Suggestion to aid with income-related discussions. - sm

I've noticed that we need some sort of standard reference or metric to use when we talk about income-related issues, and this metric should not merely reference dollars (or cents), but should relate this to <i>a unit of time</i>.  At the end of the day, it's how much you earned per unit of time that really matters, and this the only sort of metric that takes into account all of the variables that a mere monetary reference such as "line rate" does not.

The line rate paid by two different employers might be identical, and yet the same MT might only earn half as much working for one of them compared with the other.  Differences in transcription platforms, clerical/demographic complexities, the nature of the content (complexity), characteristics of dictators, availability (and payment for) of templates ("normals"), and the availability of work itself all translate the "line rate" into something that in practical terms is quite different from one employer to another, although numerically they might be the same.

Whenever I am interviewing a prospective employer (and yes, I do interview THEM), I ask a question:  What do your senior MTs earn per hour, on average - over the course of a year?  I ask this because (a) I'm a senior MT, and I expect to achieve that level of productivity after a reasonable period of adaptation, (b) this is the one number that translates absolutely every variable about the platform, the work, the availability of work, the dictators, etc. into a single number that can be compared with others.

It has never failed.  Not one employer - or recruiter - has ever been able to give me this number - and yet it's the equivalent of someone at McDonald's being able to tell and applicant how much they'll earn per hour, or how much you're offering to pay an accountant.  As such, you'd think this would be something they would make sure they know, wouldn't you?  How much are our senior people earning per hour?  They're not interested in knowing this - even for their own information?

Okay - but I think we do know - or can track - our hourly earnings and should use this in our discussions whenever possible, rather than line rates.

And when we use "average earnings per hour", I suggest that we make sure we are including hours that we are "on duty", available for work, but there is no work available.

If we can agree on a common earnings metric such as this, we'll reduce all of the variables to a fairly understandable number that we can then use to compare and contrast changes in earnings over time, differences in earnings between employers, etc.  If we do NOT use some sort of commonly understood metric that takes all of the variables into account, we're often going to be talking about very different things and not understanding one another.