Isnt it odd how footballers are always described as earning £X thousand a week. Other sportsmen earn so much a year. Does Wayne Rooney earn more than Lewis Hamilton? Does any sports fan care?
I did not have time to finish what I had started there, so just left it. I had meant to go on to discuss how to make valid comparisons of earnings & then on to the vexed question of determining value. As in equal pay for work of equal value
When I went out I saw an extraordinary headline in the Manchester Evening News: HARD UP UNI PAYS PROF MORE THAN ROONEY
By Saturday the story had reached page 3 of The Times. Based on a rubbish comparison of hourly rates, which takes into account Rooneys training, preparation & playing time, but assumes the professor is paid purely & simply for his time in the lecture hall. That nothing he does with the rest of his time is of value to the university (he does not even need time to prepare his lectures), not to mention the value of his name as a recruiting sergeant
One quarter of The Times Page 3 is taken up with an extraordinary photo of Martin Amis outside the neo-gothic Whitworth Hall, lit from below, which makes him look like a cross between Dr Goebbels & Mr Hyde. Credited to MEN photographer Paul Heyes, it is obviously posed, not snatched. Still, with the popularity of horror films it probably works well as an advertisement: WOULD YOU DARE TO WRITE AN ESSAY FOR THIS MAN?
Somebody has got hold of the details of his contract under the Freedom of Information laws & is having lots of fun with them
Personally I suspect its part of the ongoing spat with another ageing lefty enfant terrible & recent star recruit as a Manchester professor
So far, so entertaining
What dispirits me, apart from the fact that even the august Times takes such an innumerate approach to questions of pay & value, is the idea that details of individual contracts have to be reported to the government: "Details of Amis's salary were released by the Government" (my emphasis)
I suspect - hope? - that the University itself was obliged by the Freedom of Information Act to make the disclosure
