I wouldn’t say it’s false, so much as incomplete. It’s not a complete statement. Nobody wants to work for what is being offered. That statement is true. I certainly won’t accept minimum wage for my skillset, and bluntly, minimum wage, even where I am (where it seems to be higher than most areas), is still not a living wage. The only jobs that should be under the minimum requirement of a living wage, IMO, should be part-time; in that scenario, it’s less a matter of making enough per-hour to live, and more an issue of not working enough hours to cross the line of a salary you can live off of. Even part-time workers should be paid enough that if they were working 35+ hrs a week, they could survive independent of all other factors. Any full time position, even at minimum wage, should be able to support a single individuals survival in the modern world, in the country/state/region they live in. Full stop.
When people stop at “nobody wants to work”, that incomplete sentence seems to imply that the general public doesn’t want employment, they do, they just want employment that won’t lead to poverty and destitution. That incomplete statement is gaslighting defamation and manipulation. I agree with that. The general public, IMO, doesn’t want handouts, they just want to be able to live reasonably for the labor that they provide.
I’m sure this will be news to nobody here but I’m going to rant on a bit of a tangent here for a sec… but historically, a single family (say in the mid 1900’s (20th century), eg, 1950/1960), on a single income, could afford a house, a car, several children, and some other luxuries. Now, on a single income, a family can’t even afford rent while putting food on the table. There’s more than enough evidence showing how this all happened; looking at a larger picture than most people would, it’s clear that for profits, C-level pay, and the upper-class (aka 1%) the line went up, dramatically, but for workers wages, benefits and income it either stayed flat (which is a decline when you factor in inflation), or they literally went down. Very very few have seen an appropriate increase in wage over time, keeping up with inflation. Anecdotally, my wages even in my short career, even with job hopping enough to get somewhat near reasonable raises, I haven’t been able to keep up with inflation. I started my career in 2011, my first job hop put me at a fairly reasonable $55k/yr in the early 2010’s. According to the official bank of canada inflation calculator, that wage has the current buying power of a bit over $72k/yr. at my most recent employer, I wasn’t making over $72k/yr. I cannot keep up. It’s more than a 30% increase in inflation from 2011 to 2023, just based on that alone.
I don’t want more money. If I had a job that paid me reasonably today (around $75k/yr), and only ever kept up with inflation, then I would never feel the need to change jobs for financial reasons ever again. I’m sure there are other reasons why I would change jobs, but money wouldn’t be the deciding factor. I just want to earn enough to live. This is compounded by the fact that my industry (IT support) in my country, Canada, is notoriously weak in terms of wages. Looking at the website glassdoor.ca for my job description, I see starting salaries of $57k/yr or even $41k/yr. Yet, a comparable job across the border into the USA, is similar per-year, but the US dollar is worth more, so a $41k/yr USD job is worth more like $56k/yr CAD, and $57k/yr USD is worth nearly $80k/yr CAD. The issue there is that I cannot relocate. I have constraints on where I can live and what I can do about it due to my personal situation (separate from work). I like it in Canada, it’s a wonderful country for the most part; but the wages for my specific vocation are very very lacking. If someone offered me $80k/yr on the low end, I’d be very happy with my wage - provided I could keep up with inflation.
What’s stupid to me, is that everyone relies on the work I do in my chosen profession. Everyone from C-levels to worker bees doing the paper pushing for the business and everything inbetween, almost all of whom are making more than me, in most businesses. I am the glue that keeps everything operating. My friend, who works in tech as a developer/programming analyst, was given a raise last year to over $100k/yr CAD ( ~ $72k/yr USD ); yet, if we worked together, he would rely on me to keep all of his dev servers running. If I don’t do my job, he can’t do his. It’s a leaning problem, and everything leans on IT support. Whether I’m a sysadmin, or network admin, or network engineer, or helpdesk, his work relies on me and my team to do their job for him to be able to do his. IMO, that’s really stupid to have many, very highly paid resources, relying on some of the lowest paid employees in the organization in order to do their job. What makes this even more stupid, IMO, is that the IT team is usually much smaller than other teams and under-represented by unions or other means. The organization will literally cease to function if IT doesn’t do their job and something breaks while they’re unavailable.
Businesses don’t understand the problem. It’s a matter of burn rate and the leaning problem of everyone relying on a single, unified system. I’m at the bottom of the stack, the network. That’s my focus. IMO, the network should never be in question. It should always work, and do the work it does quickly and effectively. A breakdown of the network precipitates a complete failure of the organization to do business. There’s no reason why the IT and support staff should be some of the lowest paid workers.
Okay, I’ll stop my rant for now, I just get so riled up by this. Management doesn’t understand and they probably never will.