Go to the following site: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm which gives you the National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates for the U.S.
Scroll down to the table. Look at the data in the first row titled All Occupations. Examine the rest of the table. You can sort the table in different ways by clicking on the column headers.
Click on the column header titled "Annual Mean Wage". It will sort the occupations by mean wage going from low to high (or if you click on it again, from high to low). Check out the highest paying professions and the lowest paying ones.
Scroll up and look at the list of the 20+ Major Occupational Groups (MOG). Click on a couple of relatively high-paying MOG (for example, Business and Financial Operations Occupations or Healthcare Practitioners and Technicial Occupations) and a couple of relatively low-paying MOG (for example, Food Preparation and Service Related Occupations or Personal Care and Service Occupations).
If necessary, do some other research online to get a sense of why people get paid the amount they do.
Write an 1,000 word paper addressing the following questions:
1) What are the reasons behind the difference in wages between one MOG and another? Is there a difference in wages within the MOG itself? What explains this? Do wages reflect how much a profession is valued by the social system? Are there other reasons for differences in wages across occupations?
2) How should a job be valued? How should we determine how different forms of work are compensated? Should it be on the basis of supply-demand? Difficulty of the job? The nature of the qualifications required for the job? The level of importance of that work to the society? If you were designing job compensations, what criteria would you use, and why?