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Henk Penseel's Wittenborg Blog - on Image determines salary

Various groups of people often attribute themselves with a high status. If they are believed, these people are most likely better off than what they deserve. It is a sort of 'self-fulfilling prophesy'. Others would like to join such a group, because it will raise their status. Of course one has to do its utmost to be accepted. The group is promoting its image constantly, so the status and image of the persons in the group will rise and with it their corresponding salaries.

Some examples of high salaries were mentioned in the Elsevier weekly (27-10-2012): if you are working at the European Parliament you have a basic salary of €95.482 excluding expenses and if you are the chair persons of one of  the 26 European Commissions your salary triples. These are public functions with a high status. If we look at CEO's of multi nationals, then you'll see that there aren't many who earn annually less than a million euro – and although we are still in financial crises, you don't see a huge trend downwards.

But we do see a downward spiral when we look at groups of people that are not so much interested in their own status or image. In the eyes of the general public these groups, I’m  conferring to educators, have a lower status than half a century ago. You see not only that their image went down in respect to similar functions in the past, but at the same speed their salary went down. Educators care about students, they have a passion for their job. They don't spend time working on their image, because that is not their work. And because of that, the job as teacher seems for some starters not as attractive anymore; it has a low image and therefore a low salary.

All these past decennia the educators were trying to teach and they didn’t have time to think about their image. But because of that, their status calved off and at the same time their salary. It seems important nowadays for every job, which you not only have to be good at it, but you have to be good in selling your job to the outside world, if you would like to keep up your status and your salary.

WUP 02/11/2012