Gotta act your wage
It’s hard to sometimes though. I like to be thorough.
My solution is to make sure I spend sufficient time on cleaning everything properly in my bakery, and if that means customers have to wait a little longer, that’s too bad. I don’t do a bad job, I do a very good job, it’s just got less of a customer service focus than my employer would like.
“Why aren’t you working?” “There’s nothing to do.” “Well pretend like you’re working!” “You get paid more than me. You pretend like I’m working.”
Bill Hicks.
I once had a manager who couldn’t stand that I wouldn’t “look busy.” I said, give me something to do -within the scope of my contract- I’ll do it with a smile, but I won’t pretend to work. My contract said they had to pay me even if they sent me home for the day. So I just hung out, but they hated that too because I was visably doing nothing. There are downsides to contract work, but there are also big upsides. I can’t tell you how many times I’d agreed to terms with a client, arrived, and had them immediately try to gaslight me about what was agreed to.
I explained to my employer that in capitalist society my only value is my quantity/quality of work. Since I can’t downgrade quality, and they don’t pay me well enough they don’t get more than 60% of what i can do. He asked how to get more, I told him more money or more holiday… I am still at 60% maximum… It degrade with inflation too, last year during the yearly bilan, I insisted that they have to justify why they are cutting my salary since they didn’t match inflation. HR and syndic got involved and I got 2% pay increase… We are slave in this system and capitalists are trying to gazelight us to give more than they pay.
For many years I struggled to get my coworkers to understand that a raise smaller than inflation was not a raise. Every person I worked with would defend the company when they underpaid or overworked us. The argument would usually be along the lines of “You can’t blame them, it makes financial sense for a business to do that.” Of course I can blame them for exploiting me!
I finally found people who understood what I believed to be common sense, but I can’t organize any rage because the company I work for now actually treats its employees well.
Yes, each time the manager tell me we are making you a exception don’t tell your colleagues, so I told them at next coffee. Buy I never heard of one trying it too.
Pay minimum wage, get minimum effort ¯\(ツ)/¯
It is literally the best reason to be bad at your job.
I’ve painstakingly spent the past four years reprogramming myself to apply less effort. As a perfectionist (ahem… obsessive), it has been especially difficult to lower my expectations of myself. I suppose suffering through this self imposed dead career existence has actually worked; I was rewarded with essentially my work’s top award last year, a year where I did literally nothing .
Make it make sense. Cuz none of does. I was raised to be Saturday morning cartoon good, when all along, it’s the shit humans who find success.
It’s all about who you blow, not what you know. It sickens me.
You get what you pay for.
Bitch yeah it is. The amount you pay is saying the level of quality you want in the job. Pay bad, get bad quality.
If your job isn’t lifesaving, embrace mediocrity.
If you pay pocket change for tools, you get shitty tools. If you buy cheap toys, they’ll break within a couple of days. You get what you pay for, and employment is a business transaction where I’m selling my knowledge and time. If the employer doesn’t want to pay, he’ll get the budget version of both.
That’s why understanding the difference between “cheap” and “inexpensive” is important.
The German word Preiswert is great for this, means ‘worth the price’ As opposed to billig - cheap.
I think the equivalent in Norwegian would be “prisgunstig” and “billig”
You get work equivalent to pay.
Minimum wage, minimum effort.
Give value relative to compensation. An employee is under no obligation to do their best.
act your wage not your shoe size!
Depends on the job. Don’t halfass it if you’re a doctor, nurse, teacher …
I left my high school (as a student) 15 years ago, and the boat was already leaving the harbor for “teachers who give a fuck” at the turn of the millennium. I remember 4 teachers who cared, across 14 years of schooling (pre-12). And I was in the ‘gifted program’ for many of those, too.
Why should they give a fuck when they are getting scraps for a salary? It sucks for everyone involved, but I get it.
There are still things that get placed on nurses as busy-work. We used to get pulled up for not writing shift notes, but I always pointed out that it was basically duplication of standard documentation and I would always prioritise actual care over paperwork.
If it’s not written down it didn’t happen - but if it didn’t happen because I was stood at the COW then it didn’t happen either…
I disagree. Just because you are a nurse or a teacher doesn’t mean you should be underpaid.
Depends on what the definition of bad means here.
If it’s “bad” as in low quality work, i agree.
If it’s the employer version of “bad” as in limited productivity/throughput then no, fuck 'em, they get what they pay for.
