https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/career-trend-act-wage-disgruntled-workers-brings-job-warnings-experts

What is ‘act your wage,’ the new labor trend?

The trend "act your wage" is the mindset that the amount of effort employees put into their job should directly align with their pay.

It seems the main consideration for employees wanting to ‘act their wage’ is to implement boundaries aimed at protecting their own work-life balance and to not overwork themselves to a point that affects their quality of life," said Michelle Reisdorf, Chicago-based district president at Robert Half, the international HR consulting firm.

Why is 'act your wage’ trending?

This trend — and other labor trends — often gain steam seemingly as more employees sign on and feel impacted by the root cause of it, noted Reisdorf.

The state of the job market is complex, and as such, many workers may have had to take on more work and feel burned out, she said.

Good.  Even easier to shine when the turkeys fly even lower.   I will have plenty of work right up till retirement and a nice part time gig after retirement.

You likely won’t have a chance to shine. This attitude not just in work ethics but in everything in society is destroying our country.

This only works in someone's favor when management actually pays attention to how much or little their employees work.  If management doesn't care then neither will the employees.

Look at all those boot straps you are pulling yourself up by!

Just more evidence that the Fed's work on raising interest rates isn't done.  

This is just a by product of a historically low unemployment rate.  Wait until unemployment climbs back above 5% and keeps heading north for awhile.

The gaslighting operation on a generation is going quite well I see.  

"You are powerless.  You can't help yourself.  It's always someone else's fault.  You need the state to make things right."

What’s that gonna look like in terms of rates? 15% 18% 20%?

None of that is sustainable nor affordable with the base prices of cars, trucks, homes etc. theses days.

We are truly in uncharted waters and no one really knows how this is going to play out.

That kicks off the whole enchilada

It’s an old saying.

It’s another way of saying “Keeping up with the Jones’s”

“Act your wage” means don’t live a lifestyle beyond what you get paid….which is the biggest problem.

The reward for hard work is more work.  If you are self employed, this is great.  If you work for a globocorp it isn't bad, but you will get little return on it because for whatever reason companies are incredibly slow to reward it if they do at all.  Your best bet is to job hop because that does get rewarded.

That number is meaningless now. The number we should be talking about is labor participation which I believe is right around 60%. In other words 40% of the work force somehow is able to choose not to work.

And this is the attitude that is killing us. The idea of doing a good job used to be about who you are as a person.

Spot on. Being the employee who goes anywhere, anytime, to do anything gets you to the same place as the turtles you work with. Nowhere.

As a salaried employee with contracted hours I only work those contracted hours. Anything more would be stupid.

Mah, the boss will just pile more work onto you as the slackers slack off. you'll be too busy struggling to keep up as the do-nothings kiss ass and get promoted to positions above you.

You are mistaken, sir. Acting your wage means that you produce at a level reflective of your salary. No free work. Some call it quiet quitting.

Gen X thread!

This is an excellent point. The feds could mandate all those extra safety and “green” features when rates were low and the base price of the asset could rise unchecked.

But if rates climb and base prices need to drop, something will have to give.

When I was a kid I heard all the time Grow up. It was ridiculous. I think this "trend" is equally ridiculous. I put myself through college at 3.35 an hour. How is anyone making $15 an hour at McDonald's going to be able to act their wage? When I was working at McDonald's we were sent home if we weren't constantly working. If there was a slow period we had to find something to do or we got sent home. We also had to be polite and helpful to the customers and oh, yes we also actually served the customer. Nowadays the customer does everything except flip the burgers.

Very much this.
There are a huge number of posters consistently displaying mindsets and opinions that 10-15 years ago would have been right at home on DU underground.
Substitute certain buzzwords and organizations or demographics to hate and they're indistinguishable.

My brother (rip) used to give me grief about being a business owner...working all those extra hours, nights, weekends and holidays

He was a die caster and a machinist and made some of the most complicated (expensive) Chevy racing heads ever made for the Corvette. He said he clocked in at work, hung his brain up next to the time clock, and at the end of the 8 hours he put his brain back in and went home. He left his troubles at the factory time clock

"If you've got time to lean, you've got time to CLEAN"

Leaning on something without cleaning? GTFO-RFN

This.
The great 2024-2025 recession will reset attitudes.

But I bet he worked hard and did an excellent job while on the clock. This trend is being about being a lazy piece of shit and taking pay because the company is desperate for bodies.

There are pluses and minuses on each side of it

I can't help but think this is somehow tied into globohomo.

Fantasy land!

Nobody works for any other reason than money in the bank and food on the table.

The only reason to do a good job is to stay employed.  Employment is a necessary evil for anyone who isn't born rich.  You trade your lifetime away for the ability to live a little better than a welfare leech.  

Being a good person doesn't mean being a sucker.  Some employers would own slaves if it was legal.

My old job was really good pay. This one as a temp position pays shit but the goal was to get my foot in the door here. I did and have been asked if I was interested in staying, training for a new position and taking a promotion.  Yeah I had to eat shit for 90 days or so but sometimes you have do what you have do. People are too stupid to look at the bigger picture, Every movement doesn't have to be up. Sometimes you need to climb down the ladder, move it over and start climbing again to get to where you want to be.

I am a small business owner, and close to retirmement.

If I am reading it right, "act your wage" means do what you get paid for, and have some work/family time balance. I don't expect my employees to work any harder than thier paycheck reflects.

Nothing wrong with that. Life should be about LIFE....not work.


P.S. - What drove me to start my own business is that I wanted to EARN more than I really wanted to work for. Meaning I wanted time to do family stuff as opposed to living under someone elses "rule". In a relatively short stint of working REALLY HARD, I had everything I want. Freedom, money, etc.

In fairness, that number has hardly changed since 2013.

On the flip side treating employees as interchangeable and disposable results in good employees treating the job as interchangeable and disposable. If Lemonjello plays on his phone all day and gets paid the same amount as Orangejello that works hard all day eventually Orangejello won't give a shit anymore or he will leave the job for a better paying one.

And in fairness that is about the time frame that things have been going to shit.


ETA: I should say going to shit at an accelerated pace.

When I was wrenching I figured at what threshold I maxed my bonuses for a given week and I did just a tad over that point every week.  I was still out doing 95% of the shop without giving max effort. After awhile you figure out that killing yourself for the company isn't getting you anywhere

Bunch of pussies.

Do you only do a good job because you are paid? Sure you work for money, we all do. However, the quality of work you provide is a reflection of you, not the pay. If the job treats you like shit you leave, you don't short change your own morals by not doing an honest effort.

The fact that you think work ethics is related to pay is just sad. Or perhaps I am just a sucker my whole life but, I dont have to wonder about my morals or who I am as a person.

That's the entire point of raising rates.  The prices of cars, trucks, and houses skyrocketed BECAUSE of excess liquidity in the market.

Raising rates is SUPPOSED to make those things less affordable in order to cool off the market.

Y’all must have worked for some shitty companies.

This is not totally a new thing. I had an employee back in the 1990's asked for a raise he was a good worker and I told him keep up a high standard for two weeks and I'll put you in for a raise. He looked me dead in the eye and said no he wanted more money first to do more work. He said for $10 an hour you are only getting $10 worth of work from me. Mind you I had not given him more work just to keep a higher standard for a period of time. I knew he could easily do it and I was happy to help out one of my key guys.

I was flabbergasted by his attitude. It never occurred to me that someone would see things that way. Needless to say he never got a raise as long as I was there.

Yes it does.  

Attached File

Cool. The local Burger King employees (only fast food in town) are gonna be sorely disappointed when their pay dips to $5/hr. Or they close. Either way, win/win.

Over generalizations are always dangerous so with that caveat out of the way, I will say that this current generation of workers in the last 5 years definitely as a very different expectation, and I can't help but think some of it is due to the life of luxury most have had as kids.   Say what you want, even our "poor" people in society  have it pretty well.  Phones, clothes, etc.   When I entered the work force 25 years ago it wasn't uncommon to see on resume's like mine where kids had been working since they were 13, having jobs of some sort during high school and college to help put gas money or spending money in their pockets, or in many cases provide for essentials like food and clothing.  If I wanted to be able to take my girlfriend out for dinner, I had to work to get enough money to afford that.   In college when I wanted to have some beer money, I had to work for it.

Very few resume's I see these days have any references to that.   Those are replaced with extracurricular activities which aren't all bad, but don't create the same connection to working for income.   My sisters and me all worked pretty much minimum wage jobs growing up and that solidified in our brains that wasn't going to yield the lifestyles we wanted, so we all went to college and ultimately ended up with Masters Degrees of some sort, and have been able to earn good livings for ourselves and our families.

During COVID I heard a lot of grumbling and belly aching when we temporarily reduced wages to help ensure the company's cash flow would last while we tried to react to the really major slow down in our business.  It was explained as such to our employees and people were expected to work less hours so they were more or less kept whole.   The reality was very much that the high performers kept working the same amount, if not more.   People like me realized that was key to the company surviving and  ultimately all of us having our jobs longer term.

When we reinstated wages a few months later, guess who complained the loudest about getting back pay?   Was it the people that legitimately deserved it?   Nope... it was the people that took the deal as it was spelled out.   For 20% less pay the company wanted 20% less work, and got it and then some.  (There were a lot of people that pretty well took those first 6 months of COVID as a paid at home vacation, barely able to be bothered to check email or get on zoom calls).   They felt that it was not fair that they didn't get paid in full what was on their annual compensation letter.

I tied that back to again not having a clear connection built into their brain that wages are tied to work output, either in terms of hours or results based productivity.   This generation just expects that money is given to them just for being them.   Again I chalk that up to the relatively wealth and luxury most people live in to where basic survival is not tied to working for it.

That was my experience at McDonald’s.  You got time to lean, you got time to clean.  Always a bottle of carbonated water and clean rag around to clean the stainless steel freezers and stuff.  Paid for my 1st year and a half of school.  There wasn’t any fucking off.

For a lot of positions, it's a challenge to directly quantify, and arguably a lot of those positions are certainly not needed at all, but if X person is making X% over what they are costing the company, helping the company to be profitable, then it's okay to get by with the act your wage challenge.  The problem is that people are doing the bare minimum because they "think" they are worth more than they are being paid, when in reality, they are costing the company money.  They see the profit the company makes at the end of the year and have convinced themselves that they helped make that profit, when the fact is that a small percentage of people are the ones responsible and their position is quite easily replaceable by someone being paid far less.  In general, the workforce thinks far too highly of themselves.

I just posted that!  Great minds and all….

It's more meaningful than labor participation when you are trying to understand a phenomenon of people dragging ass while employed.

No shit.  My first mortgage was 12something percent. 1979.  To make buying a house work financially I built the fucker myself.  Traded labor with friends for the stuff I couldn't do alone.  Hired out the mechanicals.  Built a garage for my mom as practice.  Bought a how-to carpentry book.  Wasn't easy but solved that particular financial problem for me.  

I don't get the "Waaahh, I can't attitude."  Times are difficult right now but defeatism is a pussy way out.  Working harder (not talking about working harder at your primary employment necessarily) may not solve all problems but it sure as shit solves some and generally makes the insoluble better.  The suckage will end and you want to be as best off as you can to take advantage of that.  

No, this “trend” is about what I’ve done my whole working career. ‘Absorbing’ others’ work and work above my pay grade because it is easier for management. But getting paid for only my work.

That's the whole point.  That's why the Fed was raising rates in the first place and why I'm arguing their work isn't done.

Their work isn't done until "something gives".

You've clearly never taken pride in something you've built.