There are, of course, several problems with this entire discussion.
- Everyone responding here is the best and brightest. Statistically that is not true. This may be why you think you are undervalued.
- If some of you who aren't as good as you think you are evaluate what you are getting paid vs. what that similar work would get paid if you walked into another company today doing the same thing at the employer you complain about, how would that compare?
- The general divide seems to be big corp vs small company, though there are certainly small companies that do the same.
IF you are as good as you think you are, go somewhere your talents are rewarded. If you are unwilling to do that, STFU. You want free markets, this is what free markets do. They aren't immoral, they are amoral. The morality comes from those who participate in it.
How many of you are not doing your complete job but claim you are doing it, but refuse to go "above and beyond"? While bitching about others who are doing the same?
The best analogy for working for someone is this:
The guy who hires you is in charge of shoveling a large mound of shit. If you grab a shovel and take some of the shovels of shit away from him, you will be rewarded. If you take all the shit away from him, you will be greatly rewarded. If you shovel shit but it ends up in the wrong place, you will be less rewarded and coached up. If you are untrainable in this respect you will receive no reward. If you stand around complaining of the smell, the heat, the flies, or come up with 1000 reasons why you can't shovel shit today, don't expect a reward.
IF you are actually shoveling shit and you don't receive a reward, why would you continue to shovel shit for the guy who doesn't understand the value of shoveling shit?
If you are going to rail on about how you aren't getting paid enough, then you'd better start quantifying the value of your work in real dollars to your employer. I left the last one because I was able to do this and it fell on deaf ears. Go calculate how much money you make per day for the company, subtract your wage. You now know your value. Yes, those of you in HR/safety/accounts have a tougher time with this, but all you have to do is look at the cost of doing your job wrong and using that as a benchmark. If you as safety director keep all the paperwork and training up-to-date and save 300k in OSHA violations/year, then you have a real easy cost/benefit for your 125k/year salary.
I'm sure y'all will take many issues with this, but you should really examine your own life and work regardless. I used to think 'the man' was keeping me down. That's loser talk. I make way more money now that I did when I thought that way. All while knowing that I can do better, and should be.
BTW fuck all of you who think this is boomer thinking. People who wanted to get ahead have thought this way forever. The asian cultures, the jewish culture, the nigerians, they've all had this relationship to work. Whenever you place them in a land that is relatively free of prejudice and government interference they kick the ass of the natives.
I have every reason to think like a loser considering my upbringing, and the politics swimming around my house growing up, and my first job working for a large corp. that was a good example of what some of you talk about. This is all designed to get you to give up.
A bunch of you bitch about the .gov creating a welfare state. Well, you're inability to go above and beyond, and then be adaptable enough to leave for a better job if you've earned compensation that you aren't getting... you are participating in the welfare state too. You are giving up on the free market and now expecting a company to care about your well-being while you underperform.
"
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is something you probably agree with too.
Now, from another angle, those of you who compare standards of living cross-generationally, what did they have that you don't? What do you have that they don't?
What all of you forget who say the boomers had it easy is that they still didn't "own" their house until the kids were mostly gone. They also didn't pay for cable, they didn't have a smartphone, a computer. Many of the household appliances that you take for granted were not available at the time, and if they had some of them they didn't have all of them. When you don't have a bunch of consumer goods to spend money on, you can pour more of it into a house. BTW this was the norm pre-boomer as well, but post-WW2 did push the age when much of this was available down a decade.
2 things depressed the wage growth in this country: The boomers because of the size of their generation driving down wages for everyone, and the emptying out of the homes when all the women went to work. Both happened around the same time. A lot of this was because the boomer men, once they were in their 20s-30s, didn't realize that much of the quality of life they got off of dad's income growning up was due to the post-WW2 boom. Instead of adjusting their expectations they asked their wives to work. Because the culture was also pushing women's lib the women felt it was their duty to contribute. This depressed wages even further. We didn't really swallow these changes until the 90's as a society, as can be seen if you look at when real wages started to climb again.
So, it was the boomer's fault for handling their living standard poorly, but their parents fault for not preparing them properly, and our fault for not recognizing what happened and demanding unreasonable things from life without earning them.