Kuwoobie wrote:
gbaji wrote:
So you do the bare minimum work necessary to fill a job slot, make no effort to increase your skills, and in fact actively work to avoid doing so, and you wonder why you're not moving upward. Hmmm...
D'awww. Looks like you strained yourself trying to understand what I was saying again. I was the one doing all of the work. I was their "go-to guy." I was the sucker. I spent years picking up the slack for everyone else and had nothing to show for it. I wasn't the only one, either. That is the lesson to be learned here.
Um... I think it's you two who failed at reading comprehension. I got that entirely. The "you" in that statement was the "you" you were instructing to "do the bare minimum work necessary to fill a job slot, make no effort to increase your skills, and in fact actively work to avoid doing so...".
In case you're still confused my point was that you were giving absolutely terrible advice. While doing that extra work isn't a guarantee for success, not doing so is almost always a guarantee for failure. How the heck will you *ever* advance if you make no effort to improve your job skills and knowledge? You should be jumping at every opportunity to take on a new task. Period. Every, single, time. Even if it doesn't immediately result in any increase in wages, it doesn't matter. It's a skill you now have that you didn't have before. Even if it doesn't pay off at your Walmart position, it may pay off somewhere else.
And yes, Virginia, management does make note of who goes out of their way to be extra helpful and who does not. If this extra work didn't pay off for you, it's more likely something else about *you* that made that happen, and not the extra work. For most people taking on extra tasks pays off.
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It was their birthright, and it was luck. They were born to families who could afford to jump them through all the hoops of pretentiousness. They are the friends are relatives of the people who mattered. They sure as **** weren't people who actually worked for Wal-Mart.
Seriously? You think the sons and daughters of the rich and entitled are sitting around using their connections to get sweet mid level management positions at Walmart? Really? You're way overplaying this narrative. You really need to step away from the "us vs them" mentality. I suspect that's what's hurt your advancement.
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My point is, working harder and being optimistic and otherwise doing more to help them is not helping yourself.
Wrong. Everything else staying the same, your outcomes will be better doing those things than not. Again, it's no guarantee of success, but your odds are better if you do work harder, and are optimistic, and do more to help than if you don't. Again, I'll suggest that this negative attitude that seems to be firmly entrenched in your mind may be your biggest hindrance to success.
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What we represent is something that is completely disposable to them. They don't need to recognize your work because they don't have to. They don't need to pay more because they don't have to. You are absolutely right when you say the work isn't worth a higher wage, because it isn't worth anything at all. If the minimum wage suddenly disappeared right now, they'd be able to thumb through applications and find people who would practically be volunteers, you know, people like you with that "can do" attitude who'd be willing to start at $0.10 an hour and "work their way up" to $0.17 after thirty or so years.
Wrong. Dead and demonstrably wrong. How would these volunteers eat? You get that a starving workforce doesn't get much work done, right? You really have a bizarre infatuation with the idea that everyone that is part of "them" is just out to get you or something. You've read to many crappy distopian novels or something. In the real world, employers must pay their employees salaries sufficient for the jobs they are doing, or they wont do them. No one will work for $0.10/hour in an economy where a loaf of bread costs $3. Surely you can see this.
You keep tossing out extremes, but the reality is in the middle. And it's a middle you can work with, if you make good choices.
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...and there lies my key point. These people aren't "better than me." Not even fucking close. I have talked to them about how they got to be where they are actually. Many of them, (but not all!), are lazy, stupid, and completely worthless people. Go and work for Wal-Mart if you love being forced to take orders from people who are smaller, weaker and dumber than you. Most of the stores I worked for barely made it by because of how utterly incompetent the people running it were. There was nothing the rest of us could do about it but laugh at their stupidity between desperately looking for a way out.
Then why were they chosen for the position? You get that Walmart is a
business. It has to make money to survive. Which means that it's management levels have to be sufficiently competent to ensure that they continue to make a profit. I get that you have built up this assumption that they are all stupid and whatnot, but that simply cannot be the case. The incentive of each level of management is to put the best people in the key positions. Said positions tend to be the best paying positions. A business that doesn't do this will fail over time. Your personal assumptions about management is almost certainly ridiculously biased. I'm not going to assume no incompetents will exist in management, it's very likely that the measurement of competence that you are using isn't an accurate one in terms of what the business considers to be important.
And at the end of the day, that's what matters. When I spoke earlier about figuring out what those who have become successful have done, and attempting to do it yourself, this is why. It doesn't matter if you, the stock boy, think that the things your managers do are dumb, it's clear that whomever put them in their positions do *not* agree with you. Since they're the ones making the decisions, then it's their opinion that matters, not yours. The smart move is to figure out what they are looking for and work yourself to be that. The dumb move is declaring what they want "dumb", and refusing to do it, and thus ensuring that your odds of success are as low as possible.
Contrary to your assumptions, businesses aren't in the business of oppressing their workforce. They are in the business of making money. And most of the time, the best way to make the most money is to pay your workforce a sufficient wage to keep them employed. Which yes, means that low skilled people will tend to make very little money. But as you gain in skill, your value will increase, and your wages will increase as well. Your view of this seems to be solely from the "no skills that can't be replaced by the next warm body to walk along". Which is a very very narrow view of employment. The key is to fix that skills problem, not demand that such skills magically command a higher salary. Because the latter approach simply doesn't work on a macro-economic scale. Wages are always going to be relative to the value of the output of the labor. You can't get around this, no matter how many wage laws you attempt to pass.