Antiwork

Gas prices going up. Food prices going up. Rent is still high as ever in every city. Paycheck taxed like 25 percent with no return at tax time. My wage has stayed the same, in turn taking a pay cut from the inflation. I know I'm (25) not the only one who feels this way when I feel physically sick when I think about living this way for another 40 so years. Something's gotta give.

My employer has been piling job duties onto my department for over a year now, refusing to give us raises, pays us less than some retail establishments (we work healthcare), refuses to acknowledge our understaffing problem, has laid off staff left and right to hire poorer people abroad, then they had the audacity to show their “appreciation” for us by offering free t-shirts with their own logo on them, and they just recently donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. I support the charity they donated to, but after their blatant refusals to pay their own employees what we’re worth and treat us as actual people rather than robots, I can’t help but to feel like their donation was just to make them look good. Am I wrong to resent my employer for donating so much to charity before taking care of us first?

I work as an insurance agent. Like most companies, we're short-staffed, so the workload is immense and it's not realistic for us to keep up with the 500-600 clients that have been assigned to each of us. I generally adore my manager. She's backed me up in several situations, and we get along really well. At least once a month I've had a one-on-one talk with my manager explaining that I'm struggling and not able to keep up with this workload. She agrees and in our last talk said, “all we can do is triage at this point, just deal with the urgent requests and do the rest when you can.” Yesterday she asked why I still have so many emails (my inbox usually has a lot, but none are more than three weeks old). I told her I was only able to work three hours of over time on…