I would like to know what people's thoughts are about the discrepancy between workforce tiers. This is a long post so feel free to skip to the TLDR.
After I graduated with a BS degree in technology I ended up working for the state in an office job as an in-house technology specialist. I've always had a strong work ethic throughout my life and have had multiple summers working a blue-collar job for $10 an hour as a temp-agency worker (who bills my time +$30). Working this job and other jobs like it were physically and mentally grueling routinely racking up 60-70 hours a week — I remember coming home routinely exhausted to the point all I managed to do during weekdays was fix myself a cheap meal and attend to household chores then bed.
For the past 5 years, my current position pays about $20-21 an hour. In my first probationary year, I was working at my 110% – grateful for my new position and freedom to work mostly autonomously and everyone seemed impressed and grateful for my hard efforts. I get the highest marks at the end of my probationary review — I got a good indication from my boss my hard work has been noticed and would be rewarded as soon as there was money in the budget.
So, in my second year, I continue to put out my full effort, essentially looking for work that needed to be done to help the overall workflow of the office. My first-year employee review comes around and since I've worked harder than I have ever worked before, thought my self-evaluation warranted the highest marks. Now, this in itself doesn't warrant a pay increase, but this could potentially be used as an argument with HR that multiple years of receiving the highest marks would open the door to questioning why a boss wouldn't honor a pay raise. So, he marks me down in one category which brings my average to just 1 tier below the highest stating “When I worked here, my boss always gave me the highest marks, but I feel like that should only be reserved for the 1-2% cases and if I gave them out frequently, then everyone would be essentially getting a gold star”. I couldn't believe he said this. He basically said, “sorry, I don't recognize hard work and there are no incentives to work hard”. Since then, I've asked numerous times about a pay raise and I've been fed a carrot every time.
This left a sting, but it gets even better.
Fast forward a few months into my second year and I was in the midst of cleaning up network folders that were cluttering our root shared directory. I copied all relevant managers onto this email chain and got approval from the majority and proceeded to delete said old information. Fast forward 3.5 months, I get a semi-nasty email from one of the managers asking where one of the folders that I listed on the email chain (deleted 3.5 months ago of course). This was a particularly stressful time for me and basically was told I needed to recover said deleted files ASAP. I remarked to the manager “I'm sorry this happened, I am beginning to feel my good intentions are leading to the unintended complications. I'll be not pursuing tasks that fall outside my job description going forward”. They just looked flabbergasted and didn't say anything as I walked out of their office. I managed to get the files recovered within an hour and thought everything was peachy.
1 day later – I got a book-sized email from that manager with my boss copied onto it basically stating, I thought your comment was nasty, I value initiative in my employees, and it would have to be left up to my boss to decide what should be done with me. My boss called a meeting with me and asked me to explain everything from the beginning. After hearing everything, I threw in that this manager had plenty of time to respond to my email, and the last 10 times I've walked into their office 7/10 they were doing online shopping. He expressed to me that NO ONE worked 100% of the time (I honestly was at that time…) and he thought 85% of the time was pretty good. He told me 'my advice to you is — slow down. I remember distinctly I blinked blankly at him and said 'ok – thanks for the meeting' and left. That was the day I quietly quit my office job 3 years ago.
Since then, I tried applying to better jobs with better pay and hopefully, a better work environment where hard work was actually recognized. My first attempt of applying to another job lead to my boss telling me how unprofessional it was to ask him for a job reference out of the blue. He thought it would have been more appropriate to lead him up with an 'it's been a great pleasure working here (for me), (your) prospects of looking of looking for a new job is primarily driven by opportunity and not anything against where (you) work'. He told me that if I left, he wouldn't be able to fill the position quickly enough (2 weeks) and the person who would assume responsibility for my job would be him. After my interview, I got very positive feedback, they were sharing inner dept information as if I was already ready to roll into the door, and I would be the 'first' to hear back the next day. After multiple days passed, I called back to the person who interviewed me for an update and basically got told in a really apologetic and confusing voice that they ultimately ended up with a different choice. This is when I realized high competency as a worker tends to lead to impossible advancement as managers want to keep competent people in their positions. (My brother has shared stories of where they promote incompetent people because they couldn't afford to let the other person leave their current position).
I made changes the very next day walking into work: I made sure to do all my personal life items first such as fixing drinks, breakfast, lunch, online shopping/bills, bringing my personal computer to work on or play games, obtained a personal business license to contract work (sometimes getting paid to fix hardware for other people while at work). At first — all this felt perverse and went against every fiber of my being. I was fueled by my resentment for the man and disgruntlement by a broken system. As a result, my work visibly piled up for the people who routinely were asking me for help and people stopped asking me to do as much. I managed to knock out multi months' projects in days and keep a few easy tasks around to work on to look busy if anyone was watching. I'd say in a given week I do about 5-10 hours of real work. I simply leave work at lunch for 2 hours to go home and clean house and if no one notices, I don't make up the time, and when they do I take my 30-minute lunch break.
As unfair as this sounds, there are managers in my office who get to work from home make a clean $5k+ more than me, and objectively have half the responsibilities I do. They don't have to even leave the house or do serious work and get to collect a fat $50k+ paycheck.
I see this discrepancy everywhere and there is a common theme of rising disgruntlement in the workforce. Based on my experiences, how can the current workforce continue to let people be 1. demotivated from working hard, 2. be hindered by lazy coworkers, 3. be intentionally kept down at your current level/workplace, 4. told to not stir the pot (call out lazy workers dumping work on you),
and 5. simply not working the job you are paid to work by working from home or walking out mid-day.
It seems to me easily 15%+ of the workforce has quietly quit their job and that inefficiency has to have been passed down to the lower tier (boots on the ground) workforce. How can the entry-level/essential workforce continue to keep their heads down and work like good little sheep without revolting against this disease growing in our society? I get before it was out of desperation to keep a roof over their heads and chase a dream of a better future. Now though, a bunch of these jobs can't afford a house or afford to build a dream — I would rather collect a govt check for a better quality of life at that point.
TLDR;
My workforce experiences have left me to become a soulless employee who's become a prime example of a quiet quitter who's thrown in the towel for personal gains. I would like to know how various workforce systems are still functioning as they are and why people have not done anything about it.
I greatly appreciate your thoughts and personal experiences.