Ms. Pelosi is Wrong. Period.
House Minority Leader and Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commented late last week that she opposes pay cuts for Congress. Said, Pelosi, “I don’t think we should do it; I think we should respect the work we do. I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded.”
While I agree that our elected officials are due a certain level of respect, I do not in any way agree that a person’s salary represents the dignity of his or her job. That’s bad thinking.
The average annual pay for congressional leaders is 190K or higher. Would a cut to 150K or even 100K really lessen the dignity of the job, especially considering that all of our founding fathers who served were volunteers?
Consider this–Some of the most important positions in our society make far less than congressmen and women. Does that make their jobs less dignified? Here are a few examples:
The average schoolteacher’s salary is 50K
Medical First Responders–less than 40K
Police Officers–39 K
Fire Fighters–42K
Military–less than 50K
And as I write this, men and women who make $2.13 and hour plus tips are waiting on me and others here at Waterloo. Most of them do so because they’re committed to meeting their family’s needs or paying off their student loans, even if they have to wait tables.
Are we really supposed to believe that these jobs are less dignified and/or important than what our elected officials do? I think not.
While Pelosi’s thinking is normal, it’s flawed on two fronts. First, she’s wrong to think that leadership jobs have more dignity than other jobs. Real leaders know that their roles are more serving-based than ruling-based. While the trend these days is toward the VIP/Celebrity leader, fame and riches are rarely part of great leadership. True leaders exalt and promote others, not themselves. And when tough times come, real leaders know that they are the first to take the hit–the first to take the pay cut and the last to get the bonus.
But even more importantly, Pelosi is mistaken on another front. It’s what I’ve been harping on for several months now and it’s a major theme of my book Enough. Pelosi’s comments suggest that how much money one makes really is a good indicator of a person’s value, dignity or worth. In reality, how much money a person makes is no indicator of a person’s dignity or worth at all. Today’s VIP mindset promotes a class system where the rich and powerful have certain rights, entitlements and even protections simply because they’re rich and powerful. If you happen to be a poor or common person, well, you’re just not as important as the big shots. If you take such thinking to its logical ends, you end up with a system that doesn’t see the inherent value of a special needs child or a homeless women or a senior adult lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s. These folks have just as much dignity and value as the highest paid CEOs in the world and the most powerful political leaders.
I have no ax to grind with Pelosi or any other political leaders. I do think that leaders should be the first, not last to embrace sacrifice in difficult times. But let’s not make the mistake of connecting a job’s dignity to its financial value. If that’s true, then the most dignified jobs in our culture are those in the NBA and NFL. I think we all know better.
Source links:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/a/congresspay.htm
http://www1.salary.com/Public-School-Teacher-Salary.html
http://education-portal.com/articles/First_Responder_Salary_and_Career_Information.html
http://www.indeed.com/salary/Police-Officer.html
http://www1.salary.com/Military-Salaries.html
