as what it is, a fully consuming job, which also happens to be one of the pillars of civilization. I believe that these are almost self evident examples, but there are more. Even a politician. You might argue that in most countries a politicians is better paid than it should, but consider the amount of work that a responsible politician nowadays have to deliver, and think about the levels of stress that such will put you under. Now take a look at their salary again.
I believe that this situation is one of the most evident flaws in our market-driven aproach to salaries. If we give value to services only based in what their demand is, and not necessarily based in their relevance to our lives, we end up with our present: people that is tasked with feed us, teach our kids, care us and decide for us, are badly paid. Once upon a time we could rely that the dynamics of offer and demand could be balanced and stabilized by the negotiations that governments, trade unions and business owners had at deciding salaries. But the capacities and representativity of the trade unions has abruptly decreased in the last decades.
Perhaps we need a fundamental rethink of salaries.