I used to work at a factory in management. I am a tradesperson and was in the maintenance department.
We were having a meeting about the poor performance of the plant operators and how most just simply do not care. The company owner was looking at the management team for a way to improve this.
There was a lot of silence, before and after I piped up that they “don’t get paid enough to care”. Eventually, the plant manager spoke up, agreed and cited multiple employees leaving to go work at Walmart and even one to McDonald’s and said that if it truly paid well, people wouldn’t leave there.
The owner was upset but I know I was right. Some of these guys have no clue.. I left that job to go to a better one, again because it paid better and guess what? Good pay = good plant operators, a level of professionalism and people who care about the job they do.
Meanwhile, there’s not one guy who worked in our department still there and they’ve had postings up for a long time. They lost a pretty solid maintenance team because of the same reason. I make the same money now with less responsibility – no brainer. Their plant barely runs because they have whatever they can scrape up running it and cannot keep legitimate tradesmen to fix and maintain the place. They’ve called me multiple times asking me to come back for one shift to fix the problem of the week and once, I took them up on it.
Just further examples that you get what you pay for. I work a lot harder for a good wage.. my father ran a successful business by paying more than the competition and having the best employees in the area. I saw they gave substantial wage raises in the past 2 years so I assume they’re figuring it out but they’ve lost more money than they would have made by just retaining good employees I bet.