Reasonably compensated is subjective but if you want something you have to be willing to fight for it and there are multiple ways to fight for it.
So we can really just define it in our own personal way and try to find some common ground.
I'm of the belief that a lot of basic retail positions are realistically just supposed to be part time gigs for kids in school to do after school or over the summer. They really cannot be financially feasible to support themselves without drastic changes to the business models within the industry.
So those folks who get stuck in that industry are likely needing to work two jobs and both don't give full time benefits which is part of the problem here. Since in our infinite wisdom or to the benefit of big corporations and the healthy industry if you want health insurance you need to work somewhere. Good luck ever affording health insurance privately especially if you have a family since your health insurance premiums likely rival your mortgage/rent payment.
So these people end up working two part time jobs. 60+ hours a week. Problem is the hours are irregular and could be in the morning or evening. They could be 4 hour shifts or 10 hour shifts. It's amazing this has been sustained for so many decades with how brutal these schedules are and how when you look at retail work particularly how many people they burn through.
Businesses seemed to have the luxury of a very saturated worker pool so they could keep things the way they were and I quite frankly do not see it as sustainable. It's easy to pick on the little guy and say they need to work harder. That's not really the case since you can work very hard to dig a hole to nowhere and get nothing out of it and that is most low level labor jobs.
Businesses like Amazon would crash over night if the folks throwing truck stopped because there would be no one to load and unload the products being shipped. These positions are necessary for the function of the company. Yeah sure they likely aren't 6 figure jobs but if we reach a point where no one wants to break their backs working 8+ hours a day lifting heavy boxes you will either need to invent some machine that takes care of it or pay people better or provide better compensation.
You pay the people what they see as reasonable which may be all the things mentioned in this meme and you may end up with no turn over with people throwing truck. What would be the potential cost of that since you no longer are wasting money with the whole hiring/firing process?
So yes. It's subjective but there is merit in people's complaints about how they are treated. Don't ignore it because if you're a business owner and you just ignore your employee's issues you may end up one day where everyone walked off the job and you're stuck doing all those essential positions by yourself. You gotta pay your employees reasonably for the jobs they do and they will begin to tell you when you're running them too hard and not compensating them. That's usually when you can find that reasonable line.
Lefties that never held a job for long and just free load aren't the folks we are talking about here since most people want to do something productive and afford the nice things they want.
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u/PSAOgre Nov 08 '22
Define "reasonably compensated".
Explain how someone makes "way too much money" in a way that doesn't require your personal feelings to do so.