Wages and salaries

OCCUPATIONS

Professions

List of professions:

Accountants

Actuaries

Architect

Clergymen

Commissioned Military Officers

Commissioned Police Officers

Pilots

Dentists

Engineers

Financial and Business Analysts

Lawyers

Librarians

Nursing

Pharmacists

Philosophers

Physicians

Police Officer

Educators

Psychologists

Quantity Surveyors

Scientists

Veterinarians

Translators and Interpreters

Professions can be ranked as either Primary or Secondary. Primary professions include, for example: Judges, Doctors, Surgeons, top Police Officers, top Military Officers, Professors, higher ranking Lawyers and Bishops. Secondary professions include, for example: Dentists, Architects, Civil Engineers, Surveyors, Accountants, Lawyers and all other specialised technical occupations [Scientists, Educators, Nurses, etc]. While all professions enjoy high social status, primary professions have the highest status, regard and esteem conferred upon them by society at large. This high esteem arises primarily from the wider, deeper and higher social function of their work as compared with other lower ranking professions. Their work is regarded as more vital to society as a whole and thus of having a special and very valuable nature. By contrast, the secondary professions, while also enjoying high standing in society, yet the value of their work is seen as less vital to society and thus they enjoy a correspondingly lower status.

All professions involve technical, specialised and highly skilled work. Training for this work involves obtaining degrees and professional qualifications in order to gain entry into the profession, and without which entry to the profession is barred [occupational closure]. Therefore, all professions can be seen to involve some degree of credentialism; indeed, in modern times this credentialist aspect of professions is increasing all the time, such as through professional upgrading of skills and 'payment by results' by which the true merit of a professional person is deemed – rightly or wrongly – to be measured by the number of skill update courses they have recently attended.

All professions have a high measure of control over their own affairs and therefore tend to be self-regulating or institutionally autonomous. All professions have control over their own knowledge base – epistemological autonomy.

All professions have evolved their own 'codes of practice,' both to maintain the overall integrity and high status of the profession itself, through regulating the behaviour of its members, and to protect the public or client-base which they serve. Codes of practice need to be reviewed and policed, and breaches of discipline punished, ultimately by expulsion from the elite group of the profession. Such is the highest sanction imposed for persons found guilty of professional misconduct in the legal, medical, military and clerical worlds.

Trades

Trades are associated with skilled manual work in a particular job area, for instance, jewellery, driving, building, crafts etc. Economically and socially, a tradesman's status is considered between a labourer and a professional, with a high degree of both practical and theoretical knowledge of their trade.

Nota Bene: do not confuse a trade with uncountable trade, which is an activity of buying, selling or exchanging goods or services. Businessmen involved in trade are also referred to as tradesmen.

WAGES AND SALARIES

Wages and salaries were once distinguished: wages were paid weekly, or more frequently for casual work, in cash, while salaries were paid monthly into bank accounts. In recent years the growth of payments of wages by cheque has blurred the distinction, and wages and salaries are best regarded as a single total. Payments for work performed by the self-employed as independent contractors are not classed as wages.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14