Do teachers’ pay a passion tax?
Teaching is the best job in the world. It’s also one of the most difficult.
According to new research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business those two things may be related. The more emotionally rewarding a job is the greater the expectation of extra unpaid work — and, critically, the less well financially rewarded it is.
Do teachers’ pay a passion tax?
Professor Aaron Kay found that people see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do more work than they did for employees without the same passion. People consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on evenings and weekends, to work unpaid, and to handle tasks not in their job descriptions.
Sound familiar?
The researchers found this tendency to exploit passion arises from two beliefs:
· that work is its own reward,
· and that the employee would have volunteered anyway.
This is an example of compensatory justifications:
“When we are confronted with injustice, rather than fix it, sometimes our minds tend to compensate instead. We rationalise the situation in a way that seems fair, and assume the victims of injustice must benefit in some other way.”
For teachers, one example of compensatory justification is the long holiday fallacy.
Complain about your salary and you’ll likely get the “but you get long holidays” rebuke. Except, you don’t. Planning, professional development, classroom preparation, post- and pre-term meetings all eat into the holidays. And, even if the holidays are longer, that hardly tips the scales. The holidays are necessary to recover from the long hours, rushed lunches, late evenings and lost weekends.
And all of the extras teaching involves are done without extra pay — because it’s ‘for the students’. On which, Professor Kay offers:
“In the case of working employees harder for no extra pay, or asking them to do demeaning work or work outside their job description, believing this is fair because these workers are indulging their passions may be means of justification”.
The wellbeing agenda may just, and only just, be starting to encourage recognition of how much extra work teachers actually do. But, if the well meaning wellbeing rhetoric is to have any impact, critical will be school leaders who consciously avoid applying a passion tax on their staff and reflexive teachers who recognise when they impose the tax on themselves.
This doesn’t mean teachers shouldn’t be passionate — teaching is the best job in the world because its ‘for the students’ — it’s simply a warning that we shouldn’t let our passion be co-opted by the human tendency to legitimise or ignore exploitation.
If you enjoyed this article, you might like ‘Why Are Schools So Busy?’
REFERENCE
Kay, A. (2019) Love Your Job? Someone May be Taking Advantage of You, Available here
