Will No Company Offer a Fair Wage?
I believe the true complaint is people will not work for long for an employer who screws them over on wages. They will take a job. And then the first change they get, they will leave for another job offering higher wages and better benefits. Especially now, when Labor is “still” scarce.
Unless of course, they lack education or experience. Even with experience, you may come out on the wrong end of an offer. Working in the fields I did in supply chain was not exactly lucrative even being degreed. Employers hiring me were cheap. It was not till my last ten years of 40 years was I able to break six digits. I was still a working manager.
Read on, what the author complains about has been in existence far longer than baby Boomers and the laws protecting Labor today. Pulled from Reddit.
Is it True That “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore?” Partners in Fire, Melanie Allen
“No one wants to work anymore” is the common refrain of established business owners who can’t seem to fill essential positions in their companies.
These owners, who typically identify with the baby boomer generation, put out flyers, list positions on all the big career websites, take out classified ads, and hang hiring signs on their doors but can’t seem to attract any applicants.
Employers complain that they must work long hours to cover the gaps and wonder why they can’t find people to work for them.
“No one wants to work anymore,” they lament, as they offer minimum wage for part-time work and a constantly changing schedule.
The Truth Behind “No One Wants To Work Anymore”
It’s not that people don’t want to work. People don’t want to work for abysmal wages that don’t provide them enough to live. They don’t want to work jobs that destroy their bodies or social lives.
Younger generations want work that works for them. They crave meaning in their work but will put that aside for a high enough paycheck. They refuse to work menial jobs that don’t pay a living wage.
Example Showcasing Why No One Wants to Work Anymore
A user of the popular r/lostgeneration community on Reddit shared precisely why they turned down a job.
The Original Poster (OP) said they went into a pizza shop with a now-hiring sign on the door and inquired about the position. According to OP, the owner . . .
“Lit right up and said he was the owner, had been working alone since he bought the place 30 days ago. Said he was eager to hire and gave me an application.”
After filling out the application and showcasing their ten years of pizza experience, OP was offered a job on the spot but was dismayed to learn the owner only offered minimum wage.
OP didn’t take the job.
Why Younger Generations Don’t Want To Work
The post resonated with a lot of users. Many gave stories and examples of why they no longer want to work, and it’s not sheer laziness.
Minimum Wage is a Joke
Far too many employers want to start new workers at minimum wage, which many Redditors consider an awful joke.
One user said they made $15 an hour thirty years ago, which, back then, was enough to care for a small family. They then pointed out that their state’s partly $7.25 per hour minimum wage falls far below a living wage. “I couldn’t survive now on 15 an hour,” they said, asking how anyone could survive off half that amount.
“It’s basically just a scam if you are being paid $7 an hour in 2023,” stated another. “You are being scammed out of your time, energy, and soul.”
Living Wage is Typically Far Higher than Offered Wages
States with higher minimum wages typically have higher living costs, and even the higher salaries aren’t enough for workers who need money to live.
“Our current minimum wage is $15, which is not enough to survive here,” shared one user. They mentioned a recent report showcasing that a living wage in their city was around $22 per hour and said, “none of the business here would offer that because most owners are cheap. Yet, they complain when no one wants to work for them.”
When “Entry Level” Requires Experience
Many users lamented business owners who refuse to pay extra for required experience, training, education, or credentials. They pointed to companies that list every job as entry-level despite the massive education or experience required.
“If the job opening requires a degree, a technical certificate, or more than one year of experience, it’s not “entry-level” by any definition of the phrase, nor should it pay minimum wage,” stated one Redditor.
Companies attempt to nickel and dime employees, paying them as little as they can possibly get away with despite their expertise, then wonder why no one wants to work.
Younger generations are starting to recognize their worth and refusing to accept less.
No One Wants to Work for that Pay
It’s not about not wanting to work. It’s about looking at the job and deciding whether trading your time and labor for the pay offered is worthwhile.
In today’s day and age, many are deciding that it’s not.
“The opportunity cost of working for minimum wage is a net negative for folks stuck doing it,” said one user.
If people can’t afford to live while working 40+ hours a week at a menial job, they’ll choose not to work. They can’t afford life anyway, so what difference does it make if they work or not?
They opt to spend their time pursuing interests and engaging in gig work to make ends meet rather than committing all their time to a job that doesn’t pay enough.
No One Ever Wanted to Work
The whole idea of “No one wants to work anymore” is wrong, to begin with. People work because they have to, not because they want to.
The only people who want to work are those who find a career that aligns with their passions. Scientists, writers, artists, researchers, and doctors do want to work. Their careers give their life meaning.
The rest of us work because it provides a paycheck. We trade time for money to afford to live and do what we want in our free time.
No one is passionate about working the fast food counter, data entry, or factory work. No one wants to do those jobs. But, if they pay well enough, people will compromise. They’ll dedicate time to doing things they don’t enjoy for a higher quality of life and to provide for their families.
Popular: Regardless of Whether you Work, Financial Responsibility is Essential
Stop Complaining that Nobody Wants to Work and Start Offering Something in Return
If you’ve latched onto the “nobody wants to work anymore” ideology, you may want to look hard at what you’re offering. Is it really that nobody wants to work, or are you not offering enough compensation for the position?
This Reddit thread shows that people do want to work, but they expect fair wages that will allow them to live. If your wages don’t provide that, perhaps you’re the problem, not them.
Had this conversation twenty years ago in a bar in Montana. I told maybe he shouldn’t be down at the bar guzzling beer when he could be back at the shop doing it himself, save seven fifty an hour. Every loudmouth I ever heard that out of was a lazy ass who didn’t want to work
i suppose one could point out that the wages they pay dont support living any more? and would they work for those wages that cant support living? i get business owners want to pay as little as possible, but then they can get income from the profits of their business. which isnt something offered to employees. and i suspect that today’s economy isnt different from pre 2020, and the government support for the pandemic ended in 2021 (at the latest…odd how some dont know that), and then of course the huge layoffs in 2020, told employees that employers dont really care about them (if they didnt already know that), and that they have to advocate for themselves, since employers wont help with that. who knew that employees now want to be able to live on what they earn?
generally agree with this, but two caveats
an employer may offer a “starting wage” until he sees whether you can do the job.
an employee may take a job at below living wage because..he really can live on that and he hopes that once he shows he can do the work his pay will be raised…or by then he can find a better job.
it is true that many if not most employers are stupid-greedy and won’t ever pay a fair wage if they don’t have to. but it is also true that some employees are lazy or incompetent.
all i am saying is that “four legs good two legs bad” is not always a full understanding of the situation.
when i was a new employer and hired my first employee i offered minimum wage and was told it was an insult. i asked “what would be a fair wage?” she told me, and i said okay. turned out she didn’t show up to work reliably because she was still out looking for a better job. but i did offer her replacement the “fair wage” she had suggested, and that worked out fine. she got raises from there as i learned to appreciate her worth to the business.
i suspect that big businesses today are owned by people so far removed from the actual work that they have no idea what their employees are worth. a lot of them have no idea what their customers are worth in terms of decent service and honest products.
Seems like a minor problem really. Pizza guy offered too little and did not get a worker. That an occasional crank attributes this to an unwillingness to work isn’t very important really. Either you provide good enough conditions to attract good enough workers, or you don’t. Either your business can sustain itself with those conditions or it can’t. Whether or not those are “living wages” isn’t important other than it will impact who you might get to take a job. Maybe the pizza guy found a worker who made an okay pizza for min wage the next day. Maybe the pizza guy decided that $24/hour could work.
all problems seem minor until you look harder, or try them out in the real world.
in the real world i see there are always “excess workers” who will take a job for less than a living wage,,,hoping something will turn up. what turns up mostly is that they learn to live on less until reality catches up with them. then they become “the homeless” or “the lazy” or “without character”. funny that always happens in cycles. the economy is humming along, unemployment is low, wages are okay, then all sudden 10% of the workforce decides to quit their job and stand in long lines at the factory gate or the unemployment office. they are lazy that way.
a word for the lazy worker: i suspect either their present boss or their last boss did not treat them as a valued partner and human being. that kind of thing can destroy motivation.
We have heard about lazy workers for at least the last half century. We have also heard about businesses who could not find workers raising wages and being flooded with applications. Not just once but several times in my lifetime, and still some employers seem not to have ever heard of offering more than the minimum wage. Of course it is a matter of ideology and dogma that says workers want more (than they are worth) and employers must hold the line to keep the workers in their place.
Some employers have very unrealistic expectations that match the equally unrealistic expectations of employees. A new HS graduate is no more likely to start at $100K than a minimum wage teen summer hire is going to display managerial level initiative.
Boomers get blamed for a lot of things, because ours is the generation in the age cohort that includes the business owners and managers, but the nobody wants to work anymore has been a refrain from the older to the younger for centuries if not millennia.
Back when I was a tad starting out in the working world, big employers supposedly were obliged to offer ‘decent’ wages or suffer unionized workforces. Some years later, when I actually had a career going, it was common knowledge that my employer (at a company that is now defunct & suffered horrible death throes) would do anything, pay as wages as high as necessary, to keep unions OUT. Well, this worked out ok for quite awhile, until it didn’t, for them and for their employees.
It certainly doesn’t work now, with union participation nothing like what it was.
US union membership rate hits all-time low
AP – January 19
The U.S. union membership rate reached an all-time low last year despite high-profile unionization campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and other companies.
Union members fell to 10.1% of the overall U.S. workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was down slightly from 10.3% in 2021.
The number of workers belonging to a union actually increased by 1.9% to 14.3 million. But that failed to keep pace with higher overall employment rates. The number of wage- and salary-earning workers rose by 3.9%, the government said.
U.S. union membership has been falling steadily for decades. In 1983, the first year that comparable data is available, the union membership rate was 20.1%, the government said.
Public-sector workers, like police and teachers, had the highest unionization rates last year, at 33%. Just 6% of private-sector workers were unionized.
Automation, outsourcing and lower unionization rates in traditional union strongholds, like auto manufacturing, are among the reasons for the steady decline. But states have also chipped away at unions’ power. Twenty-seven states now have “right-to-work” laws, which prohibit a company and a union from signing a contract that requires workers to pay dues to the union that represents them. …
Ultimately, the demise of my employer was tied to works councils in Europe, which insisted that the US-based parent company be liquidated after many years of poor decision making in our executive ranks, brutal competition and massive changes in the computer industry.
European works councils (EWCs) are standing bodies that facilitate the information and consultation of employees with a focus on transnational issues, as regulated by the 1994 European Works Council Directive (Directive 94/45/EC, updated by Directive 2009/38/EC (Recast).
So often it seems easier to call things by their rightful names. The regulatory framework we used to call “minimum wage” should more properly be called the “I live in my parent’s house” wage, since it won’t provide much of anything else.
The fight for $15 a few years ago appears to be a battle won in some sense. I believe it takes at least that to get people to apply. But that isn’t really a living wage, since it barely covers the basics of rent/utilities/food/transportation in most places leaving nothing for healthcare or retirement. Which are, you know, living. $15/hr is a subsistence wage anywhere in the country. You may survive but only for so long. Everybody gets sick or needs to retire. Eventually.
When employers here in SE Vermont were having trouble hiring help post pandemic there were the usual stories about positions unfilled. I noticed right away that those stories rarely included the detail of the wages offered. A rather interesting omission I thought.
In conversations with my neighbors I suggested that local employers should be required to list additional information alongside the offered wage: A figure reflecting the ratio of that wage to a median 1 bedroom apartment within 25 miles of the work site. If employers were offering only 70-90% of what it costs to stay in out of the weather here, let’s make them acknowledge it. In the ad offering the position. Everybody seemed to think this might be useful to workers and employers.
am soc
exactly. though driving 25 miles to work is not what i call living. hard on the planet too.
Another wrinkle recently revealed by stories in WSJ and Bloomberg is the number of employers offering “fake jobs” they don’t have any intention of filling. When asked the rationale behind these non available positions over 30% of hiring managers said they posted positions to “make our company look like it is growing” and “pacify existing employees who were complaining about overtime/overwork”.
My experience looking for work 3 years ago tended to make me believe at least some of them were in that category. If fake job listings are driving the narrative here, even in part, it means wages aren’t always the issue.
yeah, i always wondered to what happened to that supply-demand curve,
What we need to have, going forward, is fully implemented AI-driven robot consumers (‘consumerbots’) who will drive up demand for ‘stuff’, that less expensive morlockian employees can make. Very important for the last piece to occur,
however.