Pay 'disparity' is easy to talk about, but 'work disparity' is the underlying reason for the pay differential. If you ask the front line worker if he or she is willing to put 60 hour weeks for 20 years to get ahead and have a shot at the c-suite, my bet is that most would want nothing to do with it. But they still think the CEO should be paid less so they get more.
This.
Whatever lines you want to draw amongst race, sex or class (and recently a good many have been), they almost disappear when you take into account things like hours worked, experience, stress, and other factors that are intimately related to end of the line productivity and how much useful stuff is being generated for someone else.
I had made 6 figures ever since my second year out of school. Another friend of mine, she still hasn't after 12 years, despite both doing technical jobs. My first year it was mostly training and I made an ok, but not great wage for an engineer. Certainly not great given only a handful of days off over 6 months (including weekends), no schedule, and essentially 24 hour on call availability. Then I started doing jobs on my own and money came. Then international work and a lot more. Enough to FIRE after 7.5 years. More freedom of schedule and days off, but still essentially always on call.
I'd get confused because I'd be talking to others about how I only got 6 weeks vacation a year, or had to work 3 days straight. They'd laugh, and say "Wha? Only 6 weeks? The rest of the world is lucky with 3, and most of us do 5 days straight - every week!" Then I'd say "Well yeah, but you get 2 days off a week and holidays, so really that's like another 16 weeks vacation on top..." Or having to clarify that 3 days of work = 72 hours, literally sleeping maybe in an office chair for 10 minutes here and there while some computer program is reprocessing data. I literally got to the point where I forgot many people work on a schedule and my sort of life wasn't the norm. Just the implied idea that there was time off naturally "baked into" a work day or week was foreign.
My friend was telling me about how her job wanted her to work some of her vacation weeks for extra pay, pull ot, etc etc. She said none of that, and is out the door every day at 4. Again this left me perplexed, but she has kids to pick up so work is a priority somewhere between kids/husband/pets and Netflix. Fine. Different world than what I'm used to. But a rig which costs $1m+/day isn't waiting on you while you pick up junior from day care. Hell, even the chopper which only costs a few thousand per hour wont. Lets not even think about the stress for when things go wrong, let alone if it's your fuckup. We're talking a guy over your shoulder with a stop watch, counting seconds when you restart the computer after windows crashes, then sending someone a bill for that thousand dollar reset.
Some people love the power and privilege that go with that, pulling over 200k before 30 opens up a ton of doors, and for friends who had the misfortune to be born in not so nice countries, it's literally a "get out of that shit hole free" card, I used it to FIRE. I also sacrificed a good portion of my 20s. Friends which kids didn't know them since they were offshore or in jungles for 250 days a year. It's easy to think big earners are just "sitting in their nice office, flying around and putting on a PR face for shareholders" and having others do dirty work.
Unless you've done these sorts of jobs where you need to put details like the birth of your first child #2 to work, you shouldn't get a vote on what a fair distribution is.
