I remember when I was not long out of University, when my career hadn’t really taken hold, and when, despite having had a couple of jobs I liked, I had, for one reason or another, not settled on what I wanted to do. As I had a year out, and then left the country for a year when I finished University, a lot of my friends had a two year career headstart on me, and I was daunted by the seeming ease of their success.

Looking back on it, what I was actually jealous of was the stability and purpose of these friends of mine who were seemingly very quickly conquering various worlds – the media, politics, the arts. What I remember being in awe of though was their salaries. One acquaintance, in their mid twenties, was working for a national broadsheet and already earning in the early £30 000s. I was living in Manchester, and when I finally graduated from an hourly temping rate, was on just about half that. I felt that my salary was part of what made up my worth, and felt demeaned by it.

I recognise now, of course, that I have friends who earn much less than me and those who earn much more, and that there are careers which have gone off-trajectory, and those which have succeeded despite the person’s not being as experienced or skilled as I believe I am. I recognise that there are trade-offs – those of my friends who work in the charity sector earn about three quarters of my salary, but don’t have to daily pit their morals in an argument against the hollowness of knowing that work they do ultimately has no benefit on anyone other than themselves and the capitalist system.

But the point of this little posting is the news this week about salaries in general – GPs, radio presenters and nannies having been under scrutiny in the press in the last few days. I believe we are obsessed as a nation with how much people earn, and that much as our obsession with property prices is based on insecurity, as I wrote about in a post over a year ago , so we find it easy to mentally value a person if we can quantify their income. I personally don’t think that GPs shouldn’t earn as much as MPs – I am certainly happier knowing that they are well paid than finding out what Jonathan Ross gets per hour on air for his weekly radio show, much as I like his work.

Anyway, in order to make some sense of the statistics, in a properly comparative manner, here is what some of the people in the headlines this week earn per hour, compared to some national averages, and some other high profile figures:

(All salaries are expressed annually, and then in hours, where an annual salary is divided by 52 to get a weekly figure, and then by 37.5 to get an hourly, except where, as in the case of Jonathan Ross, a different time commitment is known.)

2005 average national salary: £22,900; £11.74

Average national senior managers: £55,000; £28.21

Average national supervisor role: £24,000; £12.31

Average traditional labour jobs (such as foremen): £21,000; £10.77

Average national skilled labourer: £17,500; £8.97

Average national clerical staff: less than £15,000; £7.69

Jonathan Ross (just for his radio show): £530,000; £3397.44

Top earning GPs (according to tabloid press – 40 hour week): £250,000; £120.19

Average earning GPs (according to Patricia Hewitt – 52.5 hour week): £94,000; £45.19

Live-out nanny: up to £30,000; £15.38

Philip Green: £1.2bn; £615384.62

Elton John: £33m; £16923.077

David Beckham: £19.3m; £9897.44

Lucian Freud: £12m; £6153.85

Kate Moss: £11m; £5641.026

The Queen: £7.9m; £4051.28;

Jose Mourinho : £5.2m; £2666.67

Jamie Oliver : £3.75m; £1923.077

Natasha Kaplinsky : £475,000; £243.59

Barbara Windsor: £360,000; £184.62

Tony Blair: £277,928; £142.53

Cherie Booth: £250,000; £128.21

Sir Ian Blair: £215,000; £110.27

Ken Livingstone: £133,997; £68.72

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Topical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.