How much does your pay cheque define you?

Disclaimer: I am writing this filled with anger and have not written down facts and numbers, so this is an opinion-and-feelings filled text.

While on honeymoon in the awesome Azores, my husband and I did some canyoning with a random family of 5; a mum and her 4 kids. I fell immediately in love with this adventurous family, who seemed to be having a great holiday out in the Azores. As we absailed, climbed, crawled and jumped off cliffs we got to chat and find out about each other.

As a Portuguese person, an early thought I had was ‘Wow, they must be well off to travel this far on a long holiday and do all these adventures’. Well, if they were Portuguese, they probably would have to be. Mum could be a doctor, and the older kids would be doing a law degree or something like that. But this Swiss family was different: the older kids were studying; one will soon be a florist and the other an electro-technician. As for the mum, she works in a restaurant. How the…?! Never in a dream would that be possible in my sad old Portugal. I feel entitled to talk like this because I am Portuguese, I have spent most of my life in Portugal and I experienced the pressure of ‘you must get a degree in something that will give you access to a well paid aka good job’, which is the equivalent of virtually forcing all teenagers to spend (and often waste) 5 years in university studying something they have limited interest in.

When I was doing my initial degree to become a primary teacher (which I was lucky enough to be in wild love with and is definitely what I was built for), I ended up writing papers for a colleague who wasted those four years of his life. Nearly 15 years later he is finally pursuing his passion and interest. An area in which he is very creative and competent: carpentry. It is sad that he had to waste a lot of money on university tuition fees and even more importantly than money, that he had to waste 6 years of his life because he had been driven to believe that that was the only way forward, if he wanted to do better than his parents had done before him.

I have nothing against university and learning, very much the contrary. I believe in education, but in a broader way. I believe that every single profession matters: if your job is to lay cobblestones on the road, I expect your job to be done properly so people can drive safely. If your job is cleaning, I expect it to be done in detail, so places are actually clean. If you are a doctor, I expect you to know your science well and treat your patients as human beings to whom their health is an important foundation. This said, I expect every working person to be paid a dignified salary, not the joke Portuguese are paid when on a minimum wage. Not the joke Portuguese are paid in general, excluding the big masters at the top of the iceberg who have mismanaged and robbed for years.

I dream of a Portugal I suspect I will not live long enough to see, but hope will come true one day: a Portugal where your job does not label you, a Portugal where we all do our best at whatever the hell we do. A Portugal where we are not trying to outsmart someone and are not being outsmarted either.

Numbers from the OECD