With Mother's Day approaching, a number of organizations are doing their annual P.R. stunt of releasing press releases estimating what mom's would get paid if compensated for their labor. According to CNN Money, the estimates range from $60,000 to over $600,000 -- the "salary of a top-notch CEO."
I'm all for valuing the contributions of mothers (hi mom) but some of these organizations should be embarassed by the quality of their estimates. If these guys were doing this as a case study, they wouldn't get the job. Ric Edelmen, chair of Edelman Financial Services is the source of that high-end, $635K estimate. RicEdelman.com's tag line is "your financial planner." But they arrive at their estimate by totalling the annual salary of each job role a mom undertakes, from financial planner ($70K) to computer systems analyst ($60K). Um... so you're telling me that she does twenty-odd jobs, but produces as much value as full-time employees doing just one of those each? Or that her work is as leveraged doing it for 3-6 people as it would be doing it for the thousands of customers some of these jobs impact? Sorry, but I'm not letting Ric Edelman be my financial planner any time soon, if this is how carefully he thinks.
