Originally Posted by MadMac

I understand your not trying to offend and fair point.

If you do a manual job or a office one, it still depends on the basic factors on how much you get paid.

i) How high up the food chain you are, for example, a builder will not get as much as a a property developer.

ii) If you have any special skills that are in demand, or not. The majority of admin staff in offices will get less than the average wage. For example, my Mrs is an admin assistant for the home office and spends the day tracking in, tracking out, ordering, and repairing files and making sure paperwork goes to the right place, and she ears less than the average wage. Where as I work on a specialist team within a bank dealing with new lending deals writing up reports making recomendations to our main office on lending decisions and analysing businesses I ear more.

iii) How nich your business is. If you have a sector to yourselves you can charge the earth for it because not many people can do it. For example, its quite easy to find builders to help build houses or flats or redevelop properties. But you cant find people who can build off shore wind turbines that easily.

You will find that most office work doesn't pay to well. A telephony operator or processing center amin where I work will earn 18k in london. 15k out of it.

While I earn nearly double that, my job in comparison is a lot harder work. I have deadlines to meet, pressure from managers and customers to do certain bits of work within a certain amount of time while also adhearing to very strict rules and regulations on how to do things. Christ I go home to sleep and night and I dream about my job and customers calling to complain about things!!! Not to mention I might pull the odd 12hour day if I have a deadline to meet.

I could make one mistake and it could end up costing my employers a lot of money. For example a mistake I sorted out last week, we lent a property developer one million and everything on our end was done spot on, but the person who actually opened the loan account, keyed the info and transfered the money over read the estimates and not the loan agreement. So the estimates which was just a calculation said the rate on the loan was 6.5%. But the loan documents stated it was actually 1.5% above base! So when we opened the loan, yes 1.5% + base was 6.5%, but with the base rate drops is down to 2% now. As a result we have overcharged the customer 22k interest after less than on year!

Needless to say I had to refund it no questions asked. But if I haden't picked it up and the loan was to run for a few years it could have easily ended up costing 100's of thousands.

People who work in high stress or unique jobs are paid the money to keep them there. Otherwise we would all be working for Tescos so we wouldn't have to deal with the stress.

No I am not saying that people in the labour industry know less or deserve less money, because a joiner will know a lot about putting things together where I would think some super glue will do. But to earn more money you need to go by rules i, ii and iii above. Otherwise you will always earn less money.

Its taken me 8 years in the finance industry to get to the level i am at the moment, and a lot of hard work and proving myself to managers.