About this item
Your pay depends on your productivity and occupation. If you earn roughly the same as others in your job, with the precise level determined by your performance, then you're paid market value. And who can question something as objective and impersonal as the market? That, at least, is how many of us tend to think. But according to Jake Rosenfeld, we need to think again.Job performance and occupational characteristics do play a role in determining pay, but judgments of productivity and value are also highly subjective. What makes a lawyer more valuable than a teacher? How do you measure the output of a police officer, a professor, or a reporter? Why, in the past few decades, did CEOs suddenly become hundreds of times more valuable than their employees? The answers lie not in objective criteria but in battles over interests and ideals.
About the Author
Jake Rosenfeld is Professor of Sociology at Washington University-St. Louis. He is the author of What Unions No Longer Do (Harvard University Press 2014) and You're Paid What You're Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy (Harvard University Press 2021) . He is primarily interested in the determinants of wages and salaries, and how these vary across time and place. For more information, please see www.jakerosenfeld.net.
