AIs make list most underpaid positions

SAN FRANCISCO -- Many Americans complain they're not paid enough, but most of us are nowhere near as shortchanged as the country's severely underpaid workers.\nThe degree to which someone is underpaid isn't just a matter of how much money he or she earns. Two of the 10 jobs below pay more than the U.S. median of $37,500 a year. Rather, it's a function of how valuable -- or loathsome -- the work is relative to the earnings.\nSeveral jobs frequently cited as underpaid don't make the list below for that reason. \nTo suggest elementary school teachers are underpaid is to risk being branded "anti-education," but they earn $38,000 a year on average -- the equivalent of $48,000 based on a full year -- for a potentially fulfilling and enjoyable job. \nThe same holds for nurses, who are in fierce demand. While median income is about $49,000 for staff jobs, experienced RNs who scale back during child-rearing years can earn up to $40,000 a year or more working two 12-hour per diem shifts a week. Not bad for part-time work with the flexibility to set your own hours.\nSome underpaid jobs are just transitional. College teaching assistants ($12,665 a year) are the Sherpas who carry the load for tenured professors lecturing to auditorium classes, whose claim to fame may be a 20-year-old published text. They move on from there.\nThe underpaid are more like the hospital and nursing-home assistants who serve meals to and encourage sick and old people to eat, help them to the bathroom and wipe them when not emptying bedpans, and extend a bit of humanity to those whom the medical system often treats antiseptically.\nWhat follows is part of the list of 10 of the most underpaid jobs in the United States, with salary and wage figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and www.Salary.com. They are in no particular order, since one could argue any of these is the single-most underpaid:\n--Restaurant dishwashers ($7.25 an hour): The germs and bacteria these people are exposed to are scary enough to make a cat walk backward up a wall hissing the whole time. The mountains of garbage they scrape off plates, the grease that permeates pores opened wide by steaming commercial dishwashers and the general thanklessness of the job make it horrible work at twice the pay.\n--Consumer Loan Collection Agents ($22,826): The financial-services industry enriches a lot of its employees, and then pays these people peanuts to lean on deadbeats. If they've got you on the line, don't blame them for applying some pressure and unload a verbal assault on them. Blame the last zero-percent financing offer you bought hook, line and sinker.\n--Pest Controller ($24,120): In eradicating vermin from rats to cockroaches, they must crawl into the dark recesses rodents inhabit, administer all manner of chemical "treatments" and retrieve rotting carcasses on their periodic service calls. We pay them a pittance to make the noises in the wall go away and rid our kitchens of creepy crawlers we don't want to admit to hosting.\n--Slaughterers and Meatpackers ($20,010): Unlike their often well-paid counterparts -- unionized supermarket butchers -- these heavy lifters of the meat-processing industry are doing the work we never want to think about as we're marinating our strip steaks or searing our baby backs on the grill. \n--Police Officers ($41,950): For all the strain the job puts on their psyches, cops don't earn nearly enough, never mind they're always in harm's way. We pay them to be society's voice of authority, and then shy away from them. No man is an island -- except for a police officer.\nSure, they move on from four years of residency into six-figure jobs, but if we paid them more at this stage, maybe they wouldn't feel so entitled and anxious for the hefty income awaiting them.\n--Funeral Home Attendants ($19,200) and Morgue Attendants ($26,167): They see dead people, in the flesh, every day. They check in corpses and comfort grieving relatives in the most depressing work environment short of the front lines of a battlefield. A cancer ward is cheery by comparison. \n--Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics ($25,450): Down the road, their patients will be treated by well-compensated doctors if they survive; it's these front-line medical experts who greatly enhance survival chances. Look for their pay to increase as overweight Baby Boomers discover their maintenance meds failing them in the damnedest of places.\n--Preschool Teacher ($21,907): Day-care workers ($19,900) are notoriously underpaid, but the real dishonor is paid to the preschool teachers who lead our 3- and 4-year-olds in ABCs and 1-2-3s in our vast, dual-income absence. Birth to age 5 are critical years in the development of a child's personality and intelligence, yet we pay these people little more than we fork out for a \nbabysitter on a Saturday night. \nThe vast majority of Americans would never consider doing these 10 jobs, either because of the poor pay or what's involved. Still, in every case, they're performing an indispensable service, and we all owe them a debt of gratitude for it.