[quote=jpinpb]Just curious, how many of you would be willing to take a 20% cut in your pay? And how many of you risk your lives in your job?[/quote]
Personally, I’d take a 20% cut in pay if I had to. Thankfully I don’t have to. But if I had to, I’d take it. Pretty simple.
As to risking one’s life while working, let’s go to the tape… In the last decade, here are the stats: There are an average of about 750,000 police officers employed in the U.S. at any given time and an average of 160 police officers annually have died while on duty. That’s about 2 out of every 10,000 on an annualized basis.
There are almost 800,000 fire fighters in the U.S. Average annual fatalities in the line of duty have averaged about 115 over the last decade (albeit, excluding 9/11). That’s about 1.5 out of every 10,000 on an annualized basis. (Interestingly, 86% of the fire departments in the U.S. are either all or partially manned by volunteers. 70% are all-volunteer departments and 73% of all fire fighters are volunteers.)
Given that the average person driving the average amount has a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car accident in their lifetimes, I would bet that traveling salespeople – who obviously travel a lot more than the average person – have a similar (or perhaps even higher) incidence of work-related fatality relative to firefighters and police officers.
