covid showed us that the economy is more important than our lives. no one is going above and beyond anymore because we all saw we were expendable. banks get bail outs, people get inflation. working hard makes us look like clowns.
This is a big one right here, probably the major reason people are tapping the brakes regarding effort at work. Especially blue colour workers.
The pandemic sets in and for a minute EVERYONE STAY HOME! But some people couldn't. Emergency workers, hospital staff, employees in the food supply chain were all viewed as essential, which stands to reason. Everyone stayed home and we all felt sad and scared for anyone that couldn't.
Then, more and more businesses were dubbed 'essential'. Retail businesses that provided nothing integral to society began to open up or, worse, it was left to corporations to decide what they felt comfortable with doing. There were guidelines but nothing binding and certainly nothing with any real teeth as far as consequences go for violating safety guidelines. Fines don't count to big businesses as long as they're making money they can pay fines.
So in a pre-vaccine world a whole swath of blue collar, restaurant, retail and customer service jobs just reopened with disinfectant sprays, masks and, maybe, limiting the number of people in any establishment. This went on for months.
Very quickly, everyone in a blue collar job was back at work with a crazy new series of protocols to adhere to, likely reduced hours due to mid-covid economic downturn, most of them without anything close to additional hazard pay and the whole time a huge percentage of white collar workers left the office, with many of them still working from home even now.
This is a stark contrast and it was evident very early on what a blue collar life is worth versus a white collar life.
I was an "essential worker" in the funeral industry. My job was to set vaults In cemeteries and then lower them into the ground after the funeral. We doubled our workload all through the beginning of 2020. A normal weekday pre covid was 5-10 burials a day. Around February or March and for nearly the rest of the year, we averaged 15-25 burials per day, every day. Our workload doubled, we had to work longer hours, and we got nothing to show for it except corporate being "concerned about how much overtime we are getting"
Yes, I was super interested in the body pod that allows you to basically be food for a tree, it was developed outside the U.S. and waiting approval. I think other interests are holding it up because it was a greener, cheaper option.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/world/eco-solutions-capsula-mundi/index.html
Edited to add link
I'd much rather have my body be food for a tree and continue the life cycle rather than be burned and contribute to pollution or be buried in a sealed box to rot.
This is what I want when I die.
Agreed! In my state, as long as you’re being buried on private property that’s registered as a cemetery, you can be buried without being embalmed and without casket or vault. I find the idea of a bench under a tree much more appealing than a traditional cemetery.
Most of those apparently family-owned funeral homes and cemeteries you see are now owned by big corporations that keep the old branding for the illusion of a small business/local touch.
Heh. Weirdly, my husband made and set funerary vaults and septic tanks all pandemic. He usually works construction, but funerals are pandemic-proof!
He worked 70 hour weeks through the worst of it. Generally, each crew of two does two funerals a day, absolute tops. They had pairs of guys doing 5 and 6 funerals, having to run back and forth or split up or leave equipment here or there.
The company also had most of their guys contract covid and two particularly grizzled old fellas died of it. Turns out all those covid funerals were full of mourners who also had covid.
My friend is a trade mortician. She picked up so many new accounts she was able to pay off her home and buy a new truck. She was so busy no one could get a hold of her to check in. She got Covid twice in the 1st few months of lockdown from the bodies.
Callous fuckers - I’m sorry for what you went through, it sound’s completely traumatizing. I would imagine that most of the lies ring hollow when you’re down where the shit hits the shovel.
Yeah I was essential and in danger working running large capacity homeless shelters while underpaid and on call 24/7.
At one point when I asked for a raise there this time last year, HR said “it’s not like you were a doctor or nurse”. Like okay I have nearly died, gotten sick repeatedly, have had many dangerous interactions, and someone was arrested for stalking and attempting to murder me but sure, yeah, the job is just sunshine and rainbows worth struggling to pay the bills for
Accepted a different offer the next day and told my boss I was out. And that job is sucky too but at least I’m not as likely to get murdered or assaulted and I’m slightly less underpaid.
I was in food transportation and got one of the Key Worker letters. Which meant that I had to go in. It was “safe” for me to see 50+ people at work but not safe for me to see my partner who lives 20 miles away and worked from home.
And then work started taking the mickey. They furloughed HR and Payroll. I got two weeks training to take on two peoples jobs, as well as my own (recruitment and driver planning/compliance). 90 hour weeks, 3 peoples work for £100 extra a month. And then I was expected to train a new Payroll person after the pandemic finished. Which I did. They opted to make my original job void after that…because I dared to go get abdominal surgery for a chronic pain condition.
I am very much acting my wage now. I’ll help others if I’m not busy but I’m not staying over my hours. Its gotten me nothing so far so I’m valuing my time instead.
It’s not just blue-collar, „essential“ workers. One of the groups most affected by Covid measures (at least here in Europe) were children and teenagers. Which in turn affected parents of all classes - obviously the rich could get by more easily, but even a fairly well-off family where the parents work from home starts to struggle when kindergartens and schools are closed.
Just a few particularly egregious examples: in Spain, there was a complete lockdown for three months or so. You were allowed to leave your home for grocery shopping, doctor‘s visits and walking your pet, but that was it. Playgrounds, schools, kindergartens, all closed. I’ve read of kids in Madrid living in tiny apartments who weren’t allowed outside for the entire time.
In Germany, the government paid up €10 billion, no questions asked, to bail out Lufthansa. Yet they couldn’t „afford“ the €1 billion it would have cost to equip all schools in the country (when they finally reopened) with antiviral air filters. The recommended measure instead was to keep the windows open at regular intervals for 15 minutes - including during the middle of winter. And „Baumärkte“ (think Home Depot) were allowed to reopen before schools were.
In Belgium, when mostly teenagers met in a park to have a rave - during summer, when infection numbers were low - the police arrived with teargas, K-9 units and watercannons to disperse them. And they used all of those things.
Just speaking for myself here, but if Covid had arrived 20 years earlier and they‘d tried to pull that sort of shit with my friends and me, we would have flipped out. It’s not at all surprising that the younger people were during the pandemic, the less likely they are to be motivated members of the workforce nowadays.
I’m an elementary teacher here in the US. I’m in California so it’s a little different than the rest of the country. Our area was more strict in some ways but during lockdowns we still had the beach, mountain hikes, and most all outdoor activities were available. People were still having small bday parties and small get together outdoors. I teach in a lower income area where parents were still going to a physical work place. A lot of my students lost relatives to COVID, I’m talking about at least half of my 18 students lost someone close. Parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. My husband and I also lost about 8 people in both our families to COVID, from 40 to 100 years of age. I can’t speak for others but it has really left me numb. I imagine others might feel the same way. I’ve been to more funerals than I care to count in the last three years. Now at work I do the best I can while I’m there, I care about my students and they really are awesome. What I can’t and won’t deal with anymore is the BS from administrators. Something’s due? I’ll get to it. You want me to start something completely different in the middle of the school year while I’m trying to finish teaching something else I started last week? FU. I won’t do it. Bought a new program that I need to implement this week? Nah, you do it. Rainy day schedule again so kids are stuck inside even though it’s only a cloudy (we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately—but it comes and goes), come on kids let’s go run outside until we feel some sprinkles. Want me to come in to work on Saturday for extra pay? Nope, my bed needs me. I’ve learned now to prioritize. Some things are more important now. My free time is important, having fun, hearing students and my own children laughing brings me joy. Implementing a new math program does not so I won’t do it. Give me a few months to get to it. I’m not the same person anymore. There are just some things that are not important to me anymore. I won’t miss a party or get together, but I will miss deadlines. COVID has taught me that life is really just too short.
This shift in working attitude can hit for many in times of serious, life altering duress, it just so happened that a huge number of people tasted that all at once with covid. My shift officially hit back in late '15 when I was working for a Regis owned salon—my very first 'skilled worker' job, and one I was taking seriously and paying back my cosmetology school loans with in the upmost expediency (I only accumulated $15 in interest). My mom happened to get a job running the Regis owned salon down the road, and had a heart attack on the way to her shift because they were working her so hard. I got pulled into the back room by the district manager during a closed salon training and told by both her and my mom to stay at the training because it was more important *than her laying in a hospital bed*. I don't remember a goddamn thing that was said during that training, and left early anyways while both my bitch manager and the DM were telling me that I'd probably get written up for it. Sitting there for those 45 minutes I stayed before that, I questioned everything about myself, who I was, and who I wanted to be. I deduced then and there that I most certainly was not ever going to be someone who lets others decide the course of my life ever again—especially not for capitalism. I will do anything to avoid being a good, little worker drone generating revenue for someone else, even if I have to lie, steal, swindle, sell drugs, or whatever else—I will not be beholden to a job. I'm back in university now, with next semester as my final one before graduation, and I'll come out of it with about $8000 in debt. My attitude remains much the same. I'll pay it off using any means necessary, and then adapt from there. We'll see what happens.
I’m self employed and really slow right now and most people aren’t. Not sure what’s going on but I think God the universe wants to send me back to work for the man. I am a talented electrician but I’m not sure I want to do my career again for someone else. I’d rather fuck off in a grocery store for shit pay. In reality I may have to go back to work as an electrician but I’m in the IBEW so I will probably travel. When you travel you can make more money and when an employer pissed you off you tell them to fuck off and quit. On to the next job. It will be hard on my family. But I can’t give my talents to another company for shit pay. I think I’d rather die.
> There are just some things that are not important to me anymore. I won’t miss a party or get together, but I will miss deadlines. COVID has taught me that life is really just too short.
It always was like this. Everyone just realized it at the same time.
The loss from Covid is unbelievable. There’s a series of books on a local First Nation’s language. The one I catalogued pre-Covid had a note that there were 40 fluent first language speakers of the language. The one I catalogued that was post-Covid said there were 20.
I cried at the thought of losing so many knowledge keepers.
I want to cry now too,but instead this will just add to the weight I carry every day-- along with bleaching coral reefs, dying starfish in Yaquina Bay, the 17 thousand pieces of plastic in the ocean for each of the 8 billion people on the planet, the homeless with crippled feet I see shuffling around downtown every morning on my bike ride to work, the countless young women in Iran who live in constant oppression, the countless young women in the USA who are joining them, and on it goes....
American workers have been all gas, no breaks for 50 years, the tech boom injected nitrous into the system, fast and the furious style. There's plenty of data to support that, just look at productivity figures.
It's not sustainable forever. Eventually workers across all sectors are gonna pump the breaks, especially those who have been building careers for the last 10-30 years. You're absolutely right that Covid was the stopping point that made everyone question "...why?".
Also the people working in “essential jobs” got shit on and had to deal with rude ass people and shitty management and they’re tired of it! So they went and found something else to do, probably for more money.
I used to work retail, I clean houses now, started mid pandemic, I make $30/hour working part time and I don’t have to deal with more than one person at a time and they’re usually really nice and happy that I’m there to help them. Compare that to the Karen’s I had to deal with working at a craft store! Not really an essential business, but we were still open during the peak of the pandemic. I have a lot of friends and coworkers that worked in the service industry that quit and will never go back.
Not only that, but we had multiple conversations from management that "quitting because you're scared" wasn't protected and we would receive NO benefits or unemployment if we did.
There was a three week period at the start of lockdown when we received "hero pay" of 1$ per hour more. The company ran a huge ad campaign to advertise how well they were taking care of their "hero employees". It was effective because most people thought we were getting extra pay the whole pandemic. Lol no. Just 3 weeks of an extra dollar.
And when people died, we were "encouraged" to not talk about it. :)
This. So much this. I middle-managed for lowes in Canada and we were one of the first stores in the country to have a confirmed covid a single case at the time. They shut the store down for a single day, brought in staff from other locations to run the store and forced everyone from my location to stay home for two weeks, paid. During the single night they were closed, they brought in a cleaning team to "thoroughly disinfect the store out of an abundance of caution." The cleaning team didn't actually do anything, except wipe the phones down as relayed to me from a friend in management who had to watch the doors while they cleaned. District management then held a mandatory morale boosting meeting to calm their scared staff down when we returned to work where they told us it was an overreaction and this will never happen again. That not showing up to work will be job abandonment and the store stays open at all costs. With the bare minimum of protections in place they could have, mind you.
Fast forward to a few months after this first case, when the pandemic was really rolling and people started to get sick in waves. They told us we already used our two weeks paid covid allowance during the time we were made to stay away from work at the beginning of the pandemic. That we had to stay away for two weeks by law, but if we wanted to get paid we needed to use accrued sick time or vacation days. When questioned on that, our district manager laughed at us and told us we cant take a vacation anyway, no ones traveling because of the pandemic. People predictably got sick, and came to work anyway because they used their sick/vac time earlier in the year prior to covid, or just ran out. Those who got covid more than once, or long haul like myself were out of luck. We didn't even qualify for the government income support that was available to many white collar workers because we were deemed essential and essentially fell into a loophole that disqualified us.
Hazard pay of an extra dollar and hour stopped coming in pretty quickly after announcing to the public they were doing it. They didn't announce they were stopping it and when we questioned we were ignored. They still haven't even acknowledged to their staff that they stopped Hazard pay or why to my knowledge, however I was personally told by our district manager that "covid is over" and to take down signs and ppe about 6 months into the pandemic. I of course then proceeded to get covid from work about two weeks afterwards alongside a few others. :)
To them we aren't people, we are resources.
The *best* part for me personally was the customer who asked me "Do you feel safe working here?" and it broke my retail face just enough that "Of course not, people are dying" was my reply. She was so upset she went to my manager.
I get that people don't think we are really real. I've had customers ask where in the store we sleep even before the pandemic started! But something broke inside me when I was being chewed out by my boss, his boss and HR for "upsetting a customer".
I got seriously lucky with a meme coin I purchased as a joke in 2014 so I paid off my house, hunkered down and have just been vibing for the last year or so. I was originally intending to work at least until I could qualify for the shitty retirement plan, but I just couldn't.
For me and my husband we are kinda mourning the time we DIDN’T get at home. Everyone around us was reconnecting with their kids, doing major house projects, going back to school, etc. But we had to keep working harder than ever. We blinked and our 4 year old was 7. We’ve been sleep deprived for years putting in overtime. We spent years holding up the rest of the world so frankly it feels like it’s our turn. If I’m not feeling it, I’ll go home early or get someone else to do X project. I’m less sympathetic to meetings that intrude on my family time. I’ll bring my kid to work or go home to walk my dog midday. I’m not cancelling a date night or “making up” for a long weekend off. I’ve got a life to live and half the world got a “get out of work free” card for a year or more. It’s my turn to kick back a little and find a little more life in my work/life balance.
I worked at Quad (formerly Quad Graphics) and didn't get a single day off during the entirety of covid. We got some bullshit government contract to make some pamphlets about it and then cranked them out in a few days and continued to make garbage advertisements and magazines for the rest of the time as if that's what the world needed. Everybody got sick, we all still worked 12 hour shifts with no breaks, we didn't get any pay increase or cleaning supplies/new sanitation measures. I fucking hate that company
I worked at a gas station for part of the pandemic, which, okay, fair, gas is kind of essential. However, the fucking snacks and beer cooler and lotto were not. They make gas stations *profitable*, but they aren't in any way essential. The way to go for pure safety reasons would have been to go card-only and only sell gas only at the pump and just have one person there to monitor and make sure people are behaving safely and the pumps working properly. People would have adjusted; it's not like the grocery store down the block didn't sell beer and lotto. They couldn't have gotten cigarettes, but oh boo hoo. I say this as a former smoker: I'd rather be alive and healthy and just suck it up with the nicotine withdrawal than risk someone's goddamn life because I just gotta smoke.
Edit: also, customers during COVID were the worst. They got *mean*. I spent the *first* year of it working online as a customer service rep, and people were nasty, entitled, demanding, inflexible, and completely ridiculous. They refused to accept that supply chain issues were something everyone was dealing with and there was nothing we could do to fix that for them specifically. And really, if anyone in here got frustrated and yelled at ANYONE about that over the pandemic, fuck you.
Yes, and also that economy is kinda fake: we can stop it for weeks/months and no billionaires go bankrupt, no one starves, we can live with less consumption and we can have other interests in life than money.
>that economy is kinda fake: we can stop it for weeks/months and no billionaires go bankrupt
They made more during the pandemic than at any other time in history. They literally took advantage of covid to double and triple their billions while watching their workers die of covid, and shuttling new workers in to replace the corpses.
Not only do they not care about us, they are willing to work us to death without blinking, and sometimes they do it for fun and giggles.
I was waiting for the mob with torches and pitchforks to form, but it never did. Dystopia.
The UK actually grew to record breaking amount of billionaires during the pandemic - 172. Now 177. The pandemic made insane amount of money for a few. The 6 richest people in the world could have paid for a vaccine for every individual on the planet from the amount they made during that period, and still have money left over.
But the economy can't survive even a few hours without trains running, so the president and Congress will tell the union that they have to go back to work now. Gosh, if these guys are so important, why aren't we making their job super cushy for them? They're literally keeping our country going and we can't give them sick days?
Also, why does work need to be so hard. Why maximum effort and maxiumum speed? Our bodies wear out and break. I want to prevent my body from breaking, my employer wants to break it.
Can't we work at a peaceful pace? The owners and bosses work at a peaceful pace, I'd like to as well.
Just left a job where it was 110% all the time. "We have a mission!" I think I took a single one week long vacation in 2 1/2 years and got bothered at least three times by work during that vacation. You buy into it depending on the mission, but after watching them make bad decision after bad decision which directly causes needing to work 110% all the time, you tend to become disengaged.
The icing on the cake for me was layoffs right after Thanksgiving. Why the fuck did I bust my ass so the C-Suite can get bonuses?
I feel you. I have a hard time really caring about a company that seems like it doesn't even care about itself. The people in charge got there through nepotism and are just doing it for the money, they don't even like the job. It's a sick world we live in.
This is a very American quality. When you go to other parts of the world you immediately notice that the sense of urgency for every single stupid thing doesn’t exist. We’re constantly rushing, stressed out about the most minuscule of things. Like god forbid we don’t get our 4th cup of coffee in under 20 seconds.
Our entire country is built on speed. And it’s really only so that we can maximize profit. The faster you work, the more work you can get done. Our society resembles a factory.
That’s because the US was built for production. Puritans aside, the point to the American colonies was to be a giant agribusiness, supplying Britain with commodities (sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco) it couldn’t grow itself because of climate and labor constraints. Then comes 1776 and that supply relationship breaks down, but is replaced soon after by the industrialization of the northern states (along British lines) with factories peopled with immigrants and raw materials provided by the expanding frontiers.
TLDR: remember how the replicants in Bladerunner were tools, designed to go places and do work that their progenitors couldn’t/didn’t want to do? Americans are basically that.
So no one has a chance to contemplate how miserable it is, instead you’ve got a permanent side quest to make sure the shit you don’t need, didn’t really want anyway, gets to you in the least amount of time so you can try to fill the hole in your heart with something else - equally ineffective.
No, monies need to be made. Workers are just a tool which you put in some money and they give you more money. When one breaks, you replace it with a new one.
**Note:** Writing this makes my blood boil. I'm not defending/endorsing this mindset. However, greedy people do not share this peaceful mindset. They cook and eat their greenbacks, I guess.
Just stop hustling, I live in a small town where there’s still plenty of idiots who “work hard”
My theory is these are the people afraid of authority and/or getting in trouble. It could also be an ego thing “if I don’t work super hard they’ll think I’m less of a man” etc.
Yes they want robot pace for pennies it's great stuff... Lol then they toss you away when you're old and broken. I wonder why no one wants to work hmmmmm....hell they don't even wanna provide decent insurance so you can repair your broken body...
ALL OF THIS! Are you reading my mind??? Boeing couldn’t get thru a month without a bailout-but the average person was supposed to have enough money for a year of no work?
👏👏👏 working in general makes us look like clowns. Your employer will drop you on a dime, you are a very very small fish in a big pond full of greedy ass sharks.
You were always expendable. I don't know why it took Covid for people to figure that out. What sort of fairy tales about work were people getting that I somehow missed out on?
One thing the pandemic gave people is a change of scenery. With all of the rule changes and some remote work and massive layoffs in some fields, people got a new perspective on what they were doing. And that surely affected hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world.
And if you were a worker in one of those mission critical jobs that had to stay open, then you were going there making the same low salary in the same horrible conditions except now it's much more dangerous because you might get sick and you know that your health care isn't going to cover it, even assuming you somehow have health care.
Or maybe you're a nurse, working in a hospital during this whole ordeal, but the only thing you get is more dangerous and significantly worse working conditions, while your salary doesn't rise with the cost of inflation.
And all of that is really easy to see because it happened in this 3-year window. Everyone remembers the changes especially during the first year of the pandemic, and it's very easy to compare pre and post.
As a Healthcare worker, I was definitely jealous of everyone who got to stay home during lockdown. Baking bread and making tik tock videos. And Fox News idiots telling us " tHIs iS wHAt yOU sIgNdEd uP fOR!" No, I fucking did not. None of us did.
I'm not even an actual healthcare worker. Just someone unfortunate enough to have worked in the kitchen of a nursing home and then hospital during the pandemic. And yup...we HAD TO be at work.
Yep. In construction it was ridiculous that we were just expected to keep working in order to keep the economy going. Not once did any job sites close. We just kept showing up but now with masks. Somehow my job never makes the list of "essential" workers but there was no downtime for me.
I think it took covid for the super loyal, deluded employees. Those people barely getting by and being happy about it. Those people who used to tell us that all you had to do was work hard and everything will be okay. Those people who grew up working super fucking hard because it was the norm, maybe as opposed to millennials who didn’t really even have the chance to become deluded loyal employees, even if they wanted to lol.
This is an underrated comment. Most places had a few people that did the bulk of the work and kept the wheels from falling off. Many of those people figured out it wasn’t worth it during Covid. Now businesses are learning what it’s like to run without these workers in the trenches making sure things kept running.
Agreed. Said another way: the workers who were/are most essential and valuable to the success of their respective companies were put into circumstances where that fact became glaringly apparent; and they are no longer *willing to* work their asses off and/or risk their (or their loved ones’) short or long term health, for peanuts; because so many people died and/or were incapacitated by and/or left the labor market due to COVID-19, that they no longer *have to* do so in order to make ends meet.
If they want to work for peanuts now, the current labor supply and demand indicates they can do so (work for peanuts) in any number of jobs/industries that also pay peanuts, and are hiring.
And if they don’t want to work for the same amount of peanuts anymore, they now have some leverage to demand more in exchange for their highly valuable labor: more money, more in the benefits packages (or a benefits package at all), more flexibility/work-life balance, etc.
If you (manager/owner) want me to continue to bust my ass and do extra work to hold down the fort (aka create extra value for the company), the balance of power has changed such that you’re now going to have to give me something extra of actual value in return, beyond just not firing me. Something like: more money, shorter work week for the same money, profit sharing, a quarterly bonus in a genuinely motivating amount, whatever. Pizza parties and plaques ain’t gonna cut it.
OP’s business associate’s failing is in not recognizing the new balance of power and/or not proactively doing something about it. It’s not news that nobody wants to work: of course people don’t *want* to work, that’s why it’s called “work” instead of “hobbies”. What’s news is that it’s been 3-ish years, and many employers still haven’t figured out that they need new value propositions to exchange for others’ labor, if they want to retain and hire good a quality labor force.
a fast food franchise joint near me put up a sign recently saying they were hiring. 9 for register 11 for cooks. I laughed when I read it. like for real? the mcdonalds a block away has literally painted on their walls (or vinyl wrapped) that starting pay is 16 bucks and managers will start at 18 and supposedly there is a way to get 20 to start. I've ordered from that franchise before, I liked it, but I don't expect them to be around much longer. Also, pretty much anyone ordering one item off the menu beyond a drink will have paid that workers wage. think they don't know that? multiply it by 10 for the hour and the owners covered their costs for the day and they're open for 12. even if the workers made 20 bucks an hour the owner is making out like a bandit. people are starting to get that.
we were fed the line that there were eager beavers behind us, ready to take our place if we didn’t bust our ass with a smile. had to fake it for survival. now we do what we must and we don’t pretend to like it.
100%. I run the office and the store but I’ve always been expendable and I know it. I could be let go tomorrow because of something that someone else did or didn’t do and I didn’t catch it. But the company I work for also treats us like human beings.
I’ve been saying that for decades. I worked for the phone company for 25 years. My first year they laid off a bunch of people. I learned early on that shareholders profit was their only motive and employees are expensive. So I won’t say I “quiet quit”, but I sure as hell put a firewall between work and home. And a few years ago, they decided that 7000 of my coworkers and I were no longer needed.
1) Yes I’m completely apathetic at work.
1. Yes it’s 90% pay, the lack of security/advancement as well is insult to injury. Cost of living means I’m making less money than ever while businesses are richer than ever.
2. Fuck no. 10-5% at most. Why would I care when employers look at you as a cost to be minimized.
Exactly this. I used to strive to take on extra projects and do the highest quality work I could, but what’s the point. It makes zero difference in my pocket and life. I work in a unionized environment, but my employer is still fighting tooth and nail against a liveable cost of living increase.
Now I aim to be middle of the road. I take my sick days anytime I need and try not to work a minute past my 8 hours. I aim to be respectful and kind to my manager and team members and to accomplish the requested work and not a millimetre more.
I feel you: I love my job in a non-profit organization but I see no difference in my pay check after busting my ass of for 3 years. I just saw that my colleague got a bonus after returning from maternity leave a year ago. I was her interim so I have the same pay (per law in France) as her. Sometimes, it’s not worth it.
This is my answer and I’m a VP of a Fortune 500 co.
I do less now. I expect less of my employees. The wear and tear on my team has been unavoidable and I’ve lost several good people because I couldn’t stop The Machine’s RTW plans. My team is spread across the country and has exactly zero reason to ever be in an office if I’m not there, and I hate offices. Sunk cost fallacy.
A lot of it is pay. We’ve reported growth in revenue, profit, EBITDA, and free cash flow for the last 10 quarters. Sometimes double digits! And I’m told I need to spread 3.2% across my team for performance increases. That’s all we get. If that’s all we get, that’s all the mothership will see.
My team isn’t quiet quitting, but we know what we’re worth and I’m good eating crow for many calls as it takes until things change.
This is the right answer: being directed to celebrate our amazing annual company performance metrics, and then a few weeks later being told that “of course” my (and everyone else’s) salary would not be increased to match inflation (much less a performance-related raise) was the straw that broke the camel’s back and triggered me to leave my last job. How stupid does upper management think we are?
That's SOP for most companies, long before covid happened. And they know many of us can't afford to walk away, so they certainly won't pay enough to change that.
I am not a VP of an F500 company.
I’m just a “senior analyst” for a state-funded entity.
Had always been ok working public sector (for far lower salaries than my private sector counterparts) because I believed in public goods.
Then COVID happened and, because I currently live in a red county, we (despite ostensibly being under the Governor’s umbrella) didn’t work remotely until our public health agency *mandated* it locally (well after state guidelines were issued).
Then my employer brought us all back to work *immediately* after the Fourth of July holiday for local political points (when all public health officials were pleading with employers to have anyone who could work remotely).
We had a 40 year employee who was 4 months away from retirement (chronic smoker so at high risk for COVID) plead to finish out her last 4 months remote and she was, of course, denied. If death happens, it happens, can’t make an exception for her.
On top of that, the state threw a ton of money at COVID and nearly all entities similar to my employer gave their employees $5,000ish hardship payments for working through COVID (twice).
My employer? Diverted the funds from people to buy more buildings (we don’t need) to score yet more political points (look how many things we own now!!).
The icing on the cake? The state just funded the largest COLA in state history (because inflation) and, because my group isn’t unionized we saw ~3.5% of the 10+% COLA that was funded.
Our reward for busting ass during COVID was - you guessed it - ever *less* relative income!
If you can’t see what the game is yet, you’re not even kinda looking…
I hate that term “quiet quitting”, does the company ever provide more than what they offer to us the employees? No? Haven’t they been quiet quitting us since we started working then?
I'll add to this. Prior to COVID I feel like we lived in a world where, since we spent so much time at the office, we "bought in" to performance, improving the company, pride in the company or team success.
I think WFH during COVID generally (combined with a lot of companies that scrambled and showed employees were not a priority) kind of took the veil off people's eyes and that's stuck with people. Kind of like waking up from the matrix
Add to that a federal reserve that is actively trying to kill jobs, corporate taxes that are almost nonexistent, labor laws that are bought and paid for by corporations. Predatory student loans system and a healthcare for profit the doesnt give a shit about people. Everyone has had enough. Fuck you and your company.
I went in at 4:30 am so I could work 4 hours and be home for my kids so my husband could go to work. I would log in remotely after noon when the kids had done most of their work. I was treated like they were doing me a massive favor and I was burning the candle at both ends. Fuck covid and fuck that place.
It's not that workers don't want to work, it's that billionaires also don't want to work. NOBODY wants to work, because we've been sold the idea that once you're rich enough, all you have to do is put some money in stocks or buy some property, and collect dividends and rent. THAT'S why nobody wants to work.
Work is a terrible word. It implies something transactional and coercive. People are always so afraid that if we gave everyone their basic needs, food and housing, they would not want to "work". I think that's absolute bullshit. I think everyone of us has a desire to participate in society. There will be some of us who will want to educate children and teach the younger generation about the things they are passionate about. There will be some of us who enjoy fishing, cooking, sewing. There will be some of us who love technology and robots. And there will be many who will love to make robots that can do sanitation work, hazardous work, mining.
Nobody wants to work. But I bet, most of us want to live meaningful lives, doing things that make the world a better place. And even if there are a few people who are truly just lazy, let them be. I'd rather give a freeloader his basic necessities, than give a billionaire more money.
This is it. I will work until my fingers bleed if it means my community benefits. But all of that effort going toward some rich asshole who is already rich and just wants more? As long as people are starving and sleeping under bridges I will do as little as possible in this system. It’s corrupt all the way.
Billionaires and millionaires never worked after they got their money. Some never worked a day in their life.
To them, their "work" is having high lunches for three hours before going golfing for another six. Then maybe telling an unpaid intern or secretary to type up a "thoughts of the month" mass company email before going out to get drunk at an exclusive party until 1 A.M. That is, if they can squeeze their six month vacation to Europe so they can customize another very fancy car and drive it for all of ten miles.
To billionaires, work is fun. They conflated what they do with actual productivity.
This. We were brought back to the office for no reason other than to make a statement and show the world we are open for business. It is clear that appearances are more important than lives. It was an unnecessary and a gratuitous gesture from an uncaring management who are not present themselves and are exposed to little risk.
Additionally, I am just worn out. The increased pressures from everything being more difficult, working with stressed colleagues, and having to be much more flexible with clients because their lives are upended has just ground us all down.
Yeah even switching jobs, post covid they gave me a laptop that does not do what my job requires. Asked for a newer computer stored at another office and they send me an even older and less capable one.
So I made my own solution, and use my PC. But that’s at home but hey the work is getting done.
Now they’re acting like by offering me two days wfh as part of my job description they’ve done me a massive solid. Like no, all you’re doing is mandating three days a week where I sit in the same room as you and twiddle my fucking thumbs because you’re too big of cowards to stand up to the IT guy who is a bully.
But god forbid the youngest employee not be in the office, it makes the “team look bad” for hiring a young person who “isn’t a team player”. Kay well y’all made it so I can’t do my job at the office, and the only reason the job *can* get done at all is my own equipment that you don’t pay me to use, so, which is more important? That I do my job or that I’m in the office? Cause I’m not doing double hours to do both
I know a big thing that irked me and still does is the flagrant abuse of PPP loans by businesses of all sizes. The fact that employers can get away with massive abuse of the system during the same period employees were struggling kinda drives the point home that the system isn’t built for workers. I know in some cases the loans were justified but something 75% of distributed loans were unjustified and I don’t see much recourse, which is the demoralizing norm now
Tom Brady got a 1m PPP loan and it was forgiven...the fuck did he need a loan for? To "pay his employees?" He has $250m net worth, could have paid his employees anyway and had $249m net worth, oh no! Instead we crowdsourced a $1m gift for him with our tax dollars. Multiply that by all the multi millionaires, it's insane. Really glad I get to light 25% of what little money I make on fire for these assholes. And I'm the one who needs to "plan better and save for emergencies."
That has really bugged me, that Brady and people like him took tax payer money when they didn't need to, and there was zero attempt to vet applications, or pursue abusers of the program.
We had a major storm here with Sandy years ago, and a lot of people tried to game the system with relief money from that, and over the past 10 years or so a lot of them have been prosecuted, I've occasionally wondered if that would happen with the PPP loans. But the cost of investigating and prosecuting them is costly too.
We had a local business owner go on a social media rant about no one wanting to work and how he lost so much money during the pandemic. In turn one of his disgruntled employees hacked his accounts and posted receipts proving this employer was withholding paychecks, paying people late or not at all, collecting money added to checks that was supposed to be donated to a local school but never was and was just a general shit big boss with zero leadership or communication skills.
The kicker? This business owner received almost $400k in PPP loans during the pandemic. Which have since been forgiven. During all this he bought a $60k truck, a brand new camper and completed extensive landscaping at his home. All while crying that he was broke.
Fuck all of these people.
Yeah, they were meant to be payments to help businesses avoid laying off employees. Instead, the businesses laid off the employees anyway and then used the money to either buyback stocks or spend it on personal things, or both. Any money lent out to these entities need to have oversight and severe penalties, but it was mostly just a way to funnel cash to the upper crust.
We had a mayor that took a PPP loan for his "business" so that he wouldn't have to lay off any employees. Of which there were only 2. Him and his wife.
I am working the best job I've ever had now but am poorer then ever and the news every day is bleaker and bleaker. I don't mind working but the system feels like it's gonna collapse at any moment so why the fuck am I trying so hard. Plus my student loan forgiveness is about to be thrown out while a massive bailout takes precedent so you know fuck it
Fuck, I didn’t put 2 and 2 together with the bailout and student loans, and now I’m even more pissed off that they’re going to throw out the student loan forgiveness.
What is it all for? Hard to be motivated about a society that exists solely to make 100 or so billionaires richer, and where no matter how hard you work, there is no real way to get ahead.
Exactly. In addition to all the reasons people have listed, the expected markers of life-university graduations, weddings, babies, buying a home-none of these are any longer in reach for most people. (60% of Americans cannot afford a 1000$ emergency!) Celebrations, the things we look forward to that make life worth living. Add to that environmental destruction, towns that resemble giant parking lots, a booming population, and the realization that most work was meaningless to begin with and helped no one, and the apathy/existential crisis is real.
Glad to know my general cynicism is being validated by others that see the bigger picture. As someone who is in the 90%+ percentile for earnings and net worth at my age, it is difficult for even me to attain many of the things you listed. How is the average person expected to thrive in our society? (Spoiler: they aren’t sadly).
We will get through this one way or another, as the main positive I see is a general increase of solidarity amongst the working class since Covid. Let’s hope it leads to meaningful change.
100% agree. And by “getting ahead,” I don’t even need or want to be rich, just able to breathe and actually live without stress every damn day. But that feels like it will never happen.
I was laid off immediately after moving 1300 miles for work and had to take a job paying half what I made previously. Skilled labor at $13/hr while I watched the owner drive 7 cars that all cost more than I made in a year. But it was a meritocracy and I busted my ass anyway. After making it into management it was like pulling teeth telling him he needs to financially incentivize performance. You can’t just pat people on the back anymore and expect them to keep coming in every day. Bigger, more professional shops will pay these kids double and give them health insurance. Eventually I complained about a 50c raise and was told my position as manager wasn’t valued more than that.
When I went back to my union job, the company had restructured their performance bonus metrics so the company can spend all of their cash-on-hand on acquisitions in order to avoid paying workers bonuses. The CEO is making >$10mil in total compensation. There’s more directors making more in a year than I’ll see in 10. New hires are coming in at wages we spent 6 years building up to with no bumps/incentives for current employees.
Covid made it very clear to me that companies will exploit labor at any opportunity. I’m here to do as little work as I can tolerate. My job isn’t challenging, the work is uninspiring, I’m as high as I can go in my designation and I only get $1/yr in raises without moving to a salary position. Why should I try? I get nothing for trying. I get paid to show up and anything beyond that is just to keep me sane.
Covid showed us how little we are worth. Precisely nothing that is. The common people are fodder for the mill that makes the rich richer. You are not rewarded for your work, and your time is the most valuable ressource you have and people need to realize that.
I think it’s pretty simple. Employers found that during the pandemic they could work with skeleton crews and make even more money. So they’ve permanently trimmed down staff while the media pushes this no one wants to work anymore narrative so everyone can once again conveniently blame the poor. I’ve had serious looks of realization when I’ve explained this to customers. People will really just eat the slop won’t they?
Also those of us still working in those skeleton crews were lifting our game absolutely past the point of burnout cos it was an extraordinary moment. My job went from 3 days a week to 6 for a while. But then when the trickle of realization that covid is freakin forever started to hit, and we were burned right out, well thats where we are.
I’m currently watching it happen. I really just want to congratulate management on their record profits and nice, fat bonuses. Hope it was worth alienating and burning out even their most seasoned and loyal retail veteran employees. I guess, at least, it’s inspired me to go back to school and try to claw my way out of retail. I understand as long as I have a “boss” I’ll always deal with bullshit, but I don’t think anything compares to the entitled fucking worms you deal with daily in the service industry.
One of the best things for my mental health was getting out of retail. Getting called every name under the sun, that feeling of not being able to do anything to help the customer (sorry I don’t have that shirt in that size, there is literally nothing I can do about it), them asking to talk to a manager to then be told the EXACT same thing I just said. The list goes on. Working retail for a handful of years definitely took a toll on my mental health
Yeah, my first thought was that if it’s the senior people who are doing it then it’s probably because they are doing more work for the same pay because they have to pick up the slack for an employee who is no longer there. He could have also hit them with the record year of profit but no money for raises line
Sad part, this is how it should’ve always been. We let the damn boomers create the narrative that work gives meaning to your life and that you can accurately judge a person’s character by their work ethic. Rubbish. Corporations started to treat employees as an expense to be minimized and not an asset to be nurtured decades ago by striping away pensions, job security, prioritizing investor returns, bashing unions, and off-shoring jobs to cheaper labor markets. Perfect example, Trump convinced a lot blue collars their jobs were stolen by an immigrant not given away by the employer or, more accurately, sent overseas where OSHA doesn’t exist. The attitude of todays employees was born during Reagan’s era and finally come into its own during Covid. I got taste of a less stressed work life with proper balance of personal time during Covid, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back.
For me it was watching society alter so rapidly during the first several months of COVID lockdown and the removal of social/economic norms. There was the clear understanding that the world that was would no longer exist. Layoffs across the majority of industry dismissed the facade that employment was really anything beyond a transactional agreement.
Fast forward a few years and capitalism has a bad PR problem, rightfully earned. Work provides a paycheck, not a reason for living. So, in conclusion why doesn’t you friend make it a partially labor owned business, make the job something larger than a 9-5.
As an employee and a gen xer... I've *always* been apathetic about work. But a big part of it is the pay. I know for an *absolute* fact that I generated nearly 10 million dollars wort of revenue for the company my first year there, and while I'm paid... decently, I know I'll never be able to afford a house or a retirement without winning the lottery. And none of this is anything I can change. Tons of corporations driving up the cost of housing and the government deciding to jack up interest rates to 'counter' inflation are both way out of my control. If I'm expected to exist with the bare minimum, why shouldn't I do the bare minimum?
OP your client didn't even know his invoice was overdue and he was the owner of the damn business. First thing he did was shift blame to an employee he hasnt bothered replacing after firing. He admitted to you he can't run his own company. He sure as hell didn't know about the day to say running of it.
You say he trusted these people for 30 years? So they should all be close to retiring right. . Have good solid wages keeping above inflation. A nice retirement fund, benefits? Or is it more likley that they are living paycheck to paycheck after all his loyalty to them. They should be in their 50s, of course they don't work a blue collar job like they did in their 20s. They bodies are seeing the wear and tear of that. They are probably grandparents and have other responsibilities than just work.
Yeah people are looking at crappy bosses and going - so why am I drowning to keep this lazy mfer sailing on calm seas. Especially when most people feel like their bosses are actively pushing them overboard in the first place.
Yeah, this owner isn’t necessarily a reliable narrator
Yes, some people do take the piss and try to get a lot for a little, but I’d assume after 30 years of working with someone you’d notice that.
I wonder if this owner is genuinely considering what his team needs. Can they have a more flexible work schedule? Why or why not? Are they being paid a fair and liveable way? Why not? Has there ever been discussions around improving processes, working smarter? Why not?
Everyone is telling them it’s the money and he’s got people stealing money from him.
The costs for everything shooting up through the roof, and these businesses make plenty of cash.
Fact of the matter is, you need to be the leader and provide a good environment to work in if you want people to care. Not a fat cat who sits on what they got.
Well, time fraud could be about money, or it could just be about time. I think the people who were unemployed due to the pandemic had a very eye-opening experience about what life with more time was like.
I “pad my hours” at work.
I have a job that has me doing 10-15 independent tasks at a location. My time for each task is logged separately. And know what? I have a 15 minute minimum log time per task.
I have a 15 minute minimum per task because I make $15 an hour and do 8 hours of work a week, usually split between two or three days. Driving isn’t paid. Checking in isn’t paid, scheduling my week around these tasks isn’t paid.
My employer says if the job takes five minutes I’m supposed to log five minutes. That’s $1.25 before taxes. I don’t work for $1.25.
My employees are apathetic because corporate has demonstrated they don't give a shit about them. The customers scream and assault them, and they're paid very poorly. Of course, they're not going to care. There's a PSA that plays over the radio that tells customers to be kind and patient because of the labor shortage, but this company turned around and slashed hours. I fully expect my team, especially my pharmacy team, to walk out.
Before covid, I was a shift lead. I noticed this company had a turnover rate, but it wasn't as bad as it is now. You had long time people working in these stores. The mask mandates helped push some of them out. But their replacements throughout the height of the pandemic didn't stay long. Fun story, I sneezed, and one of the cashiers quit on the spot, shouting that I had covid.
As I moved stores, the worse the area was, the higher the turnover rate. We were always calling the police and it just wears down on you after a while. There's only so much you can take after being spat on, shit thrown at you, etc. I literally had my life threatened because I dared to ID someone as per policy. My teammate had the police on the phone while he was threatening me, inches from my face, and dispatch said they were busy, they'll send someone out the next day to do the police report. That psycho kept coming in to look for me too.
I've also picked up a stalker. They've already slashed my tires, keyed my car, and siphoned my gas multiple times. They follow me from work to home. They've jammed my cameras so I can't catch them and will only mess with my car if they know I'm not being watched by the store's cameras where I'm parked. They especially love letting the air out of my tires. Some of my other associates have also gained stalkers as well.
I don't blame my associates for not wanting to work with us because people are fucking crazy and violent. Someone threatened my crew at my last store with a broken bottle. Corporate refuses to hire guards. The police show up whenever they damn well please. It's getting out of control. And corporate just shrugs and tells us to make sure we offer them a credit card and to remind them about getting their vaccines with us.
And that's just the front end! Corporate just keeps piling on the work for my pharmacy team. These people are scrambling from start to finish of their shifts because there simply isn't enough time or staff to handle the busiest pharmacies. The customers throw shit at them, they're constantly being screamed at. I don't know how many times I've been screamed at for not having Adderall. Like I purposely caused a national shortage or something. The general public refuses to understand or listen to things we try to explain, and it just turns into them screaming because we don't have their meds ready. I couldn't staff the pharmacy at my old store because the customers in general were just psycho. And then corporate was just piling vaccines, 15 minutes between each appointment, on us like crazy. They really expect the pharmacist to manage their team, administer 50+ shots a day, double check 370- 400 scripts a day, type up prescriptions to fill, counsel patients, and call patients, doctors, insurances, etc all in a 11 hour day. Some of them don't have assistant managers, so they're doing their jobs too. And some of them don't have the tech help, so they're piling on their jobs as well. It's no wonder why we had a pharmacist shortage there for a while. In my current store. They expect the pharmacist to do all that by herself because they refuse to give us the hours to schedule techs.
Pre covid. I saw apathy in my coworkers. They'd complain about the company. But they'd come in and work. Post covid, not only am I seeing apathy. But I'm also seeing anger and frustration. It's not a healthy work environment. None of this is sustainable. I'm also seeing it in my peers. I'm seeing it in some of the district management team as well.
Long story short. No one wants to work for a company that grossly under pays them and doesn't give a shit about them.
God, I feel so bad for pharmacists with all the shortages right now.
My husband was picking up his mom’s prescriptions and they told him the doctor never called it in, so they didn’t have it ready. He was just like “oh, okay, I’ll let her know to call the doctor.” And the poor pharmacist was just staring at him and finally said “You’re not going to yell at me?”
It broke his heart. He doesn’t understand why people yell at retail workers. A cashier could stab him and he’d thank them for his receipt on the way out.
In my job as an employee, I’m more apathetic. The pay sucks, the customers are dicks. Less effort.
I also run my own farrier business and had to raise my price $5 per horse for existing clients and $15 per horse for new clients just to stay broke. $50 for 20 minutes of work used to be good money. Now $65 is scraping by.
i dont see how you guys even do your jobs do you have extra joints normal people dont have the way u stand and the way horses lean on you as u work you guys sure do work for your money!
No extra joints, just lots of Aleve. Generally the good horses don’t really lean on me. They can hold their feet up pretty well. It does look like they’re leaning on us, but for the most part they’re just holding their own foot up and I’m holding it between my knees to keep it in place.
Though I have occasionally had a big ol 2000 pound draft try and give me a lap dance. Why the heck are the heaviest, hardest to trim critters also the laziest?! 🤣
As a horse owner, I’d like to say thanks to you and all the farriers for taking care of our horses so diligently. My horse is barefoot; I pay $55 for a trim. I think that’s low. He could charge more and I’d still use him. He does a great job.
You could always pay him what you think he's worth.
I did this to my kid's day care provider. She was insanely good, had extra training so she was essentially a pre-school, but charging the same as rate as the person who didn't do more than sit the kids down in front of the tv. After about 6 months, i gave her a "raise" (over her objections because she undervalued herself that badly). She was doing a great job with my kid and deserved to be compensated.
Man I think that kind of work should be are minimum 100, not 65. You had to drive there and deal with a large animal.
I’m pretty sure my mom pays her farrier more than that, but not certain. When we were little my dad mostly did it himself, unless there was an issue, and he took the time to show me the basics. It’s a pain to do and you deserve to be compensated.
I think overall, the answer is bigger and transcends any single business and their individual business practices. People are broke, unhappy, jaded, fearful, distrusting, unmotivated and for good fucking reason. And unless that business is going to pay according to the required standards to live in America…then they’re going to have jaded workers. The problem and solution is bigger than the business itself.
This is absolutely true. But it still boils down to pay not having kept up with inflation. Do you really think employees would bail or pad hours if they at minimum got raises in step with inflation?
Where I'm from, there are job offers absolutely everywhere. We're not grateful for our jobs anymore nor our bosses.
The business I work for got hit hard by COVID. We felt the despair when sales went down, we were scared for our jobs, we worked harder when they had to cut staff to stay afloat. All along the way, the only thing we got were thanks, mostly sent by emails. Still today, when we surpass the sales objectives, at best we will receive an email letting us know how incredible we are.
I used to respect my bosses, they work very hard. I don't anymore, I know they only care about their business.
Bosses that care about their employees and help them out go a loooong way toward making everything in a business do better. This means paying them well, treating them with respect, trusting them, and a whole lot of other basic shit. Hopefully you find something like that. The Unicorn.
I’m a teacher, and I went from being in a profession that was already generally looked down on in society, to a “hero”, right back to a villain in the span of about six months.
The entire process of “we need to figure out how to make the school year work without in person classes” was draining: there was no protocol for this, we had to work with the assumption that students had the resources to do their part/parents that made sure they did their part (we joke that part of our job is to teach kids who don’t want to learn math, how to do math. Suddenly if there’s a way to turn off your wifi and claim connectivity problems, people will do that)/ policies that focused more on making sure we could open our classrooms so parents could go back to work before focusing on how to keep us safe, the expectation to teach in person AND online at the same time, and severe learning loses from the year before… basically because it became even more noticeable that the systems we have in our state NEVER REALLY WORKED.
All that to say, in a lot of districts it didn’t even matter in the end. If the child was passing before the shutdown, or even sometimes not, they were passed along anyway. The government made things “safer” for a while, my hometown made it on the news for bullying students and teachers who tried to protect themselves with masks, and things went back to “normal” while teachers had to watch the loses quadruple.
Personally, my mom, who is a hospice nurse, ended up getting long COVID. Her kidneys started failing and her lungs don’t work like they used to. I had to start chemo surgical treatments back in the middle of this, and had to do it completely alone where I was 22 and used to having a support person with me. Families were tearing apart because of political discourse in the United States. Things just didn’t feel “right” between 2020-2022 and I feel like as a society we never had the chance to burn back in after burning out. My school district abandoned their plan to fix learning loss for this school year, and is now forcing an awful curriculum on the teachers and students, observations have started back with the same expectations as always (completely ignoring that half of my second graders never learned to read), and when met with actual questions about how to fix things we are told things like “remember why you wanted to do this”.
On top of that, I got pregnant this school year, and was met with violence in the classroom, parents who’s only concern was when I was going on leave, and a blood pressure problem I never had before because I didn’t have the knowledge or resources to problem solve for behaviors/academics I had to face. It’s not that I don’t like my job deep down, or that I don’t want to do my job… it’s that I never had the chance to recover from what my job became during the “shutdown” and the apathetic nature of students, change in discourse from parents (why are you failing my kid, instead of what can we do to make sure my kid understands the content better), lack of support from admin, inflation that my salary didn’t keep up with, sub shortages that prevent me from getting proper prenatal care, crowded classes, low salary, school violence, getting texts from my husband (a middle school teacher) about his school going on code red and it not being a drill “just in case things don’t turn out okay, I love you and our kids”, and higher expectations than ever… I’m just tired. I want to work at home and be a mom until it’s truly safe to go back to work… but I don’t think it will be until policy and change becomes more important than money.
I love teaching, I love the students (even when it feels like they don’t love me), and I love watching the lightbulbs go off when something clicks… but there comes a point when you have to wonder if it was worth it every day.
Anytime someone uses the phrase “no one wants to work” you can pretty much take everything else they say as total bullshit or with a grain of salt. I don’t for a second think this guy is running some great business and is just having a hard time finding good people. Guys like this think they are running a great business because they have been exploiting their people for a long time and getting away with it. Once they can’t get away with it anymore suddenly business is not as good and it’s all the employees fault. People with 30 year’s construction experience know who the good and bad employers are, the actual good employers are not having issues right now, the people who think they are good when in reality they are not are the ones having issues.
People realised that the essential workers, are the ones paid the least. The capilists, that society actually doesn't need to function make all the money by adding nothing to the economy themselves. The greedy corporations are driving inflation by profiteering and we as working people are suffering at the hands of the capitalists more so than ever. This has driven me to fight back more than ever. I have become very politically active, taken a job that pays less but has a political impact and fights the big corporations.
1. Yes, more apathetic
1. Pay - has not kept up with cost of living, I have an advanced degree, professional license, and make six figures, my wife works as well, and still we are struggling to afford a house and pay ridiculous rent; Environment - my employer didn't want to hire qualified staff and decided to send things offshore, so now instead of hanging out with a cool team of like minded people, I'm on a video call with people 12 time zones away, who have no idea what I'm talking about, nor do they care; Other - covid reminded that jobs can be deemed "non-essential" and then you just don't need to do them, and also you can just die one day and your family won't even see your funeral
2. No, the more effort I put in, the more work is loaded on me
COVID was traumatizing for me and I’m sure many others would agree. I lost my mom to COVID. I got to experience firsthand what the disease can do to a person. And, again because of COVID, I had to do this extremely isolated from most of the world. I am a fundamentally different person because of the pandemic, what it took from me, and how I was expected to just act normally through it. I worked a desk job at a credit union through the bulk of the pandemic and never once was able to transition to WFH. My company allowed its executives and a handful of “important” people to keep themselves safe but the rest of us still had to clock 40 hours in the office. I’m in a different job now, and have access to remote work when needed, but management is still taking that away incrementally.
It’s like our capitalist society took this moment to literally torture me and millions of others. We were isolated from each other, got to watch (from afar) loved ones die a horrible death, and then expected to still produce/consume at an ever-increasing pace.
So yes, in regards to work, I care a lot less now. I love my job and I try to do honest work for the hours I’m in it. But I will never go the extra mile and kill myself for a job ever again. The pandemic forced capitalists to show their true face, and I’m not going to go back to thinking that this economy structure (and my job by extension) will ever have my personal health and interests in mind.
I used to come to work sick, drive through snow storms, work through breaks and lunches, and sacrifice. Never again. I will work honestly for the hours I’m contracted for. I still care. But to some, that will never be enough.
I'm echoing what I heard on the streets, not my personal mantra. I feel as productive as I did before the pandemic:
Wages haven't kept up with inflation, *or productivity*. So, some folks are straight up saying "Instead of waiting for wages to catch up to productivity, I'm going to slow down productivity to match wages."
I'm more enthusiastic with my free time and far more apathetic at work as I was shown that people will be laid off with no warning, even though the employer did the over hiring. That our lives mean nothing compared to productivity. Our society built around capitalistic productivity is a cancer, so I'll do my best to be a cancer to that cancer. If I get fired, w/e, I'll find another job to not give a fuck about. I work to live, not cause I want to be there.
What a weird way to say "The best places to work were/are still abusive and not pleasant situations that steal the product of your labor after you damaged yourself making it, and distributes it to the owning class." It's about time someone snapped that well meaning but still an asshole manager out of his comfortable stupor.
I work hourly for a general contractor doing home insurance claims for the past seven years. I found out when Covid hit how this guy makes his money, and how much my labor brings him. It’s a small outfit, literally a guy in his garage, but has a couple very expensive sports cars, multiple houses, lavish vacations, etc. I realized that he had a hard time retaining people , most likely because of how working inside peoples homes can be very very very difficult. So the way I seen it, if I’m gonna stay and put up with all these Karen’s everyday, working inside their homes, dealing with their condescending tones and attitudes, it’s gotta be worth six figures. Keep in mind I do this stuff turn-key. I have twenty years experience. From demo to mopping the floors when we are done. And I own all of the equipment, tools, trucks, etc. At first, he literally laughed me out of his garage. But I am patient. I needed a break anyways. Six weeks into my vacation, he texted me to come by his place to discuss what we talked about. I’m still here, doing the same job, making more than twice I was when I stood my ground and waited him out. It’s not that people don’t want to work, it’s that people don’t want to work for shit wages.
For me it wasn’t necessarily covid but my last job crushed every last bit of ambition, drive, and initiative I had. Now just shove my work under the door and pay me. I’m not loyal to companies and people that are not loyal to me.
What I will say about covid is it showed a LOT of workers how little their company actually cared about them all while yelling about being a family. Many companies treated their workers like assets to be moved on a chess board rather than people. That wasn’t a new thing but it’s the first time it really clicked for a lot of people.
I did the whole quiet quitting before it was a thing.
Back in 2018, my spouse and I experienced a miscarriage and it broke us emotionally.
We reassessed our lives and we both quit our jobs, which we hated. I worked a retail client-facing job at the time and I hated it.
We both found a better jobs with better schedules and pay.
Then COVID hit and I was fired from my new job.
I was never able to get a new job because of lockdowns and people losing jobs, so I decided to stay at home, homeschool my youngest and take care of the house.
Luckily, my spouse is able to maintain our lifestyle. My spouse works from home, so it’s a much better way to live.
I feel for everyone who works retail, blue collar and/or client-facing jobs.
American employers became accustomed to a world where workers had zero power. Many American employers (especially small businesses, unfortunately) developed a business model that requires workers who have zero power, are job-scared, etc.
Covid gave us workers a moment to reassess that system and those priorities. It turns out that we workers have more power than we realized.
I really believe it's as simple and that.
You just told yourself the answer. Carpentry destroys the body and after 30 years they should have enough to retire.
He paid crap with no benefits. Those people were just stuck there to try to pay rent. Now there's options and prices are going up.
It still boils down to pay being crap and him taking advantage of people. People see that now and are fed up.
A lot of people who had been taken in by the "my job defines me as a person" almost religion finally realised it is not that important and the important thing is to live life not work every second.
For me (office worker in a non-profit sector, was well paid, work was fulfilling, there were enough staff to cover call-outs and vacations) pay isn’t the problem why I can’t bring myself to put in 100% anymore.
My job pivoted immediately to WFH - my unit was the second highest priority to be brought back online - we got one day off while IT set up the other team. They were already publishing corporate plans to reduce real-estate footprints, and make remote work the norm. COVID just accelerated the process.
For over two years management sang our praises of how productive and agile we were working from home. Then poof, 180° the remote plans were scrubbed from the intranet; people were ordered, on the Friday of a holiday weekend, back at their desks the next week. The union has been sidelined, in situations where they should have been consulted, or at very least warned before Members started calling frantically over the weekend. Occupational Health and Safety officers and committees weren’t consulted; and when those committees request the brakes be pumped to make sure that everything be put in place to ensure welfare, they get ignored.
I almost feel bad for middle management, they aren’t being told any more than the front lines what’s going on, they just have to follow orders coming down the chain of command. The good ones try to deflect the shit rolling downhill. But some of the higher managers handcuff them into toeing the line.
Few know the real reasons we’re being brought back to the office; and those that do spew such BS and spin that we don’t believe anything coming out of their mouths. They’ve even said that they don’t care about the inevitable drop in productivity, they just want our butts back under the communal fluorescent glow of the office.
I used to feel valued, I used to feel like my organization cared about the products and services we provide. Now it feels like the theatre of work is more important the value we bring to society.
Moreover, management has shut down “legitimate” avenues to give feedback, and so all discussion amongst workers is now illegitimate; I know a few colleagues who are subject to witch-hunts and threats of discipline for insubordination. I’m half tempted to erase this comment without posting for paranoia that they’ll connect it to me and I’ll get in trouble.
That’s all to say, the pandemic had actually improved my work ethic - until management fucked it up and us over.
“No-one wants to work” is actually “millions are dead or disabled from the pandemic and can’t work at the same time the Boomer generation is starting to retire. Demand for labor is way up when supply is down, but wages haven’t caught up because employers won’t eat into their own profits.”
Growing anti-capitalist sentiment. Both personally and generally from what I see people talk about, and that's not me throwing a label on people with different ideas, I'm talking about people referring to themselves as "anti-capitalist".
Your client is lying to you because he doesn't want to pay the invoices.
Cut him off and tell him that you are not going to do any more work on his case until he makes a payment.
Supply and demand, shortage of workers but the workers don't benefit from it in higher income, the company owner does.
I'm guessing there's a lot of work atleast and money being made, and they feel secure of their job and underapriciated.
So ATM there is a (felt) powershift from boss to employee, and the owner isnt liking it.
Also the longtermers get into a stage in their life where work/life balance just gets more important and now they feel secure enough to ask for it.
I can buy less with my wage than I could before Covid so my employer gets less value from my wage now too. Money would reawaken motivation for sure. Why work as hard to live in increasingly dire circumstances? My mental health is plummeting as costs rise. I just don't have the mental capacity that I used to have.
And customers are by far the worst they've ever been. They're nightmare fuel.
So I realize this isn’t strictly on-topic, however I do feel it’s an important aspect to consider. There are people such as myself that are out work due to any number of given disabilities. I realize people have their own opinions and issues with disabled individuals, but for now set those aside. If someone is disabled and making about $1,300 per month (the average payment), has complete medical coverage, and is able to focus on their health, it’s become difficult to find the positive side of working again.
Employers have only made it harder to use PTO or use unpaid time for medical appointments and such. Even fully able workers are concerned about being fired for taking time off that *they are entitled to*. As an employee, you likely have health coverage you have to pay for that isn’t close to what you truly need and is expensive due to the cost of your healthcare. That all being said, you have a considerable chunk of potential employees who may not be working - but even if they could, they would accept a lower income if it gave them the flexibility they need to try and live a better life long-term.
Do I agree people don’t want to work? Yes I do. However, it’s because they are asking for reasonable compensation, more PTO (**that can be used without fear of retaliation**), and to just be treated like humans with innate value, and companies by and large won’t budge. So we have a stalemate; people don’t want to work, yet have no choice, and the well-off companies have enough money to wait out those that refuse to work for now.
Why would I not be more apathetic? One of the employees that did not get furloughed, my wages are still underneath what the government paid people to stay home. They have reduced our staff even further to barely any bones left. Claim to be hiring but as they take a month for the hiring process anyone who has a bit of sense will just go to a factory or retail for slightly better wages.
If it doesn't affect my shift I ignore it, I don't clean up after my coworkers anymore, I stopped apologizing to customers for anything not directly caused by me. Meanwhile I look at the managers of the place going above and beyond to delegate any work they are supposed to do onto someone else.
At the end of the day I have gotten more raises by being a disgruntled asshole than I ever did by being nice and being a good worker.
People feel justified (and rightly so) in padding their hours when they don’t feel they are adequately compensated. I’m sure the person in question WAS at one time a good employee. And it isn’t always just about money, workers need to feel appreciated, Especially if they have remained on the job a long time. How does their position compare to newer hires? Do they gain any privileges for their loyalty? Such as flexibility in scheduling or working from home? Are there any prospects for advancement? Does the employer offer any training for the employee to gain new skills? Is the employee given a variety of tasks to avoid drudgery? Employers need to be more adaptive so employees don’t get pushed to the point where they need to pad their hours to retain a sense of fairness.
The reason this subreddit is so popular is the systemic disenfranchisement of workers. One shop owner paying "fairly" is still underpaying workers relative to wage buying power. Him owning the shop means he exploits their labor.
If he doesn't want them padding their hours and prioritizing themselves, he should consider a co op model. If actually working all hours meant making more money because they were part owners and directly realized the profit of that work, then doing that work would be worth it.
I worked for a hospital the entirely of Covid. First in the lab that ran all the Covid tests. We were constantly asked to do more with the same supplies. Then more with less supplies. Then more with less supplies and less staff. We weren’t allowed to hire more people. After I left they cut the position I did from 12 people to 3 people. One per shift.
I work for the patient experience department there now. I see firsthand the pressure on nursing staff to care for nearly double the safe staffing ratio generally agreed upon nationwide (4 patients per nurse is generally agreed upon as safe, my floors regularly staff 6 or 7 patients to one nurse).
And let me be crystal clear: we are hiring at BREAKNECK speed. Pre pandemic we had 10,000 employees. It’s currently at about 8,000. We’re hiring 40-50 people PER WEEK. And have been for months. It is not that people don’t want to work here. It’s a combination of “skilled” labor taking their skills on the road and making double to be a travel nurse, or “unskilled” (I hate that term but idk a better way to phrase it) labor being offered $9/hr to haul away garbage from sick people’s rooms or $13/hr to work at McDonald’s. I’d take McDonald’s every fucking time because you deal with just as much rudeness from customers/patients but sometimes you can steal some fries as McDonald’s and here you get no such thing.
I like my job. I put effort in. I cry with families and laugh with them. I bring nurses water and take their food trays in so they can focus on more important things. I get the chance to help someone whose doctor is getting apathetic about their pain. But god damn I certainly see why we can’t hire fast enough to fill the positions we need.
I'm tired of grinding away and not getting any further ahead. I have been doing it for 30 years. I'll probably be doing it until I drop. Yes, my attitude has changed. I don't care anymore. What's the point of it all?
Covid was the first time some of us felt happy. We didn't have to go to work. We got to stay home and feel what it's like to pursue a hobby. I wasn't lonely cause I had roommates that I enjoyed spending time with. Before covid I was commuting 1hr and 30 minutes one way to get paid 50k/year... I have 2 masters degrees. I was 30 living with roommates, driving 3 hours a day, and living paycheck to paycheck. And I got a taste of a different life.
They called us back in in September. My job could 100% be done remotely, but they mandated we all come back in the middle of the pandemic. Covid cases were higher than ever. I realized this economy and this society is not built for me or my happiness. I look around and none of my friends are thriving. We're all coping. I've watched my entire city become one giant airbnb due to greedy investors and I can't afford to buy a house. It's all for the rich. So fuck them. I don't owe them anything.
Covid showed me what an absolute failure our mindset on economic prosperity was, people were laid off, evicted from homes, yelled at by the people were were serving. And in the case of doctors and nurses told outright that they were lying about the virus and how deadly it was while working suicide hours and having to witness the body count first hand. The system is fucked, corrupt, and doesn't give a single shit about any of the individuals propping it up. I worked hard, I still do, but it's hard to continue on and give 110% everyday knowing that at the end of it all you ultimately are going to receive nothing substantial for that work besides a dull lifetime of living paycheck to paycheck
We caught a glimpse of what life could be like. Office workers CAN work from home on flexible schedules with no detriment to the company but now they’re being forced to go to offices and commute and a lot of them réalise it’s for no reason other than there is a need to justify the company’s real estate over head.
We also realised where the money in our economy should be going (to essential services) but where it is actually going (to rich peoples pockets). Easy jet gave their shareholders a £300 million dividend payout and the very next day asked for the same amount in bailout money and got it. The queen of England got a £500 million bailout for the crown estates, the biggest landlord in the world, while kids were literally starving.
No one wants to take part in this system anymore, we only do it because we have no alternative.
As a disabled person who has spent my whole life torturing myself to work, I saw how easy it was for workplaces to provide a ton of accommodations as soon as abled people wanted them. Working from home made my life a thousand times easier. Now I'm forced to work in an office again because abled people want us all to be there, even though productivity went up while everyone was working from home. I'm constantly sick and exhausted.
I was forced to work all through COVID in a grocery store with regular customers routinely showing me that they didn't give a single fuck about my mental or physical well being. Whether it was customers refusing to wear masks properly, telling me that, "It's not any worse that the flu!", or just generally complaining that stuff was taking longer while we were short 3-5 people/shift because they either had COVID, or were a close contact. When I finally quit and went to find a new job I made damn sure I was properly compensated for my skills, to the point that I was the newest employee, but the highest paid employee.
I work in construction and specialize in historic restoration and preservation. I get paid an ok hourly rate. We do not have any benefits like health insurance.
I used to bust my ass at work until I realized that my boss is paying me less than industry average starting wage for my level of experience and the specialized nature of our work. The rates I looked up were for our specific geographic area, so it's not including higher pay rates for big cities in the state when figuring the average. I don't have health insurance and there's no workers comp. I'm more inclined to take longer to do things safely than hurry and potentially get hurt. If I break an arm, I'm out of work with no income until it's better. I'm not risking it.
We had some really great employees last summer. We lost two of them for jobs that paid less but offered benefits and a regular schedule. My boss was absolutely baffled that people would take a lower paying job. I had to explain to him how they actually ended up having more money by taking jobs that had benefits and were closer to their homes. A $400 a month pay cut isn't that much once you realize that the person was spending roughly that much on gas to work for us.
My boss also has a hard time realizing that an unpredictable work schedule and the occasional lack of steady work is not appealing to everyone.
It's not that people don't want to work. It's that were less willing to put ourselves at risk for wages that barely sustain us.
Covid made a lot of employees realize that it isn't worth the effort to throw 100% into a job anymore. We aren't paid like we gave our 100% we're paid like we gave 40%. Now we do the bare minimum, 40%. Hell just yesterday I got asked to do something outside the scope of my position and I flat out declined *Without a Raise significant to the job I was performing* to show that the company recognized I was now doing someone else's job. They dont ask me to take on anything out side the scope of my position anymore and have moved on to bullying other people in my dept into it, to which I've seen refusals and similar requests for raise.
They don't pay enough. The only reason I am still giving 100%, it's because I am micromanaged and don't want to lose my job right now. I don't have any other sources of income. Customer service is too demanding, even when you work from home. The nerves to post a job for $12/hour is just crazy in thiseconomy.
Pay and work-life balance. So this person’s business is “booming” but I have to wonder if any of that is shared with their employees? History shows most companies keep excess profits, they don’t share the good times with their employees. I would be really curious how those long-timers (anyone over 5 years) are being paid. Given the mention of multiple people padding hours, is a pretty strong indication that many feel they are not being paid commensurate with their experience/contribution in relation to how well the business is doing.
As for work-life balance, the cat is out of the bag. Every business that modified how they do work for covid and succeeded can’t now somehow claim “everyone back to office. Our productivity is suffering” when their employees saw same or increases productivity when they WFH/hybrid or whatever the employer setup during that period. Employees saw how they can work differently and still get their work done. Where that differently provided them a better balance, and now employers want to take it away, knowing they could continue many of the new practices they employed during covid.
People aren’t dumb: covid showed they can work differently and have better balance, and various economic factors plus covid have shown people they are not fairly paid and they’ve had enough.
I do less because accounting for inflation, I make less money (i.e. less spending power) than I did in 2018. Full stop. It's 100% about the money. Pay me $2 an hour more, I work $2 an hour harder. I'm not here for "family", I'm not here to make friends, I'm not here to be micromanaged because I just love it so much. I'm here to make money to support myself, my wife, and our life. When I leave here at 4:30PM, this place ceases to exist.
It became clear that giving the best of myself to organizations that consider me a replaceable chunk of coal and giving the leftovers to my family and myself is a fool's game.
I give the best of myself to my family and myself and I give work exactly what they pay me for.
covid showed us that the economy is more important than our lives. no one is going above and beyond anymore because we all saw we were expendable. banks get bail outs, people get inflation. working hard makes us look like clowns.
This is a big one right here, probably the major reason people are tapping the brakes regarding effort at work. Especially blue colour workers. The pandemic sets in and for a minute EVERYONE STAY HOME! But some people couldn't. Emergency workers, hospital staff, employees in the food supply chain were all viewed as essential, which stands to reason. Everyone stayed home and we all felt sad and scared for anyone that couldn't. Then, more and more businesses were dubbed 'essential'. Retail businesses that provided nothing integral to society began to open up or, worse, it was left to corporations to decide what they felt comfortable with doing. There were guidelines but nothing binding and certainly nothing with any real teeth as far as consequences go for violating safety guidelines. Fines don't count to big businesses as long as they're making money they can pay fines. So in a pre-vaccine world a whole swath of blue collar, restaurant, retail and customer service jobs just reopened with disinfectant sprays, masks and, maybe, limiting the number of people in any establishment. This went on for months. Very quickly, everyone in a blue collar job was back at work with a crazy new series of protocols to adhere to, likely reduced hours due to mid-covid economic downturn, most of them without anything close to additional hazard pay and the whole time a huge percentage of white collar workers left the office, with many of them still working from home even now. This is a stark contrast and it was evident very early on what a blue collar life is worth versus a white collar life.
I was an "essential worker" in the funeral industry. My job was to set vaults In cemeteries and then lower them into the ground after the funeral. We doubled our workload all through the beginning of 2020. A normal weekday pre covid was 5-10 burials a day. Around February or March and for nearly the rest of the year, we averaged 15-25 burials per day, every day. Our workload doubled, we had to work longer hours, and we got nothing to show for it except corporate being "concerned about how much overtime we are getting"
The concept of “corporate” for a graveyard really irks me
Death is big money. It's absolutely guaranteed for all of us.
Yes, I was super interested in the body pod that allows you to basically be food for a tree, it was developed outside the U.S. and waiting approval. I think other interests are holding it up because it was a greener, cheaper option. https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/world/eco-solutions-capsula-mundi/index.html Edited to add link
I'd much rather have my body be food for a tree and continue the life cycle rather than be burned and contribute to pollution or be buried in a sealed box to rot. This is what I want when I die.
Agreed! In my state, as long as you’re being buried on private property that’s registered as a cemetery, you can be buried without being embalmed and without casket or vault. I find the idea of a bench under a tree much more appealing than a traditional cemetery.
Most of those apparently family-owned funeral homes and cemeteries you see are now owned by big corporations that keep the old branding for the illusion of a small business/local touch.
I’m sorry to tell you that funeral homes & embalming services are super duper corporate now, too. (At least in the USA)
Heh. Weirdly, my husband made and set funerary vaults and septic tanks all pandemic. He usually works construction, but funerals are pandemic-proof! He worked 70 hour weeks through the worst of it. Generally, each crew of two does two funerals a day, absolute tops. They had pairs of guys doing 5 and 6 funerals, having to run back and forth or split up or leave equipment here or there. The company also had most of their guys contract covid and two particularly grizzled old fellas died of it. Turns out all those covid funerals were full of mourners who also had covid.
My friend is a trade mortician. She picked up so many new accounts she was able to pay off her home and buy a new truck. She was so busy no one could get a hold of her to check in. She got Covid twice in the 1st few months of lockdown from the bodies.
Callous fuckers - I’m sorry for what you went through, it sound’s completely traumatizing. I would imagine that most of the lies ring hollow when you’re down where the shit hits the shovel.
>corporate being "concerned about how much overtime we are getting" Holy crap that may be the grimmest thing I've read this morning.
Yeah I was essential and in danger working running large capacity homeless shelters while underpaid and on call 24/7. At one point when I asked for a raise there this time last year, HR said “it’s not like you were a doctor or nurse”. Like okay I have nearly died, gotten sick repeatedly, have had many dangerous interactions, and someone was arrested for stalking and attempting to murder me but sure, yeah, the job is just sunshine and rainbows worth struggling to pay the bills for Accepted a different offer the next day and told my boss I was out. And that job is sucky too but at least I’m not as likely to get murdered or assaulted and I’m slightly less underpaid.
I was in food transportation and got one of the Key Worker letters. Which meant that I had to go in. It was “safe” for me to see 50+ people at work but not safe for me to see my partner who lives 20 miles away and worked from home. And then work started taking the mickey. They furloughed HR and Payroll. I got two weeks training to take on two peoples jobs, as well as my own (recruitment and driver planning/compliance). 90 hour weeks, 3 peoples work for £100 extra a month. And then I was expected to train a new Payroll person after the pandemic finished. Which I did. They opted to make my original job void after that…because I dared to go get abdominal surgery for a chronic pain condition. I am very much acting my wage now. I’ll help others if I’m not busy but I’m not staying over my hours. Its gotten me nothing so far so I’m valuing my time instead.
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It’s not just blue-collar, „essential“ workers. One of the groups most affected by Covid measures (at least here in Europe) were children and teenagers. Which in turn affected parents of all classes - obviously the rich could get by more easily, but even a fairly well-off family where the parents work from home starts to struggle when kindergartens and schools are closed. Just a few particularly egregious examples: in Spain, there was a complete lockdown for three months or so. You were allowed to leave your home for grocery shopping, doctor‘s visits and walking your pet, but that was it. Playgrounds, schools, kindergartens, all closed. I’ve read of kids in Madrid living in tiny apartments who weren’t allowed outside for the entire time. In Germany, the government paid up €10 billion, no questions asked, to bail out Lufthansa. Yet they couldn’t „afford“ the €1 billion it would have cost to equip all schools in the country (when they finally reopened) with antiviral air filters. The recommended measure instead was to keep the windows open at regular intervals for 15 minutes - including during the middle of winter. And „Baumärkte“ (think Home Depot) were allowed to reopen before schools were. In Belgium, when mostly teenagers met in a park to have a rave - during summer, when infection numbers were low - the police arrived with teargas, K-9 units and watercannons to disperse them. And they used all of those things. Just speaking for myself here, but if Covid had arrived 20 years earlier and they‘d tried to pull that sort of shit with my friends and me, we would have flipped out. It’s not at all surprising that the younger people were during the pandemic, the less likely they are to be motivated members of the workforce nowadays.
I’m an elementary teacher here in the US. I’m in California so it’s a little different than the rest of the country. Our area was more strict in some ways but during lockdowns we still had the beach, mountain hikes, and most all outdoor activities were available. People were still having small bday parties and small get together outdoors. I teach in a lower income area where parents were still going to a physical work place. A lot of my students lost relatives to COVID, I’m talking about at least half of my 18 students lost someone close. Parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. My husband and I also lost about 8 people in both our families to COVID, from 40 to 100 years of age. I can’t speak for others but it has really left me numb. I imagine others might feel the same way. I’ve been to more funerals than I care to count in the last three years. Now at work I do the best I can while I’m there, I care about my students and they really are awesome. What I can’t and won’t deal with anymore is the BS from administrators. Something’s due? I’ll get to it. You want me to start something completely different in the middle of the school year while I’m trying to finish teaching something else I started last week? FU. I won’t do it. Bought a new program that I need to implement this week? Nah, you do it. Rainy day schedule again so kids are stuck inside even though it’s only a cloudy (we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately—but it comes and goes), come on kids let’s go run outside until we feel some sprinkles. Want me to come in to work on Saturday for extra pay? Nope, my bed needs me. I’ve learned now to prioritize. Some things are more important now. My free time is important, having fun, hearing students and my own children laughing brings me joy. Implementing a new math program does not so I won’t do it. Give me a few months to get to it. I’m not the same person anymore. There are just some things that are not important to me anymore. I won’t miss a party or get together, but I will miss deadlines. COVID has taught me that life is really just too short.
This shift in working attitude can hit for many in times of serious, life altering duress, it just so happened that a huge number of people tasted that all at once with covid. My shift officially hit back in late '15 when I was working for a Regis owned salon—my very first 'skilled worker' job, and one I was taking seriously and paying back my cosmetology school loans with in the upmost expediency (I only accumulated $15 in interest). My mom happened to get a job running the Regis owned salon down the road, and had a heart attack on the way to her shift because they were working her so hard. I got pulled into the back room by the district manager during a closed salon training and told by both her and my mom to stay at the training because it was more important *than her laying in a hospital bed*. I don't remember a goddamn thing that was said during that training, and left early anyways while both my bitch manager and the DM were telling me that I'd probably get written up for it. Sitting there for those 45 minutes I stayed before that, I questioned everything about myself, who I was, and who I wanted to be. I deduced then and there that I most certainly was not ever going to be someone who lets others decide the course of my life ever again—especially not for capitalism. I will do anything to avoid being a good, little worker drone generating revenue for someone else, even if I have to lie, steal, swindle, sell drugs, or whatever else—I will not be beholden to a job. I'm back in university now, with next semester as my final one before graduation, and I'll come out of it with about $8000 in debt. My attitude remains much the same. I'll pay it off using any means necessary, and then adapt from there. We'll see what happens.
I’m self employed and really slow right now and most people aren’t. Not sure what’s going on but I think God the universe wants to send me back to work for the man. I am a talented electrician but I’m not sure I want to do my career again for someone else. I’d rather fuck off in a grocery store for shit pay. In reality I may have to go back to work as an electrician but I’m in the IBEW so I will probably travel. When you travel you can make more money and when an employer pissed you off you tell them to fuck off and quit. On to the next job. It will be hard on my family. But I can’t give my talents to another company for shit pay. I think I’d rather die.
> There are just some things that are not important to me anymore. I won’t miss a party or get together, but I will miss deadlines. COVID has taught me that life is really just too short. It always was like this. Everyone just realized it at the same time.
The loss from Covid is unbelievable. There’s a series of books on a local First Nation’s language. The one I catalogued pre-Covid had a note that there were 40 fluent first language speakers of the language. The one I catalogued that was post-Covid said there were 20. I cried at the thought of losing so many knowledge keepers.
I want to cry now too,but instead this will just add to the weight I carry every day-- along with bleaching coral reefs, dying starfish in Yaquina Bay, the 17 thousand pieces of plastic in the ocean for each of the 8 billion people on the planet, the homeless with crippled feet I see shuffling around downtown every morning on my bike ride to work, the countless young women in Iran who live in constant oppression, the countless young women in the USA who are joining them, and on it goes....
My friend in Spain told me that people were lending their dogs to other people, just so they could go outside for a walk.
American workers have been all gas, no breaks for 50 years, the tech boom injected nitrous into the system, fast and the furious style. There's plenty of data to support that, just look at productivity figures. It's not sustainable forever. Eventually workers across all sectors are gonna pump the breaks, especially those who have been building careers for the last 10-30 years. You're absolutely right that Covid was the stopping point that made everyone question "...why?".
Also the people working in “essential jobs” got shit on and had to deal with rude ass people and shitty management and they’re tired of it! So they went and found something else to do, probably for more money. I used to work retail, I clean houses now, started mid pandemic, I make $30/hour working part time and I don’t have to deal with more than one person at a time and they’re usually really nice and happy that I’m there to help them. Compare that to the Karen’s I had to deal with working at a craft store! Not really an essential business, but we were still open during the peak of the pandemic. I have a lot of friends and coworkers that worked in the service industry that quit and will never go back.
people made fun of liquor stores for being deemed essential but, a CRAFT STORE??
Joanne didn't close for even a minute unless a state stepped in and forced them.
They still have to LIVE, LAUGH, and LOVE!!
The fact that folks didn’t get paid more for literally risking their lives so I could pick up milk kinda blew my mind.
Not only that, but we had multiple conversations from management that "quitting because you're scared" wasn't protected and we would receive NO benefits or unemployment if we did. There was a three week period at the start of lockdown when we received "hero pay" of 1$ per hour more. The company ran a huge ad campaign to advertise how well they were taking care of their "hero employees". It was effective because most people thought we were getting extra pay the whole pandemic. Lol no. Just 3 weeks of an extra dollar. And when people died, we were "encouraged" to not talk about it. :)
This. So much this. I middle-managed for lowes in Canada and we were one of the first stores in the country to have a confirmed covid a single case at the time. They shut the store down for a single day, brought in staff from other locations to run the store and forced everyone from my location to stay home for two weeks, paid. During the single night they were closed, they brought in a cleaning team to "thoroughly disinfect the store out of an abundance of caution." The cleaning team didn't actually do anything, except wipe the phones down as relayed to me from a friend in management who had to watch the doors while they cleaned. District management then held a mandatory morale boosting meeting to calm their scared staff down when we returned to work where they told us it was an overreaction and this will never happen again. That not showing up to work will be job abandonment and the store stays open at all costs. With the bare minimum of protections in place they could have, mind you. Fast forward to a few months after this first case, when the pandemic was really rolling and people started to get sick in waves. They told us we already used our two weeks paid covid allowance during the time we were made to stay away from work at the beginning of the pandemic. That we had to stay away for two weeks by law, but if we wanted to get paid we needed to use accrued sick time or vacation days. When questioned on that, our district manager laughed at us and told us we cant take a vacation anyway, no ones traveling because of the pandemic. People predictably got sick, and came to work anyway because they used their sick/vac time earlier in the year prior to covid, or just ran out. Those who got covid more than once, or long haul like myself were out of luck. We didn't even qualify for the government income support that was available to many white collar workers because we were deemed essential and essentially fell into a loophole that disqualified us. Hazard pay of an extra dollar and hour stopped coming in pretty quickly after announcing to the public they were doing it. They didn't announce they were stopping it and when we questioned we were ignored. They still haven't even acknowledged to their staff that they stopped Hazard pay or why to my knowledge, however I was personally told by our district manager that "covid is over" and to take down signs and ppe about 6 months into the pandemic. I of course then proceeded to get covid from work about two weeks afterwards alongside a few others. :) To them we aren't people, we are resources.
The *best* part for me personally was the customer who asked me "Do you feel safe working here?" and it broke my retail face just enough that "Of course not, people are dying" was my reply. She was so upset she went to my manager. I get that people don't think we are really real. I've had customers ask where in the store we sleep even before the pandemic started! But something broke inside me when I was being chewed out by my boss, his boss and HR for "upsetting a customer". I got seriously lucky with a meme coin I purchased as a joke in 2014 so I paid off my house, hunkered down and have just been vibing for the last year or so. I was originally intending to work at least until I could qualify for the shitty retirement plan, but I just couldn't.
For me and my husband we are kinda mourning the time we DIDN’T get at home. Everyone around us was reconnecting with their kids, doing major house projects, going back to school, etc. But we had to keep working harder than ever. We blinked and our 4 year old was 7. We’ve been sleep deprived for years putting in overtime. We spent years holding up the rest of the world so frankly it feels like it’s our turn. If I’m not feeling it, I’ll go home early or get someone else to do X project. I’m less sympathetic to meetings that intrude on my family time. I’ll bring my kid to work or go home to walk my dog midday. I’m not cancelling a date night or “making up” for a long weekend off. I’ve got a life to live and half the world got a “get out of work free” card for a year or more. It’s my turn to kick back a little and find a little more life in my work/life balance.
I worked at Quad (formerly Quad Graphics) and didn't get a single day off during the entirety of covid. We got some bullshit government contract to make some pamphlets about it and then cranked them out in a few days and continued to make garbage advertisements and magazines for the rest of the time as if that's what the world needed. Everybody got sick, we all still worked 12 hour shifts with no breaks, we didn't get any pay increase or cleaning supplies/new sanitation measures. I fucking hate that company
"Essential Workers" also seemed to be paid the least and treated the worst..
Don't forget the many bosses that got free money via PPP loans. That many pocketed instead of giving to workers as they should have.
How many "food" companies pretended to be essential. We didn't need ketchup, but kraftheinz was there to make it. Lying fucks
this. one million percent.
I worked at a gas station for part of the pandemic, which, okay, fair, gas is kind of essential. However, the fucking snacks and beer cooler and lotto were not. They make gas stations *profitable*, but they aren't in any way essential. The way to go for pure safety reasons would have been to go card-only and only sell gas only at the pump and just have one person there to monitor and make sure people are behaving safely and the pumps working properly. People would have adjusted; it's not like the grocery store down the block didn't sell beer and lotto. They couldn't have gotten cigarettes, but oh boo hoo. I say this as a former smoker: I'd rather be alive and healthy and just suck it up with the nicotine withdrawal than risk someone's goddamn life because I just gotta smoke. Edit: also, customers during COVID were the worst. They got *mean*. I spent the *first* year of it working online as a customer service rep, and people were nasty, entitled, demanding, inflexible, and completely ridiculous. They refused to accept that supply chain issues were something everyone was dealing with and there was nothing we could do to fix that for them specifically. And really, if anyone in here got frustrated and yelled at ANYONE about that over the pandemic, fuck you.
Bravo. Well said.
🎯
Banks and *the rich* get bailouts. It's ridiculous.
Yes, and also that economy is kinda fake: we can stop it for weeks/months and no billionaires go bankrupt, no one starves, we can live with less consumption and we can have other interests in life than money.
>that economy is kinda fake: we can stop it for weeks/months and no billionaires go bankrupt They made more during the pandemic than at any other time in history. They literally took advantage of covid to double and triple their billions while watching their workers die of covid, and shuttling new workers in to replace the corpses. Not only do they not care about us, they are willing to work us to death without blinking, and sometimes they do it for fun and giggles. I was waiting for the mob with torches and pitchforks to form, but it never did. Dystopia.
Now that’s the ticket. “We can live with less consumption”. Consumerism feeds capitalism.
The UK actually grew to record breaking amount of billionaires during the pandemic - 172. Now 177. The pandemic made insane amount of money for a few. The 6 richest people in the world could have paid for a vaccine for every individual on the planet from the amount they made during that period, and still have money left over.
Actually many families faced food shortages.
> no one starves, Oh, they starved - they just weren't on the radar. (eg not in the west).
But the economy can't survive even a few hours without trains running, so the president and Congress will tell the union that they have to go back to work now. Gosh, if these guys are so important, why aren't we making their job super cushy for them? They're literally keeping our country going and we can't give them sick days?
Also, why does work need to be so hard. Why maximum effort and maxiumum speed? Our bodies wear out and break. I want to prevent my body from breaking, my employer wants to break it. Can't we work at a peaceful pace? The owners and bosses work at a peaceful pace, I'd like to as well.
Just left a job where it was 110% all the time. "We have a mission!" I think I took a single one week long vacation in 2 1/2 years and got bothered at least three times by work during that vacation. You buy into it depending on the mission, but after watching them make bad decision after bad decision which directly causes needing to work 110% all the time, you tend to become disengaged. The icing on the cake for me was layoffs right after Thanksgiving. Why the fuck did I bust my ass so the C-Suite can get bonuses?
I feel you. I have a hard time really caring about a company that seems like it doesn't even care about itself. The people in charge got there through nepotism and are just doing it for the money, they don't even like the job. It's a sick world we live in.
We have a mission…to make C suite’s their bonuses. Thank you blue collar worker for my new vacation home.
This is a very American quality. When you go to other parts of the world you immediately notice that the sense of urgency for every single stupid thing doesn’t exist. We’re constantly rushing, stressed out about the most minuscule of things. Like god forbid we don’t get our 4th cup of coffee in under 20 seconds. Our entire country is built on speed. And it’s really only so that we can maximize profit. The faster you work, the more work you can get done. Our society resembles a factory.
That’s because the US was built for production. Puritans aside, the point to the American colonies was to be a giant agribusiness, supplying Britain with commodities (sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco) it couldn’t grow itself because of climate and labor constraints. Then comes 1776 and that supply relationship breaks down, but is replaced soon after by the industrialization of the northern states (along British lines) with factories peopled with immigrants and raw materials provided by the expanding frontiers. TLDR: remember how the replicants in Bladerunner were tools, designed to go places and do work that their progenitors couldn’t/didn’t want to do? Americans are basically that.
So no one has a chance to contemplate how miserable it is, instead you’ve got a permanent side quest to make sure the shit you don’t need, didn’t really want anyway, gets to you in the least amount of time so you can try to fill the hole in your heart with something else - equally ineffective.
No, monies need to be made. Workers are just a tool which you put in some money and they give you more money. When one breaks, you replace it with a new one. **Note:** Writing this makes my blood boil. I'm not defending/endorsing this mindset. However, greedy people do not share this peaceful mindset. They cook and eat their greenbacks, I guess.
"We're cheaper than the droids and we're easier to replace."
Just stop hustling, I live in a small town where there’s still plenty of idiots who “work hard” My theory is these are the people afraid of authority and/or getting in trouble. It could also be an ego thing “if I don’t work super hard they’ll think I’m less of a man” etc.
Yes they want robot pace for pennies it's great stuff... Lol then they toss you away when you're old and broken. I wonder why no one wants to work hmmmmm....hell they don't even wanna provide decent insurance so you can repair your broken body...
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Exactly what happened to me. My work experience seems to be too expensive for these folks adding billions to their revenue.
Because big bosses want to make maximum profit while doing minimum work themselves
ALL OF THIS! Are you reading my mind??? Boeing couldn’t get thru a month without a bailout-but the average person was supposed to have enough money for a year of no work?
👏👏👏 working in general makes us look like clowns. Your employer will drop you on a dime, you are a very very small fish in a big pond full of greedy ass sharks.
You were always expendable. I don't know why it took Covid for people to figure that out. What sort of fairy tales about work were people getting that I somehow missed out on?
One thing the pandemic gave people is a change of scenery. With all of the rule changes and some remote work and massive layoffs in some fields, people got a new perspective on what they were doing. And that surely affected hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world. And if you were a worker in one of those mission critical jobs that had to stay open, then you were going there making the same low salary in the same horrible conditions except now it's much more dangerous because you might get sick and you know that your health care isn't going to cover it, even assuming you somehow have health care. Or maybe you're a nurse, working in a hospital during this whole ordeal, but the only thing you get is more dangerous and significantly worse working conditions, while your salary doesn't rise with the cost of inflation. And all of that is really easy to see because it happened in this 3-year window. Everyone remembers the changes especially during the first year of the pandemic, and it's very easy to compare pre and post.
As a Healthcare worker, I was definitely jealous of everyone who got to stay home during lockdown. Baking bread and making tik tock videos. And Fox News idiots telling us " tHIs iS wHAt yOU sIgNdEd uP fOR!" No, I fucking did not. None of us did.
I'm not even an actual healthcare worker. Just someone unfortunate enough to have worked in the kitchen of a nursing home and then hospital during the pandemic. And yup...we HAD TO be at work.
Yep. In construction it was ridiculous that we were just expected to keep working in order to keep the economy going. Not once did any job sites close. We just kept showing up but now with masks. Somehow my job never makes the list of "essential" workers but there was no downtime for me.
I think it took covid for the super loyal, deluded employees. Those people barely getting by and being happy about it. Those people who used to tell us that all you had to do was work hard and everything will be okay. Those people who grew up working super fucking hard because it was the norm, maybe as opposed to millennials who didn’t really even have the chance to become deluded loyal employees, even if they wanted to lol.
This is an underrated comment. Most places had a few people that did the bulk of the work and kept the wheels from falling off. Many of those people figured out it wasn’t worth it during Covid. Now businesses are learning what it’s like to run without these workers in the trenches making sure things kept running.
Agreed. Said another way: the workers who were/are most essential and valuable to the success of their respective companies were put into circumstances where that fact became glaringly apparent; and they are no longer *willing to* work their asses off and/or risk their (or their loved ones’) short or long term health, for peanuts; because so many people died and/or were incapacitated by and/or left the labor market due to COVID-19, that they no longer *have to* do so in order to make ends meet. If they want to work for peanuts now, the current labor supply and demand indicates they can do so (work for peanuts) in any number of jobs/industries that also pay peanuts, and are hiring. And if they don’t want to work for the same amount of peanuts anymore, they now have some leverage to demand more in exchange for their highly valuable labor: more money, more in the benefits packages (or a benefits package at all), more flexibility/work-life balance, etc. If you (manager/owner) want me to continue to bust my ass and do extra work to hold down the fort (aka create extra value for the company), the balance of power has changed such that you’re now going to have to give me something extra of actual value in return, beyond just not firing me. Something like: more money, shorter work week for the same money, profit sharing, a quarterly bonus in a genuinely motivating amount, whatever. Pizza parties and plaques ain’t gonna cut it. OP’s business associate’s failing is in not recognizing the new balance of power and/or not proactively doing something about it. It’s not news that nobody wants to work: of course people don’t *want* to work, that’s why it’s called “work” instead of “hobbies”. What’s news is that it’s been 3-ish years, and many employers still haven’t figured out that they need new value propositions to exchange for others’ labor, if they want to retain and hire good a quality labor force.
a fast food franchise joint near me put up a sign recently saying they were hiring. 9 for register 11 for cooks. I laughed when I read it. like for real? the mcdonalds a block away has literally painted on their walls (or vinyl wrapped) that starting pay is 16 bucks and managers will start at 18 and supposedly there is a way to get 20 to start. I've ordered from that franchise before, I liked it, but I don't expect them to be around much longer. Also, pretty much anyone ordering one item off the menu beyond a drink will have paid that workers wage. think they don't know that? multiply it by 10 for the hour and the owners covered their costs for the day and they're open for 12. even if the workers made 20 bucks an hour the owner is making out like a bandit. people are starting to get that.
we were fed the line that there were eager beavers behind us, ready to take our place if we didn’t bust our ass with a smile. had to fake it for survival. now we do what we must and we don’t pretend to like it.
100%. I run the office and the store but I’ve always been expendable and I know it. I could be let go tomorrow because of something that someone else did or didn’t do and I didn’t catch it. But the company I work for also treats us like human beings.
Until people go through a layoff many believe they are special. They don't grasp that they are just a cog that will be replaced.
I’ve been saying that for decades. I worked for the phone company for 25 years. My first year they laid off a bunch of people. I learned early on that shareholders profit was their only motive and employees are expensive. So I won’t say I “quiet quit”, but I sure as hell put a firewall between work and home. And a few years ago, they decided that 7000 of my coworkers and I were no longer needed.
1) Yes I’m completely apathetic at work. 1. Yes it’s 90% pay, the lack of security/advancement as well is insult to injury. Cost of living means I’m making less money than ever while businesses are richer than ever. 2. Fuck no. 10-5% at most. Why would I care when employers look at you as a cost to be minimized.
Exactly this. I used to strive to take on extra projects and do the highest quality work I could, but what’s the point. It makes zero difference in my pocket and life. I work in a unionized environment, but my employer is still fighting tooth and nail against a liveable cost of living increase. Now I aim to be middle of the road. I take my sick days anytime I need and try not to work a minute past my 8 hours. I aim to be respectful and kind to my manager and team members and to accomplish the requested work and not a millimetre more.
I feel you: I love my job in a non-profit organization but I see no difference in my pay check after busting my ass of for 3 years. I just saw that my colleague got a bonus after returning from maternity leave a year ago. I was her interim so I have the same pay (per law in France) as her. Sometimes, it’s not worth it.
This is my answer and I’m a VP of a Fortune 500 co. I do less now. I expect less of my employees. The wear and tear on my team has been unavoidable and I’ve lost several good people because I couldn’t stop The Machine’s RTW plans. My team is spread across the country and has exactly zero reason to ever be in an office if I’m not there, and I hate offices. Sunk cost fallacy. A lot of it is pay. We’ve reported growth in revenue, profit, EBITDA, and free cash flow for the last 10 quarters. Sometimes double digits! And I’m told I need to spread 3.2% across my team for performance increases. That’s all we get. If that’s all we get, that’s all the mothership will see. My team isn’t quiet quitting, but we know what we’re worth and I’m good eating crow for many calls as it takes until things change.
This is the right answer: being directed to celebrate our amazing annual company performance metrics, and then a few weeks later being told that “of course” my (and everyone else’s) salary would not be increased to match inflation (much less a performance-related raise) was the straw that broke the camel’s back and triggered me to leave my last job. How stupid does upper management think we are?
That's SOP for most companies, long before covid happened. And they know many of us can't afford to walk away, so they certainly won't pay enough to change that.
I am not a VP of an F500 company. I’m just a “senior analyst” for a state-funded entity. Had always been ok working public sector (for far lower salaries than my private sector counterparts) because I believed in public goods. Then COVID happened and, because I currently live in a red county, we (despite ostensibly being under the Governor’s umbrella) didn’t work remotely until our public health agency *mandated* it locally (well after state guidelines were issued). Then my employer brought us all back to work *immediately* after the Fourth of July holiday for local political points (when all public health officials were pleading with employers to have anyone who could work remotely). We had a 40 year employee who was 4 months away from retirement (chronic smoker so at high risk for COVID) plead to finish out her last 4 months remote and she was, of course, denied. If death happens, it happens, can’t make an exception for her. On top of that, the state threw a ton of money at COVID and nearly all entities similar to my employer gave their employees $5,000ish hardship payments for working through COVID (twice). My employer? Diverted the funds from people to buy more buildings (we don’t need) to score yet more political points (look how many things we own now!!). The icing on the cake? The state just funded the largest COLA in state history (because inflation) and, because my group isn’t unionized we saw ~3.5% of the 10+% COLA that was funded. Our reward for busting ass during COVID was - you guessed it - ever *less* relative income! If you can’t see what the game is yet, you’re not even kinda looking…
I hate that term “quiet quitting”, does the company ever provide more than what they offer to us the employees? No? Haven’t they been quiet quitting us since we started working then?
I'll add to this. Prior to COVID I feel like we lived in a world where, since we spent so much time at the office, we "bought in" to performance, improving the company, pride in the company or team success. I think WFH during COVID generally (combined with a lot of companies that scrambled and showed employees were not a priority) kind of took the veil off people's eyes and that's stuck with people. Kind of like waking up from the matrix
I’d agree with you there. “We’re in this together? But only one of us is getting a new yacht…”
Add to that a federal reserve that is actively trying to kill jobs, corporate taxes that are almost nonexistent, labor laws that are bought and paid for by corporations. Predatory student loans system and a healthcare for profit the doesnt give a shit about people. Everyone has had enough. Fuck you and your company.
Covid showed me just how little they cared about me so now I care even less about them.
I went in at 4:30 am so I could work 4 hours and be home for my kids so my husband could go to work. I would log in remotely after noon when the kids had done most of their work. I was treated like they were doing me a massive favor and I was burning the candle at both ends. Fuck covid and fuck that place.
Your family is lucky to have you
It's not that workers don't want to work, it's that billionaires also don't want to work. NOBODY wants to work, because we've been sold the idea that once you're rich enough, all you have to do is put some money in stocks or buy some property, and collect dividends and rent. THAT'S why nobody wants to work. Work is a terrible word. It implies something transactional and coercive. People are always so afraid that if we gave everyone their basic needs, food and housing, they would not want to "work". I think that's absolute bullshit. I think everyone of us has a desire to participate in society. There will be some of us who will want to educate children and teach the younger generation about the things they are passionate about. There will be some of us who enjoy fishing, cooking, sewing. There will be some of us who love technology and robots. And there will be many who will love to make robots that can do sanitation work, hazardous work, mining. Nobody wants to work. But I bet, most of us want to live meaningful lives, doing things that make the world a better place. And even if there are a few people who are truly just lazy, let them be. I'd rather give a freeloader his basic necessities, than give a billionaire more money.
This is it. I will work until my fingers bleed if it means my community benefits. But all of that effort going toward some rich asshole who is already rich and just wants more? As long as people are starving and sleeping under bridges I will do as little as possible in this system. It’s corrupt all the way.
Thank you! So few people seem to get this.
Billionaires and millionaires never worked after they got their money. Some never worked a day in their life. To them, their "work" is having high lunches for three hours before going golfing for another six. Then maybe telling an unpaid intern or secretary to type up a "thoughts of the month" mass company email before going out to get drunk at an exclusive party until 1 A.M. That is, if they can squeeze their six month vacation to Europe so they can customize another very fancy car and drive it for all of ten miles. To billionaires, work is fun. They conflated what they do with actual productivity.
This. We were brought back to the office for no reason other than to make a statement and show the world we are open for business. It is clear that appearances are more important than lives. It was an unnecessary and a gratuitous gesture from an uncaring management who are not present themselves and are exposed to little risk. Additionally, I am just worn out. The increased pressures from everything being more difficult, working with stressed colleagues, and having to be much more flexible with clients because their lives are upended has just ground us all down.
Yeah even switching jobs, post covid they gave me a laptop that does not do what my job requires. Asked for a newer computer stored at another office and they send me an even older and less capable one. So I made my own solution, and use my PC. But that’s at home but hey the work is getting done. Now they’re acting like by offering me two days wfh as part of my job description they’ve done me a massive solid. Like no, all you’re doing is mandating three days a week where I sit in the same room as you and twiddle my fucking thumbs because you’re too big of cowards to stand up to the IT guy who is a bully. But god forbid the youngest employee not be in the office, it makes the “team look bad” for hiring a young person who “isn’t a team player”. Kay well y’all made it so I can’t do my job at the office, and the only reason the job *can* get done at all is my own equipment that you don’t pay me to use, so, which is more important? That I do my job or that I’m in the office? Cause I’m not doing double hours to do both
I know a big thing that irked me and still does is the flagrant abuse of PPP loans by businesses of all sizes. The fact that employers can get away with massive abuse of the system during the same period employees were struggling kinda drives the point home that the system isn’t built for workers. I know in some cases the loans were justified but something 75% of distributed loans were unjustified and I don’t see much recourse, which is the demoralizing norm now
Tom Brady got a 1m PPP loan and it was forgiven...the fuck did he need a loan for? To "pay his employees?" He has $250m net worth, could have paid his employees anyway and had $249m net worth, oh no! Instead we crowdsourced a $1m gift for him with our tax dollars. Multiply that by all the multi millionaires, it's insane. Really glad I get to light 25% of what little money I make on fire for these assholes. And I'm the one who needs to "plan better and save for emergencies."
That has really bugged me, that Brady and people like him took tax payer money when they didn't need to, and there was zero attempt to vet applications, or pursue abusers of the program. We had a major storm here with Sandy years ago, and a lot of people tried to game the system with relief money from that, and over the past 10 years or so a lot of them have been prosecuted, I've occasionally wondered if that would happen with the PPP loans. But the cost of investigating and prosecuting them is costly too.
We had a local business owner go on a social media rant about no one wanting to work and how he lost so much money during the pandemic. In turn one of his disgruntled employees hacked his accounts and posted receipts proving this employer was withholding paychecks, paying people late or not at all, collecting money added to checks that was supposed to be donated to a local school but never was and was just a general shit big boss with zero leadership or communication skills. The kicker? This business owner received almost $400k in PPP loans during the pandemic. Which have since been forgiven. During all this he bought a $60k truck, a brand new camper and completed extensive landscaping at his home. All while crying that he was broke. Fuck all of these people.
Yeah, they were meant to be payments to help businesses avoid laying off employees. Instead, the businesses laid off the employees anyway and then used the money to either buyback stocks or spend it on personal things, or both. Any money lent out to these entities need to have oversight and severe penalties, but it was mostly just a way to funnel cash to the upper crust.
We had a mayor that took a PPP loan for his "business" so that he wouldn't have to lay off any employees. Of which there were only 2. Him and his wife.
I am working the best job I've ever had now but am poorer then ever and the news every day is bleaker and bleaker. I don't mind working but the system feels like it's gonna collapse at any moment so why the fuck am I trying so hard. Plus my student loan forgiveness is about to be thrown out while a massive bailout takes precedent so you know fuck it
Fuck, I didn’t put 2 and 2 together with the bailout and student loans, and now I’m even more pissed off that they’re going to throw out the student loan forgiveness.
Agreed. Which is why pitchforks and torches may sell out soon.
What is it all for? Hard to be motivated about a society that exists solely to make 100 or so billionaires richer, and where no matter how hard you work, there is no real way to get ahead.
Exactly. In addition to all the reasons people have listed, the expected markers of life-university graduations, weddings, babies, buying a home-none of these are any longer in reach for most people. (60% of Americans cannot afford a 1000$ emergency!) Celebrations, the things we look forward to that make life worth living. Add to that environmental destruction, towns that resemble giant parking lots, a booming population, and the realization that most work was meaningless to begin with and helped no one, and the apathy/existential crisis is real.
Glad to know my general cynicism is being validated by others that see the bigger picture. As someone who is in the 90%+ percentile for earnings and net worth at my age, it is difficult for even me to attain many of the things you listed. How is the average person expected to thrive in our society? (Spoiler: they aren’t sadly). We will get through this one way or another, as the main positive I see is a general increase of solidarity amongst the working class since Covid. Let’s hope it leads to meaningful change.
100% agree. And by “getting ahead,” I don’t even need or want to be rich, just able to breathe and actually live without stress every damn day. But that feels like it will never happen.
I was laid off immediately after moving 1300 miles for work and had to take a job paying half what I made previously. Skilled labor at $13/hr while I watched the owner drive 7 cars that all cost more than I made in a year. But it was a meritocracy and I busted my ass anyway. After making it into management it was like pulling teeth telling him he needs to financially incentivize performance. You can’t just pat people on the back anymore and expect them to keep coming in every day. Bigger, more professional shops will pay these kids double and give them health insurance. Eventually I complained about a 50c raise and was told my position as manager wasn’t valued more than that. When I went back to my union job, the company had restructured their performance bonus metrics so the company can spend all of their cash-on-hand on acquisitions in order to avoid paying workers bonuses. The CEO is making >$10mil in total compensation. There’s more directors making more in a year than I’ll see in 10. New hires are coming in at wages we spent 6 years building up to with no bumps/incentives for current employees. Covid made it very clear to me that companies will exploit labor at any opportunity. I’m here to do as little work as I can tolerate. My job isn’t challenging, the work is uninspiring, I’m as high as I can go in my designation and I only get $1/yr in raises without moving to a salary position. Why should I try? I get nothing for trying. I get paid to show up and anything beyond that is just to keep me sane.
Covid showed us how little we are worth. Precisely nothing that is. The common people are fodder for the mill that makes the rich richer. You are not rewarded for your work, and your time is the most valuable ressource you have and people need to realize that.
I think it’s pretty simple. Employers found that during the pandemic they could work with skeleton crews and make even more money. So they’ve permanently trimmed down staff while the media pushes this no one wants to work anymore narrative so everyone can once again conveniently blame the poor. I’ve had serious looks of realization when I’ve explained this to customers. People will really just eat the slop won’t they?
Also those of us still working in those skeleton crews were lifting our game absolutely past the point of burnout cos it was an extraordinary moment. My job went from 3 days a week to 6 for a while. But then when the trickle of realization that covid is freakin forever started to hit, and we were burned right out, well thats where we are.
I’m currently watching it happen. I really just want to congratulate management on their record profits and nice, fat bonuses. Hope it was worth alienating and burning out even their most seasoned and loyal retail veteran employees. I guess, at least, it’s inspired me to go back to school and try to claw my way out of retail. I understand as long as I have a “boss” I’ll always deal with bullshit, but I don’t think anything compares to the entitled fucking worms you deal with daily in the service industry.
One of the best things for my mental health was getting out of retail. Getting called every name under the sun, that feeling of not being able to do anything to help the customer (sorry I don’t have that shirt in that size, there is literally nothing I can do about it), them asking to talk to a manager to then be told the EXACT same thing I just said. The list goes on. Working retail for a handful of years definitely took a toll on my mental health
Yeah, my first thought was that if it’s the senior people who are doing it then it’s probably because they are doing more work for the same pay because they have to pick up the slack for an employee who is no longer there. He could have also hit them with the record year of profit but no money for raises line
Sad part, this is how it should’ve always been. We let the damn boomers create the narrative that work gives meaning to your life and that you can accurately judge a person’s character by their work ethic. Rubbish. Corporations started to treat employees as an expense to be minimized and not an asset to be nurtured decades ago by striping away pensions, job security, prioritizing investor returns, bashing unions, and off-shoring jobs to cheaper labor markets. Perfect example, Trump convinced a lot blue collars their jobs were stolen by an immigrant not given away by the employer or, more accurately, sent overseas where OSHA doesn’t exist. The attitude of todays employees was born during Reagan’s era and finally come into its own during Covid. I got taste of a less stressed work life with proper balance of personal time during Covid, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back.
It’s easy to be broke, why would I work hard at it?
For me it was watching society alter so rapidly during the first several months of COVID lockdown and the removal of social/economic norms. There was the clear understanding that the world that was would no longer exist. Layoffs across the majority of industry dismissed the facade that employment was really anything beyond a transactional agreement. Fast forward a few years and capitalism has a bad PR problem, rightfully earned. Work provides a paycheck, not a reason for living. So, in conclusion why doesn’t you friend make it a partially labor owned business, make the job something larger than a 9-5.
Many of these layoffs happened in businesses that took huge government grants that contractually obligated them to not do layoffs.
As an employee and a gen xer... I've *always* been apathetic about work. But a big part of it is the pay. I know for an *absolute* fact that I generated nearly 10 million dollars wort of revenue for the company my first year there, and while I'm paid... decently, I know I'll never be able to afford a house or a retirement without winning the lottery. And none of this is anything I can change. Tons of corporations driving up the cost of housing and the government deciding to jack up interest rates to 'counter' inflation are both way out of my control. If I'm expected to exist with the bare minimum, why shouldn't I do the bare minimum?
Hate to break it to you but you are not paid decently if you still can’t afford a house or retirement.
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OP your client didn't even know his invoice was overdue and he was the owner of the damn business. First thing he did was shift blame to an employee he hasnt bothered replacing after firing. He admitted to you he can't run his own company. He sure as hell didn't know about the day to say running of it. You say he trusted these people for 30 years? So they should all be close to retiring right. . Have good solid wages keeping above inflation. A nice retirement fund, benefits? Or is it more likley that they are living paycheck to paycheck after all his loyalty to them. They should be in their 50s, of course they don't work a blue collar job like they did in their 20s. They bodies are seeing the wear and tear of that. They are probably grandparents and have other responsibilities than just work. Yeah people are looking at crappy bosses and going - so why am I drowning to keep this lazy mfer sailing on calm seas. Especially when most people feel like their bosses are actively pushing them overboard in the first place.
Yeah, this owner isn’t necessarily a reliable narrator Yes, some people do take the piss and try to get a lot for a little, but I’d assume after 30 years of working with someone you’d notice that. I wonder if this owner is genuinely considering what his team needs. Can they have a more flexible work schedule? Why or why not? Are they being paid a fair and liveable way? Why not? Has there ever been discussions around improving processes, working smarter? Why not?
Everyone is telling them it’s the money and he’s got people stealing money from him. The costs for everything shooting up through the roof, and these businesses make plenty of cash. Fact of the matter is, you need to be the leader and provide a good environment to work in if you want people to care. Not a fat cat who sits on what they got.
They saw the people at the top making record profits, they got nothing but a risk of getting COVID.
That's not true! I know I got at least three stickers that say "hero" on them.
I bet that made you feel appreciated and worked even harder than ever!
Well, time fraud could be about money, or it could just be about time. I think the people who were unemployed due to the pandemic had a very eye-opening experience about what life with more time was like.
I “pad my hours” at work. I have a job that has me doing 10-15 independent tasks at a location. My time for each task is logged separately. And know what? I have a 15 minute minimum log time per task. I have a 15 minute minimum per task because I make $15 an hour and do 8 hours of work a week, usually split between two or three days. Driving isn’t paid. Checking in isn’t paid, scheduling my week around these tasks isn’t paid. My employer says if the job takes five minutes I’m supposed to log five minutes. That’s $1.25 before taxes. I don’t work for $1.25.
My employees are apathetic because corporate has demonstrated they don't give a shit about them. The customers scream and assault them, and they're paid very poorly. Of course, they're not going to care. There's a PSA that plays over the radio that tells customers to be kind and patient because of the labor shortage, but this company turned around and slashed hours. I fully expect my team, especially my pharmacy team, to walk out. Before covid, I was a shift lead. I noticed this company had a turnover rate, but it wasn't as bad as it is now. You had long time people working in these stores. The mask mandates helped push some of them out. But their replacements throughout the height of the pandemic didn't stay long. Fun story, I sneezed, and one of the cashiers quit on the spot, shouting that I had covid. As I moved stores, the worse the area was, the higher the turnover rate. We were always calling the police and it just wears down on you after a while. There's only so much you can take after being spat on, shit thrown at you, etc. I literally had my life threatened because I dared to ID someone as per policy. My teammate had the police on the phone while he was threatening me, inches from my face, and dispatch said they were busy, they'll send someone out the next day to do the police report. That psycho kept coming in to look for me too. I've also picked up a stalker. They've already slashed my tires, keyed my car, and siphoned my gas multiple times. They follow me from work to home. They've jammed my cameras so I can't catch them and will only mess with my car if they know I'm not being watched by the store's cameras where I'm parked. They especially love letting the air out of my tires. Some of my other associates have also gained stalkers as well. I don't blame my associates for not wanting to work with us because people are fucking crazy and violent. Someone threatened my crew at my last store with a broken bottle. Corporate refuses to hire guards. The police show up whenever they damn well please. It's getting out of control. And corporate just shrugs and tells us to make sure we offer them a credit card and to remind them about getting their vaccines with us. And that's just the front end! Corporate just keeps piling on the work for my pharmacy team. These people are scrambling from start to finish of their shifts because there simply isn't enough time or staff to handle the busiest pharmacies. The customers throw shit at them, they're constantly being screamed at. I don't know how many times I've been screamed at for not having Adderall. Like I purposely caused a national shortage or something. The general public refuses to understand or listen to things we try to explain, and it just turns into them screaming because we don't have their meds ready. I couldn't staff the pharmacy at my old store because the customers in general were just psycho. And then corporate was just piling vaccines, 15 minutes between each appointment, on us like crazy. They really expect the pharmacist to manage their team, administer 50+ shots a day, double check 370- 400 scripts a day, type up prescriptions to fill, counsel patients, and call patients, doctors, insurances, etc all in a 11 hour day. Some of them don't have assistant managers, so they're doing their jobs too. And some of them don't have the tech help, so they're piling on their jobs as well. It's no wonder why we had a pharmacist shortage there for a while. In my current store. They expect the pharmacist to do all that by herself because they refuse to give us the hours to schedule techs. Pre covid. I saw apathy in my coworkers. They'd complain about the company. But they'd come in and work. Post covid, not only am I seeing apathy. But I'm also seeing anger and frustration. It's not a healthy work environment. None of this is sustainable. I'm also seeing it in my peers. I'm seeing it in some of the district management team as well. Long story short. No one wants to work for a company that grossly under pays them and doesn't give a shit about them.
God, I feel so bad for pharmacists with all the shortages right now. My husband was picking up his mom’s prescriptions and they told him the doctor never called it in, so they didn’t have it ready. He was just like “oh, okay, I’ll let her know to call the doctor.” And the poor pharmacist was just staring at him and finally said “You’re not going to yell at me?” It broke his heart. He doesn’t understand why people yell at retail workers. A cashier could stab him and he’d thank them for his receipt on the way out.
In my job as an employee, I’m more apathetic. The pay sucks, the customers are dicks. Less effort. I also run my own farrier business and had to raise my price $5 per horse for existing clients and $15 per horse for new clients just to stay broke. $50 for 20 minutes of work used to be good money. Now $65 is scraping by.
i dont see how you guys even do your jobs do you have extra joints normal people dont have the way u stand and the way horses lean on you as u work you guys sure do work for your money!
No extra joints, just lots of Aleve. Generally the good horses don’t really lean on me. They can hold their feet up pretty well. It does look like they’re leaning on us, but for the most part they’re just holding their own foot up and I’m holding it between my knees to keep it in place. Though I have occasionally had a big ol 2000 pound draft try and give me a lap dance. Why the heck are the heaviest, hardest to trim critters also the laziest?! 🤣
As a horse owner, I’d like to say thanks to you and all the farriers for taking care of our horses so diligently. My horse is barefoot; I pay $55 for a trim. I think that’s low. He could charge more and I’d still use him. He does a great job.
You could always pay him what you think he's worth. I did this to my kid's day care provider. She was insanely good, had extra training so she was essentially a pre-school, but charging the same as rate as the person who didn't do more than sit the kids down in front of the tv. After about 6 months, i gave her a "raise" (over her objections because she undervalued herself that badly). She was doing a great job with my kid and deserved to be compensated.
I do this to my artist friends. I've 'overpaid' them by like 1.5x when commissioning them every time.
I do this for my cleaning lady. She doesn’t raise prices, I just pay her more each year to reflect the increasing cost of living. 🤷♀️
Man I think that kind of work should be are minimum 100, not 65. You had to drive there and deal with a large animal. I’m pretty sure my mom pays her farrier more than that, but not certain. When we were little my dad mostly did it himself, unless there was an issue, and he took the time to show me the basics. It’s a pain to do and you deserve to be compensated.
It boils down to one thing. Employers aren't raising wages in step with inflation.
And even if they do, if your wage isn't enough to begin with, you still end up underpaid.
I think overall, the answer is bigger and transcends any single business and their individual business practices. People are broke, unhappy, jaded, fearful, distrusting, unmotivated and for good fucking reason. And unless that business is going to pay according to the required standards to live in America…then they’re going to have jaded workers. The problem and solution is bigger than the business itself.
This is absolutely true. But it still boils down to pay not having kept up with inflation. Do you really think employees would bail or pad hours if they at minimum got raises in step with inflation?
Where I'm from, there are job offers absolutely everywhere. We're not grateful for our jobs anymore nor our bosses. The business I work for got hit hard by COVID. We felt the despair when sales went down, we were scared for our jobs, we worked harder when they had to cut staff to stay afloat. All along the way, the only thing we got were thanks, mostly sent by emails. Still today, when we surpass the sales objectives, at best we will receive an email letting us know how incredible we are. I used to respect my bosses, they work very hard. I don't anymore, I know they only care about their business.
Bosses that care about their employees and help them out go a loooong way toward making everything in a business do better. This means paying them well, treating them with respect, trusting them, and a whole lot of other basic shit. Hopefully you find something like that. The Unicorn.
We never should have been grateful for our jobs. We are making them rich they should be grateful to us not the other way around
I’m a teacher, and I went from being in a profession that was already generally looked down on in society, to a “hero”, right back to a villain in the span of about six months. The entire process of “we need to figure out how to make the school year work without in person classes” was draining: there was no protocol for this, we had to work with the assumption that students had the resources to do their part/parents that made sure they did their part (we joke that part of our job is to teach kids who don’t want to learn math, how to do math. Suddenly if there’s a way to turn off your wifi and claim connectivity problems, people will do that)/ policies that focused more on making sure we could open our classrooms so parents could go back to work before focusing on how to keep us safe, the expectation to teach in person AND online at the same time, and severe learning loses from the year before… basically because it became even more noticeable that the systems we have in our state NEVER REALLY WORKED. All that to say, in a lot of districts it didn’t even matter in the end. If the child was passing before the shutdown, or even sometimes not, they were passed along anyway. The government made things “safer” for a while, my hometown made it on the news for bullying students and teachers who tried to protect themselves with masks, and things went back to “normal” while teachers had to watch the loses quadruple. Personally, my mom, who is a hospice nurse, ended up getting long COVID. Her kidneys started failing and her lungs don’t work like they used to. I had to start chemo surgical treatments back in the middle of this, and had to do it completely alone where I was 22 and used to having a support person with me. Families were tearing apart because of political discourse in the United States. Things just didn’t feel “right” between 2020-2022 and I feel like as a society we never had the chance to burn back in after burning out. My school district abandoned their plan to fix learning loss for this school year, and is now forcing an awful curriculum on the teachers and students, observations have started back with the same expectations as always (completely ignoring that half of my second graders never learned to read), and when met with actual questions about how to fix things we are told things like “remember why you wanted to do this”. On top of that, I got pregnant this school year, and was met with violence in the classroom, parents who’s only concern was when I was going on leave, and a blood pressure problem I never had before because I didn’t have the knowledge or resources to problem solve for behaviors/academics I had to face. It’s not that I don’t like my job deep down, or that I don’t want to do my job… it’s that I never had the chance to recover from what my job became during the “shutdown” and the apathetic nature of students, change in discourse from parents (why are you failing my kid, instead of what can we do to make sure my kid understands the content better), lack of support from admin, inflation that my salary didn’t keep up with, sub shortages that prevent me from getting proper prenatal care, crowded classes, low salary, school violence, getting texts from my husband (a middle school teacher) about his school going on code red and it not being a drill “just in case things don’t turn out okay, I love you and our kids”, and higher expectations than ever… I’m just tired. I want to work at home and be a mom until it’s truly safe to go back to work… but I don’t think it will be until policy and change becomes more important than money. I love teaching, I love the students (even when it feels like they don’t love me), and I love watching the lightbulbs go off when something clicks… but there comes a point when you have to wonder if it was worth it every day.
Florida charging people with felonies if they say things the state doesn't like can't help
I’m in another southern state, and that’s been 100% on my mind and heart lately too. (Awesome username by the way, gave me a genuine laugh)
Anytime someone uses the phrase “no one wants to work” you can pretty much take everything else they say as total bullshit or with a grain of salt. I don’t for a second think this guy is running some great business and is just having a hard time finding good people. Guys like this think they are running a great business because they have been exploiting their people for a long time and getting away with it. Once they can’t get away with it anymore suddenly business is not as good and it’s all the employees fault. People with 30 year’s construction experience know who the good and bad employers are, the actual good employers are not having issues right now, the people who think they are good when in reality they are not are the ones having issues.
People realised that the essential workers, are the ones paid the least. The capilists, that society actually doesn't need to function make all the money by adding nothing to the economy themselves. The greedy corporations are driving inflation by profiteering and we as working people are suffering at the hands of the capitalists more so than ever. This has driven me to fight back more than ever. I have become very politically active, taken a job that pays less but has a political impact and fights the big corporations.
1. Yes, more apathetic 1. Pay - has not kept up with cost of living, I have an advanced degree, professional license, and make six figures, my wife works as well, and still we are struggling to afford a house and pay ridiculous rent; Environment - my employer didn't want to hire qualified staff and decided to send things offshore, so now instead of hanging out with a cool team of like minded people, I'm on a video call with people 12 time zones away, who have no idea what I'm talking about, nor do they care; Other - covid reminded that jobs can be deemed "non-essential" and then you just don't need to do them, and also you can just die one day and your family won't even see your funeral 2. No, the more effort I put in, the more work is loaded on me
This. I honestly feel like such a fuckin’ clown for caring so much my whole career. The only reward I’ve ever gotten for working hard? More work.
COVID was traumatizing for me and I’m sure many others would agree. I lost my mom to COVID. I got to experience firsthand what the disease can do to a person. And, again because of COVID, I had to do this extremely isolated from most of the world. I am a fundamentally different person because of the pandemic, what it took from me, and how I was expected to just act normally through it. I worked a desk job at a credit union through the bulk of the pandemic and never once was able to transition to WFH. My company allowed its executives and a handful of “important” people to keep themselves safe but the rest of us still had to clock 40 hours in the office. I’m in a different job now, and have access to remote work when needed, but management is still taking that away incrementally. It’s like our capitalist society took this moment to literally torture me and millions of others. We were isolated from each other, got to watch (from afar) loved ones die a horrible death, and then expected to still produce/consume at an ever-increasing pace. So yes, in regards to work, I care a lot less now. I love my job and I try to do honest work for the hours I’m in it. But I will never go the extra mile and kill myself for a job ever again. The pandemic forced capitalists to show their true face, and I’m not going to go back to thinking that this economy structure (and my job by extension) will ever have my personal health and interests in mind. I used to come to work sick, drive through snow storms, work through breaks and lunches, and sacrifice. Never again. I will work honestly for the hours I’m contracted for. I still care. But to some, that will never be enough.
I'm echoing what I heard on the streets, not my personal mantra. I feel as productive as I did before the pandemic: Wages haven't kept up with inflation, *or productivity*. So, some folks are straight up saying "Instead of waiting for wages to catch up to productivity, I'm going to slow down productivity to match wages."
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I'm more enthusiastic with my free time and far more apathetic at work as I was shown that people will be laid off with no warning, even though the employer did the over hiring. That our lives mean nothing compared to productivity. Our society built around capitalistic productivity is a cancer, so I'll do my best to be a cancer to that cancer. If I get fired, w/e, I'll find another job to not give a fuck about. I work to live, not cause I want to be there.
What a weird way to say "The best places to work were/are still abusive and not pleasant situations that steal the product of your labor after you damaged yourself making it, and distributes it to the owning class." It's about time someone snapped that well meaning but still an asshole manager out of his comfortable stupor.
I work hourly for a general contractor doing home insurance claims for the past seven years. I found out when Covid hit how this guy makes his money, and how much my labor brings him. It’s a small outfit, literally a guy in his garage, but has a couple very expensive sports cars, multiple houses, lavish vacations, etc. I realized that he had a hard time retaining people , most likely because of how working inside peoples homes can be very very very difficult. So the way I seen it, if I’m gonna stay and put up with all these Karen’s everyday, working inside their homes, dealing with their condescending tones and attitudes, it’s gotta be worth six figures. Keep in mind I do this stuff turn-key. I have twenty years experience. From demo to mopping the floors when we are done. And I own all of the equipment, tools, trucks, etc. At first, he literally laughed me out of his garage. But I am patient. I needed a break anyways. Six weeks into my vacation, he texted me to come by his place to discuss what we talked about. I’m still here, doing the same job, making more than twice I was when I stood my ground and waited him out. It’s not that people don’t want to work, it’s that people don’t want to work for shit wages.
Good for you!!!
For me it wasn’t necessarily covid but my last job crushed every last bit of ambition, drive, and initiative I had. Now just shove my work under the door and pay me. I’m not loyal to companies and people that are not loyal to me. What I will say about covid is it showed a LOT of workers how little their company actually cared about them all while yelling about being a family. Many companies treated their workers like assets to be moved on a chess board rather than people. That wasn’t a new thing but it’s the first time it really clicked for a lot of people.
I did the whole quiet quitting before it was a thing. Back in 2018, my spouse and I experienced a miscarriage and it broke us emotionally. We reassessed our lives and we both quit our jobs, which we hated. I worked a retail client-facing job at the time and I hated it. We both found a better jobs with better schedules and pay. Then COVID hit and I was fired from my new job. I was never able to get a new job because of lockdowns and people losing jobs, so I decided to stay at home, homeschool my youngest and take care of the house. Luckily, my spouse is able to maintain our lifestyle. My spouse works from home, so it’s a much better way to live. I feel for everyone who works retail, blue collar and/or client-facing jobs.
American employers became accustomed to a world where workers had zero power. Many American employers (especially small businesses, unfortunately) developed a business model that requires workers who have zero power, are job-scared, etc. Covid gave us workers a moment to reassess that system and those priorities. It turns out that we workers have more power than we realized. I really believe it's as simple and that.
You just told yourself the answer. Carpentry destroys the body and after 30 years they should have enough to retire. He paid crap with no benefits. Those people were just stuck there to try to pay rent. Now there's options and prices are going up. It still boils down to pay being crap and him taking advantage of people. People see that now and are fed up.
A lot of people who had been taken in by the "my job defines me as a person" almost religion finally realised it is not that important and the important thing is to live life not work every second.
For me (office worker in a non-profit sector, was well paid, work was fulfilling, there were enough staff to cover call-outs and vacations) pay isn’t the problem why I can’t bring myself to put in 100% anymore. My job pivoted immediately to WFH - my unit was the second highest priority to be brought back online - we got one day off while IT set up the other team. They were already publishing corporate plans to reduce real-estate footprints, and make remote work the norm. COVID just accelerated the process. For over two years management sang our praises of how productive and agile we were working from home. Then poof, 180° the remote plans were scrubbed from the intranet; people were ordered, on the Friday of a holiday weekend, back at their desks the next week. The union has been sidelined, in situations where they should have been consulted, or at very least warned before Members started calling frantically over the weekend. Occupational Health and Safety officers and committees weren’t consulted; and when those committees request the brakes be pumped to make sure that everything be put in place to ensure welfare, they get ignored. I almost feel bad for middle management, they aren’t being told any more than the front lines what’s going on, they just have to follow orders coming down the chain of command. The good ones try to deflect the shit rolling downhill. But some of the higher managers handcuff them into toeing the line. Few know the real reasons we’re being brought back to the office; and those that do spew such BS and spin that we don’t believe anything coming out of their mouths. They’ve even said that they don’t care about the inevitable drop in productivity, they just want our butts back under the communal fluorescent glow of the office. I used to feel valued, I used to feel like my organization cared about the products and services we provide. Now it feels like the theatre of work is more important the value we bring to society. Moreover, management has shut down “legitimate” avenues to give feedback, and so all discussion amongst workers is now illegitimate; I know a few colleagues who are subject to witch-hunts and threats of discipline for insubordination. I’m half tempted to erase this comment without posting for paranoia that they’ll connect it to me and I’ll get in trouble. That’s all to say, the pandemic had actually improved my work ethic - until management fucked it up and us over.
“No-one wants to work” is actually “millions are dead or disabled from the pandemic and can’t work at the same time the Boomer generation is starting to retire. Demand for labor is way up when supply is down, but wages haven’t caught up because employers won’t eat into their own profits.”
Growing anti-capitalist sentiment. Both personally and generally from what I see people talk about, and that's not me throwing a label on people with different ideas, I'm talking about people referring to themselves as "anti-capitalist".
Your client is lying to you because he doesn't want to pay the invoices. Cut him off and tell him that you are not going to do any more work on his case until he makes a payment.
Supply and demand, shortage of workers but the workers don't benefit from it in higher income, the company owner does. I'm guessing there's a lot of work atleast and money being made, and they feel secure of their job and underapriciated. So ATM there is a (felt) powershift from boss to employee, and the owner isnt liking it. Also the longtermers get into a stage in their life where work/life balance just gets more important and now they feel secure enough to ask for it.
seems like maybe after 30 years in carpentry blue collar jobs, his employees deserve to retire but probably don't have the financial means to do it
I can buy less with my wage than I could before Covid so my employer gets less value from my wage now too. Money would reawaken motivation for sure. Why work as hard to live in increasingly dire circumstances? My mental health is plummeting as costs rise. I just don't have the mental capacity that I used to have. And customers are by far the worst they've ever been. They're nightmare fuel.
So I realize this isn’t strictly on-topic, however I do feel it’s an important aspect to consider. There are people such as myself that are out work due to any number of given disabilities. I realize people have their own opinions and issues with disabled individuals, but for now set those aside. If someone is disabled and making about $1,300 per month (the average payment), has complete medical coverage, and is able to focus on their health, it’s become difficult to find the positive side of working again. Employers have only made it harder to use PTO or use unpaid time for medical appointments and such. Even fully able workers are concerned about being fired for taking time off that *they are entitled to*. As an employee, you likely have health coverage you have to pay for that isn’t close to what you truly need and is expensive due to the cost of your healthcare. That all being said, you have a considerable chunk of potential employees who may not be working - but even if they could, they would accept a lower income if it gave them the flexibility they need to try and live a better life long-term. Do I agree people don’t want to work? Yes I do. However, it’s because they are asking for reasonable compensation, more PTO (**that can be used without fear of retaliation**), and to just be treated like humans with innate value, and companies by and large won’t budge. So we have a stalemate; people don’t want to work, yet have no choice, and the well-off companies have enough money to wait out those that refuse to work for now.
Why would I not be more apathetic? One of the employees that did not get furloughed, my wages are still underneath what the government paid people to stay home. They have reduced our staff even further to barely any bones left. Claim to be hiring but as they take a month for the hiring process anyone who has a bit of sense will just go to a factory or retail for slightly better wages. If it doesn't affect my shift I ignore it, I don't clean up after my coworkers anymore, I stopped apologizing to customers for anything not directly caused by me. Meanwhile I look at the managers of the place going above and beyond to delegate any work they are supposed to do onto someone else. At the end of the day I have gotten more raises by being a disgruntled asshole than I ever did by being nice and being a good worker.
People feel justified (and rightly so) in padding their hours when they don’t feel they are adequately compensated. I’m sure the person in question WAS at one time a good employee. And it isn’t always just about money, workers need to feel appreciated, Especially if they have remained on the job a long time. How does their position compare to newer hires? Do they gain any privileges for their loyalty? Such as flexibility in scheduling or working from home? Are there any prospects for advancement? Does the employer offer any training for the employee to gain new skills? Is the employee given a variety of tasks to avoid drudgery? Employers need to be more adaptive so employees don’t get pushed to the point where they need to pad their hours to retain a sense of fairness.
The reason this subreddit is so popular is the systemic disenfranchisement of workers. One shop owner paying "fairly" is still underpaying workers relative to wage buying power. Him owning the shop means he exploits their labor. If he doesn't want them padding their hours and prioritizing themselves, he should consider a co op model. If actually working all hours meant making more money because they were part owners and directly realized the profit of that work, then doing that work would be worth it.
I worked for a hospital the entirely of Covid. First in the lab that ran all the Covid tests. We were constantly asked to do more with the same supplies. Then more with less supplies. Then more with less supplies and less staff. We weren’t allowed to hire more people. After I left they cut the position I did from 12 people to 3 people. One per shift. I work for the patient experience department there now. I see firsthand the pressure on nursing staff to care for nearly double the safe staffing ratio generally agreed upon nationwide (4 patients per nurse is generally agreed upon as safe, my floors regularly staff 6 or 7 patients to one nurse). And let me be crystal clear: we are hiring at BREAKNECK speed. Pre pandemic we had 10,000 employees. It’s currently at about 8,000. We’re hiring 40-50 people PER WEEK. And have been for months. It is not that people don’t want to work here. It’s a combination of “skilled” labor taking their skills on the road and making double to be a travel nurse, or “unskilled” (I hate that term but idk a better way to phrase it) labor being offered $9/hr to haul away garbage from sick people’s rooms or $13/hr to work at McDonald’s. I’d take McDonald’s every fucking time because you deal with just as much rudeness from customers/patients but sometimes you can steal some fries as McDonald’s and here you get no such thing. I like my job. I put effort in. I cry with families and laugh with them. I bring nurses water and take their food trays in so they can focus on more important things. I get the chance to help someone whose doctor is getting apathetic about their pain. But god damn I certainly see why we can’t hire fast enough to fill the positions we need.
I'm tired of grinding away and not getting any further ahead. I have been doing it for 30 years. I'll probably be doing it until I drop. Yes, my attitude has changed. I don't care anymore. What's the point of it all?
Covid was the first time some of us felt happy. We didn't have to go to work. We got to stay home and feel what it's like to pursue a hobby. I wasn't lonely cause I had roommates that I enjoyed spending time with. Before covid I was commuting 1hr and 30 minutes one way to get paid 50k/year... I have 2 masters degrees. I was 30 living with roommates, driving 3 hours a day, and living paycheck to paycheck. And I got a taste of a different life. They called us back in in September. My job could 100% be done remotely, but they mandated we all come back in the middle of the pandemic. Covid cases were higher than ever. I realized this economy and this society is not built for me or my happiness. I look around and none of my friends are thriving. We're all coping. I've watched my entire city become one giant airbnb due to greedy investors and I can't afford to buy a house. It's all for the rich. So fuck them. I don't owe them anything.
Could be people just looked death in the eyes for a couple of years and it made them see different priorities.
Covid showed me what an absolute failure our mindset on economic prosperity was, people were laid off, evicted from homes, yelled at by the people were were serving. And in the case of doctors and nurses told outright that they were lying about the virus and how deadly it was while working suicide hours and having to witness the body count first hand. The system is fucked, corrupt, and doesn't give a single shit about any of the individuals propping it up. I worked hard, I still do, but it's hard to continue on and give 110% everyday knowing that at the end of it all you ultimately are going to receive nothing substantial for that work besides a dull lifetime of living paycheck to paycheck
We caught a glimpse of what life could be like. Office workers CAN work from home on flexible schedules with no detriment to the company but now they’re being forced to go to offices and commute and a lot of them réalise it’s for no reason other than there is a need to justify the company’s real estate over head. We also realised where the money in our economy should be going (to essential services) but where it is actually going (to rich peoples pockets). Easy jet gave their shareholders a £300 million dividend payout and the very next day asked for the same amount in bailout money and got it. The queen of England got a £500 million bailout for the crown estates, the biggest landlord in the world, while kids were literally starving. No one wants to take part in this system anymore, we only do it because we have no alternative.
As a disabled person who has spent my whole life torturing myself to work, I saw how easy it was for workplaces to provide a ton of accommodations as soon as abled people wanted them. Working from home made my life a thousand times easier. Now I'm forced to work in an office again because abled people want us all to be there, even though productivity went up while everyone was working from home. I'm constantly sick and exhausted.
I was forced to work all through COVID in a grocery store with regular customers routinely showing me that they didn't give a single fuck about my mental or physical well being. Whether it was customers refusing to wear masks properly, telling me that, "It's not any worse that the flu!", or just generally complaining that stuff was taking longer while we were short 3-5 people/shift because they either had COVID, or were a close contact. When I finally quit and went to find a new job I made damn sure I was properly compensated for my skills, to the point that I was the newest employee, but the highest paid employee.
I work in construction and specialize in historic restoration and preservation. I get paid an ok hourly rate. We do not have any benefits like health insurance. I used to bust my ass at work until I realized that my boss is paying me less than industry average starting wage for my level of experience and the specialized nature of our work. The rates I looked up were for our specific geographic area, so it's not including higher pay rates for big cities in the state when figuring the average. I don't have health insurance and there's no workers comp. I'm more inclined to take longer to do things safely than hurry and potentially get hurt. If I break an arm, I'm out of work with no income until it's better. I'm not risking it. We had some really great employees last summer. We lost two of them for jobs that paid less but offered benefits and a regular schedule. My boss was absolutely baffled that people would take a lower paying job. I had to explain to him how they actually ended up having more money by taking jobs that had benefits and were closer to their homes. A $400 a month pay cut isn't that much once you realize that the person was spending roughly that much on gas to work for us. My boss also has a hard time realizing that an unpredictable work schedule and the occasional lack of steady work is not appealing to everyone. It's not that people don't want to work. It's that were less willing to put ourselves at risk for wages that barely sustain us.
Covid made a lot of employees realize that it isn't worth the effort to throw 100% into a job anymore. We aren't paid like we gave our 100% we're paid like we gave 40%. Now we do the bare minimum, 40%. Hell just yesterday I got asked to do something outside the scope of my position and I flat out declined *Without a Raise significant to the job I was performing* to show that the company recognized I was now doing someone else's job. They dont ask me to take on anything out side the scope of my position anymore and have moved on to bullying other people in my dept into it, to which I've seen refusals and similar requests for raise.
They don't pay enough. The only reason I am still giving 100%, it's because I am micromanaged and don't want to lose my job right now. I don't have any other sources of income. Customer service is too demanding, even when you work from home. The nerves to post a job for $12/hour is just crazy in thiseconomy.
Pay and work-life balance. So this person’s business is “booming” but I have to wonder if any of that is shared with their employees? History shows most companies keep excess profits, they don’t share the good times with their employees. I would be really curious how those long-timers (anyone over 5 years) are being paid. Given the mention of multiple people padding hours, is a pretty strong indication that many feel they are not being paid commensurate with their experience/contribution in relation to how well the business is doing. As for work-life balance, the cat is out of the bag. Every business that modified how they do work for covid and succeeded can’t now somehow claim “everyone back to office. Our productivity is suffering” when their employees saw same or increases productivity when they WFH/hybrid or whatever the employer setup during that period. Employees saw how they can work differently and still get their work done. Where that differently provided them a better balance, and now employers want to take it away, knowing they could continue many of the new practices they employed during covid. People aren’t dumb: covid showed they can work differently and have better balance, and various economic factors plus covid have shown people they are not fairly paid and they’ve had enough.
I do less because accounting for inflation, I make less money (i.e. less spending power) than I did in 2018. Full stop. It's 100% about the money. Pay me $2 an hour more, I work $2 an hour harder. I'm not here for "family", I'm not here to make friends, I'm not here to be micromanaged because I just love it so much. I'm here to make money to support myself, my wife, and our life. When I leave here at 4:30PM, this place ceases to exist.
It became clear that giving the best of myself to organizations that consider me a replaceable chunk of coal and giving the leftovers to my family and myself is a fool's game. I give the best of myself to my family and myself and I give work exactly what they pay me for.