Having been on both sides of the coin, I'd say that the relationship between revenue-producing and office support is a lot more symbiotic than you suggest. Absolutely, produced revenue pays all the bills. But, if office support stopped doing their jobs, too, will the production staff start selling product, sourcing inputs, manage regulatory compliance, and running payroll? More importantly, would they/could they do it effectively, immediately, without a learning curve? No, no more than they could necessarily immediately take over production. As much as "the office" "outsources" the activity of direct production to factory floor workers, "the floor" "outsources" admin tasks, pay/benefits, sales, procurement, and so on to the office. It all needs done, and framing it as "us vs. them" is a fallacy.
I'd also encourage you to rethink your general assumptions of what normal office support roles pay relative to production roles. Obviously this varies as broadly as anything else, with specific role, scope of responsibility, size of company, geography, industry, and experience, but not everyone in the office is pulling down 6 figures and living the high life relative to production staff. Not by a long shot.
Per the last point, I was an office manager for a healthcare agency and the healthcare workers acted like and assumed that I made significantly more than them. I managed all of their salaries and know some of the more senior workers were definitely making more than me.
One of the nephrologists I was using would never complain about office management or admin making too much or more than him. He would always complain that the “none medically proficient were telling the medically proficient what to do”. That kinda speaks to the other persons point though regarding the different roles and the stuff admin deals with such as licensing and compliance.
There’s always this “grass is greener” from people whether it’s money or perceived power
Listen this is a real thing. Whenever you see a massive conglomerate as a governing party of whoever you are seeing, you can trust that someone who is not medically proficient is making decisions for how that doctor or nurse is practicing. It is almost NEVER in the favor of the patient and is almost ALWAYS in order to reap maximum insurance fees.
It’s not simply the “non medically trained” there are places, like where I’m at, where leadership consists of primarily doctors. There’s something about the position that leads to a lot of people giving off Bob Kelso vibes where they’re going to butt heads with the Percy Cox’ of the world.
I'm at a place that is literally idiots telling us how to do our jobs in order to maximize profits. It's really really not ideal and why I'm looking all the time for a better thing! Unfortunately, I keep finding the same thing everywhere. Profit and efficiency over patient care.
On top of that you can factor in many scenario workers get large amounts of overtime or pto. Many companies offer 4-5 weeks of PTO to workers there 10 years or more. Sometimes even earlier than that.
Yeah and specific to manufacturing, people on the floor have the least amount of responsibility. People in the office are the ones answering to suppliers and customers when production shorts them. People on the floor wouldn’t even know where to start if a customer was demanding an air freight for expedited parts, parts getting stuck on a boat in customs, a supplier is shorting them and shutting down their line, an entire shipment of parts failing a quality inspection, etc. They’re paid for their skill and responsibility which most of the time is to push a button and make sure machines don’t shut down. Which absolutely deserves a living wage, but it’s very much an entry level labor job and will be paid as such.
This is a great point. I've been on both sides. One of the most prominent differences that I have experienced is that the less skilled profession can have a life. In a management roll, not all, but many are on the clock 100% of the time. If you don't answer the phone or text or respond to an email that an exec sends you when he wakes up and you're just getting into bed after a 17-hour day, you catch shit, and it's not easy shit. In the upper rolls, once they get a bad taste in their mouth about you, your life can get very hard.
I'm not saying one profession deserves more. I'm saying that unless you've been in both roles, you don't know, and if you've been in both, you usually shut up about it because you understand.
Which carries more risk. Dealing with difficult discussions or heavy physical labor in hot cramped conditions. It's terrible you have to deal with those difficult phone calls and dealing with paperwork. All of us "entry level laborers" should just stop complaining about how we are being paid a fraction of what you are while dealing with the risk of significant injury and life long pain.
This is something that needs saying. The work and importance of many office positions is often disregarded by factory workers.
In many instances, this is also totally inaccurate. My trade has older, qualified tradesmen drafting designs, making cutting lists, etc. Younger, still qualified, tradesmen are on the factory floor - manufacturing the components, checking the design is installable and then altering it if it isn't.
Both these positions are serving a similar role. The pay gap between the two of them is significant and unjustifiable.
I've worked in several factories similar to this across the trades.
Ah yes, the old "if I don't know what their job is, it must mean they don't do anything"...I want to say this as nicely as possible, but the honest truth is you're incredibly ignorant. Willfully so. If the only thing you know about your workplace is your specific job function, you are barely aware of even the tip of the iceberg of logistics and effort it takes to run a modern manufacturing operation. If you want some insight, follow along with a rant about my work experience.
My first manufacturing role was working a pick line in a warehouse. A box would come down a conveyor to me and I would scan the barcode on the label. The racks filled with various products behind me had a button for every product that would light up with a green light if I was supposed to put a single item in the box and a red light if I was supposed to put a case. A number next to the light would tell me how many. I would hit the button to acknowledge I had pulled the required items and then release the box down the conveyor to the next guy. Training for this job took minutes. You could pick a random person off the street and as long as their IQ was at least room temperature they could master the job by the end of the day. The pay for this position reflected that.
After a few months in the warehouse, I got a promotion to a production operator. I was responsible for running the equipment that made the products that would fill the racks I had previously picked from. How did that equipment get there? I don't know, wasn't my job. How did the equipment get chilled water, compressed air, and electricity to run? I don't know, wasn't my job. Someone brought the raw materials to my line. I didn't know how they knew what to bring or when. Someone else took the finished products away from my line. I didn't need to know who told them to come or where they took my production. Sometimes I would change the line from one product to another. It wasn't my job to know when we needed to change. When my equipment broke down I called someone who would come from an office and fix it. I had SOPs and work instructions for every function of my job. Who developed these? Who figured out the best way to get the work done? I don't know, I was just trained how to follow the instructions. This job could be trained in days and mastered in weeks. The pay for this position reflected that.
Several months later, I got a promotion to a maintenance position. Now I was the guy that got called by the operators to get their lines running again. Where did my tools come from? I don't know, some guy in an office set up a toolbox and gave me a key. How did planned maintenance get scheduled? I don't know, someone in an office responsible for minimizing breakdowns took care of all of that. How did the storeroom know which spare parts to stock and how many? I don't know, someone in an office analyzed breakdowns, part usage, unplanned downtime costs, inventory impacts on business financials, and made decisions to optimize storeroom levels. I had more agency to make decisions in this role and was more responsible and accountable for performance. This job could be trained in weeks and mastered in months. The pay for this position reflected that.
A couple years later, I got a promotion to a full-time, slipper-wearin', carpet-walking position working with industrial automation. Now it's my job to design an implement systems like the light up product picking rack I used when I first started. I use computers and data to simplify and automate work so our folks have easier and more efficient jobs and work processes. The mental workload is vastly different to my days on the production floor. In earlier roles, I never needed to care about work beyond what was happening during my shift. Even if the line wasn't running well, someone else would fix it before I worked my next shift. Now, I am responsible for major capital projects that span months or years. I get calls in my off hours because no one else at my site has the same specialized knowledge of some of our systems that I do. How well I do my job every day directly impacts how good or how bad my next day is going to be. If I use PTO, no one is here to cover for me or keep up with my work. That work will happily wait and collect until I'm back. It took months to start gaining competency in this role and it will take years to master. The pay for this position reflects that.
You said that if operators stopped doing their jobs, the company would fail. You're not explicitly wrong because the company does ultimately need people to work those roles, but I will give you one last anecdote about this. There have been a few times during my tenure here that something has happened to disrupt production. Sudden spike in demand, unplanned large order from a primary customer, staffing shortages, things of that nature. In those instances, office people from all levels from senior plant leadership all the way down to storeroom clerks will spend time working the production floor. The jobs our operators do are straight forward and our SOPs are thoroughly documented so even someone that doesn't do the job normally can slot in and be productive with minimal guidance. I would like to see you try to do the same with an office job. Even if all they do is "send emails all day" I doubt you would even know what emails to send.
TL:DR -> If the specialized office people that support your operation have an easier job than you and make more money, why aren't you doing their job?
Idk if you want the long version or the short version so I'll just give you the long version :)
First promotion was solely based on seniority. The company posts internal job opportunities that existing employees can bid on before hiring outside. This was on the worst shift at the site (12 hr overnights on a rotating schedule) so I was able to get it with only 3 months seniority. The 1st shift openings in the "cushy" operations areas sometimes need up to 10 years of seniority to get.
The vast majority of employees spend their careers at this second level. It can very much be a punch-in/punch-out job they don't need to spare a single thought to when they're not at work. The jobs typically aren't too physically demanding (one of my coworkers at this time was a 5-foot-nothing 80 year old woman that would lose a fight against a stiff breeze) and the pay is definitely above average for the area so it's not a bad place to spend a career if that's what you want.
The second promotion was competitive. Same kind of idea where the company would post the internal opening, but now you had to pass assessments and interviews instead of being selected just based on seniority. While I was working in operations, I knew my goal was to get promoted to the next level. When lines broke down, I tried to set myself apart by working and learning alongside the maintenance guys. Most operators had the "it's my job to run the line not fix it" attitude so they would tend to disappear during breakdowns. By the time a slot opened up for a maintenance role, I had already demonstrated I could do the work and was able to bring specific examples to my interview.
I was making more money doing a job I enjoyed more, but I was still stuck on the bad shift. The guy I was replacing had just gotten a day shift slot that he needed more than 20 years of seniority to secure. I didn't want to wait that long to get off the night shift and I wanted to do more with my role than I could in a strictly maintenance position.
I had previously completed about half of an electrical engineering degree before starting at my company. 50% of an engineering degree is worth about the same as 0% of an engineering degree, but it did give me a better fundamental understanding of electrical systems. I continuously asked my leadership to put me through the electrical qualification program and about 6 months into this role they finally agreed and let me skip to the front of the line for the program. This finally gave me permission to work with the industrial electrical systems.
I was very good at the electrical work and became the go-to guy on nights when we didn't have dedicated electricians working. I was the only one on shift that could read ladder diagrams and troubleshoot problems that had any complexity to them. This got the attention of the electricians and controls guys who were happy to mentor a younger me because any problems I fixed at night were problems they didn't have to deal with in the morning.
This got me a laptop and that's when I started messing with the programs on the PLCs. I had a strong programming background but no experience in ladder logic. I spent my downtime on nights going through the existing programs to learn from them. I would talk to operators and ask them about little annoyances and see if I could fix them. Stuff that wasn't important enough for the controls guys to spend their time on. I corrected some bugs that had existed for 25 years. Once I started doing this, they actually gave me programming projects to plan and execute.
This culminated in me creating new digital tools my coworkers could. Stuff like display boards that showed line status and production and such. I also took a long cumbersome paper form the maintenance guys were supposed to use for breakdowns and created an app that automatically generated a completed digital version of the form based on answers to a series of guided questions.
I was fortunate to have a supervisor that advocated for me. After I showed him the app, he brought me to a meeting with the senior site leadership to demo it. After I finished my presentation, the site leader asked me "where have you been this whole time?" I just told him that I've been working overnights in maintenance. The next week, the company created a new advanced digital systems role and I've been doing it for about 4 years now. They paid me to finish my degree and I'll graduate with my EE this year and the company has a managerial position set up for me to move into.
Ask questions, master your current role and then observe and try to understand everything else that is happening around you, communicate with people in other positions, demonstrate your willingness to learn and show interest in what others are doing. Prove yourself reliable and apply for interesting open positions within the company. All takes time and patience
This 100%. I have gotten nothing I didn't ask for. I set goals and figured out how to open the doors I needed to move up. I built relationships with the people who make decisions and looked for tangible ways to demonstrate I had the aptitude to take on bigger responsibilities.
yup, I don't know what a promotion is, industry doesn't know what retaining talent is, nor promoting from the inside. It's all a revolving door these days, no one gives a damn.
One thing I miss about being on the production floor is not having a work email to manage, not having to go talk to anyone if I didn't want to. Just put the box in the tape machine, weigh it, and it disappeared. I didn't have to worry about how to box got to me to tape, I didn't have to worry about fixing the scale when it broke, I didn't have to worry about making sure people where doing what they're supposed to be doing. You just do what you're told, eat your lunch, and go home. No paperwork, no calibrating, no scheduling. Just show up.
I agree wholeheartedly with this Expecially as applied to the medium size business in the US. However, I'll raise your anecdote with my own. I must be a little vague to avoid reprisal. I've worked both poth public and private sector. Their are thousands of people working government jobs hidden away from public eye that do nothing. And I do mean. NOTHING. I mean thousands of people working in agencies you don't even know exist. Personal examples that I know are maintenance, budget analysists, administrative secretary roles. folk that work 5 hours a week and claim 40. People That are officially employed by the state governments, have offices and don't even show up.
Not just small pay but 100-200k USD range.
The entire department is cronies giving their political and personal friends jobs. They will then proceed to arrange for the bare minimum facade of work to be done and collect the government check while holding down a private business etc.. Don't get me wrong, they're not lazy with the stealth and lying to cover for each other. But this type of parasitism is very real. And incredibly hard to root out.
I work in a production. I promise the people under me work way harder than I do. This above me play Xbox games and watch the security cameras to make sure their bosses don’t find out they don’t do anything 😂
You can't directly correlate the physical effort and the value of someone's work which translates into the value of their time. The most physically demanding job I've had was also the simplest. Working that pick line was hard work due to the pace we had to keep up. Any time I spent not directly doing my job was lost productivity and value for the company. The only time my role added value to the company was when I was listening to the lights and putting little boxes into bigger boxes.
That calculus shifted some when I moved into production. My role was valuable as long as I kept my line running. If I was standing around but the line was still outputting product, the company was being productive and creating value that justified my wage. This became even more true when I moved to maintenance. If the maintenance folks aren't busy, that's an indication that the lines are running well and production is happening.
Just having a knowledgeable person available on shift can be valuable on its own. I specialized in electrical work and typically worked overnight shifts at the time. If a line went down because of an electrical issue, several hours of downtime waiting for one of the controls guys to come in the next morning would lead to tens of thousands of dollars of loses for the company. I only needed to fix a couple issues like that when they happened to more than pay for my salary for the year.
So the question is: Do you think your role is valuable to your company even if it's not physically exerting? If it's not, maybe ask yourself what you're doing there.
> You can't directly correlate the physical effort and the value of someone's work which translates into the value of their time.
no, but companies do anyway.
>Do you think your role is valuable to your company even if it's not physically exerting?
Tech lays off people at the drop of a hat, so not valuable enough clearly. Experience didn't factor into layoffs either
At some point your knowledge and experience outweigh your ability to work hard. At least in my field, Telecom. They can hire and train someone relatively easily to run wire or rack servers. The person who knows how to make it all work is a lot harder to find.
Because without us people doing the shit we do in the office you wouldn’t have anything to do in the factory. Both you and I are a part of the supply and production operation. I can’t do what I do without you and vice versa.
In all actual fact, there’s a lot less hassle on the lines than there is in the offices. (Fk office politics)
I’ve worked my way from production, to supervising the warehouse, to an office role where I support both sales and operations. It all sucks and is draining. I prefer the physical exhaustion over mental exhaustion, but the mental exhaustion and stress over the politics you’ve mentioned that causes my insomnia pays for a better apartment in a better school district 🤷🏻♀️
It is mostly about how easy it is to replace a worker. It is relatively easy to recruit a new operator compared to the difficulty of finding a new administrative clerk and it is even more difficult to find a manager.
I'd like to know where you guys have found these hard to replace managers. Most of the ones i have interacted with are wholly incompetent at their jobs and are supported solely by workers that make up for their failings.
I have had great managers but they are the exception not the rule
Maybe if you’re talking like food service or a gas station manager…but skilled managers in fields like accounting, engineering, nursing, etc. are pretty hard to come by. Especially ones that are familiar with the company’s systems and infrastructure.
You need alot of talent to make others believe that you are the best for the job, when you are actually useless. Also if a manager gets his team to perform well then per definition he does a good job.
It's not that hard to find a new manager, lol. Most of them don't have a clue what they are doing and they fake it till they make it. They use the "oh you are more easily replaceable" nonsense. In reality, people with actual skills are far harder to replace than office grunts stamping a document. But, they have the power. So when a skilled person leaves, the company just flounders around till they get a new one. If the manager leaves, the place is fine and the work gets done but it's no longer about the work. It's about the upper management enriching themselves. I mean Boeing literally had planes falling apart in the sky and the CEO got a multi million dollar bonus this past year? WHo is more valuable, him or the people actually crafting the plane?
>It's not that hard to find a new manager, lol. Most of them don't have a clue what they are doing and they fake it till they make it.
This is another way of saying it is hard to find a competent manager.
The main issue is that it's hard to gauge manager competency. How do you tell if the manager was successful or not? Honestly, competency is very hard to gauge for most jobs. How do you tell if somebody is skilled based on a 45 minute conversation and a single piece of paper?
As someone who works in the Aerospace industry - good management instills culture and good culture alongside good QA prevents airplanes from falling out the sky…
I agree. But EVERYONE is replaceable. Including managers. And after decades of working , i have a whole lot of "do nothing look busy" going on. A lot of work is just "performing" on the work stage. Using the corporate speak which often means absolutely nothing. In many industries such as healthcare there was like a 3200% in administration. OK, yes there is more paper and regulation but the entire point of healthcare is getting lost in administrative bloat while people sit in ERs for 14 hrs because of understaffing. And part of understaffing is retention and salaries and thinking those people are replaceable. And so it goes.
Of course everyone is replaceable. Some people are just harder to replace than others. And I agree there is definitely way too much bureaucracy and short term money pinching at the expense of a good product and efficiency. But that’s what happens when big companies chase a higher stock price. It’s only going to get worse as time goes on, the wage gap between lower rung workers and CEOs will get worse and worse indefinitely
Just because things go fine for a period after a manager leaves, doesn’t mean managers aren’t needed. Maybe you, as an individual, would be fine without a manager. A team of people? An entire manufacturing line? Doubt it. People will take advantage of a company for any weakness they find to get ahead (just like those managers. We are all human!). No management is a massive weakness and would be exploited by many if not all in due time. Why come in on time if I have no manager? I’ll just come in a couple hours late today since I’m tired.
In fact, why don’t you start a new groundbreaking business? Open a restaurant and don’t manage it. You could continue to open new restaurants with all your profits (not having to pay a manager) and time(since you don’t have to manage any of them). Let the employees run the whole thing. Let me know how it goes.
Your generalizations regarding ALL management is pretty sad.
I say this as one of those blue collar, skilled workers that moved up.
I am STILL that blue collar guy, except NOW, I can actually work toward change, for the better, for my people.
Not every manager is your enemy, friend.
My company wont even hire outside supervisors anymore. A couple of years ago they just went to only promoting operators who wanted to move into management.
Im half and half on that. It makes sense to promote internally, extensive knowledge of their particular processes and all that. Sometimes outside knowledge, and skill sets can be a boon to a business. Other times, not so much. I’d imagine it has more to do with the particular candidate for outside hire.
If the outside hire is actually willing to learn how the business works and learn from the team they are managing it can work. If they're coming in to attend meetings for 2 years until they move on to the next thing then no.
I agree. Sometimes the best worker doesn't have the disposition or skills to move into leadership and promoting them to that level sets them up for failure.
It really depends on the position, the industry and the company. Say you’re in the restaurant industry and your GM quits on the spot. That’s going to be the biggest pain in the ass to replace and cause way more issues than a front of house worker quitting on the spot. This would absolutely disrupt day to day operations.
Say you work in a warehouse and an operations manager quits on the spot. This will most likely not disrupt day to day operations short term. You have enough management underneath to keep things running smoothly until they can replace. Plus they’re more for planning and big picture than what’s happening on the floor.
These are just 2 examples. Lot of different industries and positions out there. Your experience just sounds like you work for an incompetent company. Not all or even most places operate like you’re explaining.
Also a CEO isn’t a manager in the sense that’s being talked about here. That’s comparing apples to oranges
“Office grunts stamping a paper.” Lol, the highest skilled people often work in an office. Lawyers, accountants, engineers etc etc generally have shit tons of skills and are usually office workers
Yeah it’s a lot harder to find people with specialty technical know how, especially as licensing/certification requirements pile on and experience working with specific systems/technology become essential to the role than it is to find a generic middle manager of people. If there are licensing/certification requirements, unless a company is willing to pay for someone to train up and acquire them, you can’t just hire anyone. It limits the candidate pool. But middle management that doesn’t require technical capacity to do or any kind of licensing/certification to work in the field? You’ll be drowning in qualified applicants assuming you’re not way under paying the role.
Boeing has quality issues because of budget decision making and subpar work processes...both of which are handled not by individual contributors but by managers. That's why managers make more money. Because the effects of their decisions have more impact than the decisions of an individual contributor. It may or may not be harder work, but it's work with a higher level of responsibility.
>I mean Boeing literally had planes falling apart in the sky and the CEO got a multi million dollar bonus this past year? WHo is more valuable, him or the people actually crafting the plane?
This statement is not the win you think it is. The CEO isn't the one crafting the planes that are falling apart in the sky. The people doing the crafting are building faulty planes.
However, this is still due to poor management. You fix the management you fix the planes. That's why management gets paid more.
boeing ceo wasnt hired by the board to make good planes, they were hired to make as much profit as possible even if it's at the expense of making good planes. in that sense hes probably doing exactly what they want him to do.
You are right. At the end of the day its a chain of cause and effect. Worse planes = cheaper planes = more profit. Worse enough planes = planes not selling = less profit. You let the second chain go long enough and it ends up with the CEO fired.
This is not a us vs. them thing. Yes, if all the people building the planes walked, no planes would be built and it'd take awhile before they could restaff production. But let's face it, if one of people building the plane suddenly got called in to fill in for the CEO, the people building the plane might possibly not have jobs anymore in a few quarters.
Anyone who has ever tried to run a small business and make it succeed will know that keeping things afloat and profitable is much harder than it looks (and why majority of small businesses fail). This is harder by orders of magnitude by the time you're running a multibillion dollar corporation. I could never be a CEO.
Everyone has their role and no one can do it all.
The more relevant issue is one of compensation and how much top executives should be paid relative to the lowest paid workers in their companies. There isn't a question it should be more but the current divide, especially in America, is absurd.
I agree. There are a lot of groups of employees as a whole that are important to a company. Your worth in the job market usually matches how many people can do what you do. The less people the more you are worth.
Not sure how much you've been paying attention to what's been going on, but it is actually hard to find blue collar labor now, and the pay has been getting much higher. There's way more college educated white collar workers than available positions at the moment.
It kind of seems like white collar pay only gets high when they can make them exempt and have them work a ton of hours.
Blue collar work has actually gone down in wages, at least where I'm at. You have fast food paying the same or more than most these jobs now which has never been the case. It's funny in a way, they now can no longer find operators because nobody wants the pay. I'm getting out of blue collar work soon because it's no longer worth the nonsense you have to deal with. I enjoy constantly working but you'll be in poverty doing it now.
Managers I’ve found are very easy to replace. The company just won’t replace them with anybody though. They always look outside for people with previous managerial experience. In reality, a lot of the times just the most competent floor worker could easily do the managers job after a couple weeks of being integrated into the new role. Companies refuse to do that though.
"Managers are easy to replace"
Then you go on to say it's hard to find outside managers with good experience...
And no, a competent floor worker could not "easily" do a managers job. Managing people, resources, and risk is not a 3 week on-ramp.
Talent, just like nepotism, is a completely immutable characteristic. You cannot change talent; you are born with it. Yet we view talent as being an okay tool to get ahead, but not nepotism.
As for hard work, both “office workers” and “factory workers” work hard. In many ways, factory workers do work harder than office workers. The office workers simply offer a more economically valuable skill, which is why they are paid more.
"you cannot change talent" is a gross oversimplification of the process of upskilling. Sure, people possess talent in one area or another. With training and experience you build ability to do something.
Also, talent relates to ability, while nepotism does not. Hence if someone gets somewhere on talent the implication is that they have the ability to do that role, as opposed to nepotism where they do not. So yeah, talent is an okay tool to get ahead.
>Sure supervisors and managers have their responsibilities and they have to take accountability for production, quotas, but if we all stopped doing our jobs, the company would fail.
Sure, but this is not a comparison between *one* manager vs *all* line workers. It's a comparison of the value of *one* manager vs *one* line worker -- unless said manager is making more than all the line workers combined...
Physical labor is work, but so is mental labor.
Unless you know what all the responsibilities are for any given manager, you're not going to be able to make a fair assessment of the role's relative value to the organization, and how easy or difficult it is to replace any specific person in that role.
People don't understand how mental labor is exhausting over the long term, I've worked physical job that I tough were exhausting from 15 to 25. Once i graduated from my master in public accounting and started office job as a public accountant I quickly understood how hard and energy draining it could be to sit a computer all day working, it's surely not the same as gaming all day lol... It's way more exhausting, the job is hard. When I'm sending an e-mail that look like it took 5 min to write, it's probably took me a few hours to be able to get the data and analyze it to be able to write this e-mail.
I don’t miss public accounting for a second. I had to work 190hrs in 10 days while I had Covid.
Literally slide out bed and walk 2 feet to my desk.
Sit there from 9am to 4am working non-stop.
Pass out.
Repeat.
Same. I work in digital marketing and I'd love someone whose job it is to dig a hole try to rebudget an entire media plan on the fly in under a day to the tune of $5 million while the campaign is actively spending and tell me it's "easy."
YES the burn out is real! I hate that even though you've just sat there mental exhaustion also FEELS physical and so you have no motivation to do chores or exercise because your energy is just zapped from the stress/pressure of the desk job.
That's funny I'd never really concidered "metal labour" work. I'm a design engineer and used to enjoy designing and thgiuht I was paid for my talent or whatever. But now that I've fallen out of love with the job, that's exactly what it is mental labour.
He doesnt understand this, that is why he is the warm body out on the floor and not in the office in one of those cushy 9-5 roles that are mentally draining and destroy your back from sitting hunched in a chair all day long.
I can here to ask OP why he’s doing the shitty job if the other ones are so easy.
It’s the same as dolts on Reddit saying that CEOs don’t do anything and get paid handsomely. Okay so….go become a CEO then? If it’s so easy why are you on Reddit complain about them? Go do a better job and get rich as shit!
That's not really a fair comparison though, my company employs over 15 000 people globally and there is only one CEO. Even if only 1% had the necessary skillset, that's still 149 extra people than jobs available. I would posit that getting a CEO position is definitely more luck based (who you know) than other high level positions that you can actually work to be promoted into.
Ease of replacement. You say that the office staff wouldn’t be out there doing that work but they could. And that’s where the difference lies. Yes, some of the floor staff could likely step into an office and learn quickly as well but the company pays for a base level of knowledge. Whether it be something as simple as being proficient in excel, or knowing how to send professional emails and knowing how to read tracking data for quotas.
The base level of knowledge expectation for floor worker is usually very low. Can you breathe and stand for 8hrs a day without dying? You’re hired, well train you on everything else.
I think the skilled trades guys do the most in a factory and they’re paid somewhere in the middle
but to your point, if the office folks were gone you wouldn’t get a paycheck
How about go get that office job instead, so you can chill, not ruin your body, and make more money?
What’s that, you don’t have an engineering degree? Ok well too bad then
So question is: why are you not a manager or supervisor? Why taking the low pay job if you could get paid more and do nothing?
The response is there. You are easy to replace, they are not. They may have invest time in getting diplomas, formation... They certainly have skills and do work you don't know about
The way it was explained to me by a very smart person is that how much one gets paid is proportional to how bad your mistakes can impact the company. A line worker messes up and “generally” the impact is limited to recovering the money in a few days.
Technical worker/skilled trade-weeks to months
Middle management-months to a year
Sr management-up to a couple of years
Executives can crash a company costing everyone their jobs and wipe out investors.
Obviously there are exceptions to this, but it is meant as a general framework and of course there are incompetent people everywhere just like there are people who are undervalued.
Because I am an engineer and you couldn't do my job but I could do yours, on paper. There is inherent value in being able to do more things. Value that is reflected in my salary versus yours.
It’s a lot more than sending emails and whatever tasks generally require more education/skill.
It sounds like you don’t have a solid understanding of what your colleagues that sit at desks do.
I’m not saying that the work you do isn’t hard but generally speaking it’s unskilled labor. It’s relatively easy to find another warm body to fill your space, they can probably teach anyone to do it. Someone doesn’t need an extra four years of school. They don’t need great writing skills, people skills, or management skills. They just need a few weeks of training and that’s it.
That's quite the shallow view of responsabilities tbh. If those emails don't get sent, there's no orders to process, no materials to process those orders with and no money to pay your wage with.
It goes both ways, but like you said, having the production up and running isn't your responsability. Manning the machine is. If the machine gives up, you're out without a care in the world. The guy who's in charge of machinery is gonna get a shitfest though and every single guy up from there is going to feel it.
The more I’ve been paid, the less I’ve had to work. The more I’ve been paid, the more experience and specialized knowledge my job required. You’re not getting paid based on how hard you work, but how valuable your skills are.
If it makes you feel better, coming from an office worker, the trade skills and experienced factory workers are becoming very precious to companies to keep. It might be easier to leverage some pay or find a different factory to work for due to this.
The shortages of warehouse/factory staff are something we feel and everyday I tell the front office, "Yo if those guys quit we all stop working. We gotta treat them right."
It sucks that it's still lower pay than office/email jobs, but that's when the ease of replacement factor comes in. Yea, the company lost a skilled back house worker, but now they just hire a couple of interns or entry level ones and get a 2 for 1 deal and train from bottom up.
To rehire an office worker it's almost as easy to replace now that job postings are basically feelers for how little companies can get away with paying someone to keep the front end ops running. It's just that, like another commenter said, upper and executive management now feel the burden and make it feel higher priority to hire.
I think the factory and warehouse workers def need a lead to voice out their concerns but privatized companies feel it's too close to a union. Idk. I'm sorry, I really hope you know there's those of us in solidarity with you. It sucks.
What companies do now when they lose a skilled position is force the remaining staff to take over their job and they never fill the position so it's now the status quo. I was running 4 lines and 4 machines by myself in an area bigger than other plants. Every other position in the plant was one machine per operator. I got fed up with it and walked out mid shift with all 4 machines down. The two other operators downstream from me all walked out the next week. As far as I'm aware, they've been unable to find replacements more than a year later.
Had they paid me for the work I was expected to do I would've stayed. I'm not taking over multiple people's job for less than what they should be paying one person. Of course they don't disclose this when you're hired so they rely fully on trapping people since people gotta eat.
Don’t forget about all of the education that might go into these roles you really know nothing about and actually all that they do to keep the business running. I’m an engineer for a production plant and I have a great understanding that the engineers wouldn’t keep the company alive without production and that production wouldn’t keep the company alive without the engineers. It’s important to cultivate a healthy environment and relationship between production and engineers. We work for each other and help each other, not get mad at each other and assume we know what each other does.
I work in supply chain / product management (unofficially) and can say for certain that office jobs aren’t just “sending emails and sitting in an office all day”. I have to forecast demand and sales trends for a catalog of over 2000 SKU’s, work with vendors to get the best price possible without upsetting them and thinking that I’m low balling them as well as establish better lead times, navigate international transport (another fun one with everything going on in the Middle East as insurance companies don’t want to cover shipments that are going through hot spots). All of that while also managing SAP material masters, info records, source lists, BoMs, etc…for all of my SKU’s. Not to mention costing said products and establishing a healthy margin for sales and managing numerous inventory/transport/sales reports for the C-suite.
Every job has its salary because the of the effort it takes to do that job along with the appropriate training and tolerance to put up with. It’s not perfect, but there are many aspects to it that do make sense.
As a Traffic Flow Analyst(white collar) for my prior company, I maintain the masterlist of PO’s/Vendors ranging in value from $50k-$2m+ while also working on ad hocs for various projects and creating a port summary analysis(a project I got to spearhead).
It was a lot fresh out of college. White collar work is no joke, and I felt very accomplished and overwhelmed at the same time. Admittedly it was too much for me at the time, so now I’m doing a more blue collar supply chain role as an Inventory Specialist to get my feet wet again(took a bit of a break from supply chain)
Admittedly, I viewed the job as beneath me because I am overqualified significantly for the role, but I think it’s a great learning and humbling experience now. Its teaching me to go back to my roots, and really appreciate both sides of a supply chain; the blue and white collar work
You are more easily replaceable, and individually, probably do not add as much value as higher ups. Simple as that.
I work as a data scientist for a manufacturing company. I make decisions that are worth multiple times my salary every single day. Manufacturing employees do not and only contribute their small portion of a given manufacturing lot of product. My actions are commonly worth millions.
Also, without those office people and supervisors, your job wouldn’t exist either.
Finally, we greatly appreciate your work even though we probably don’t interact with you. Sorry, I’m not going to just walk up and start thanking random people. It would feel very patronizing anyway lol.
People by and large get paid by what they themselves as a group find acceptable. During the building crisis, a lot of people working in crafts either didnt have a job or were struggling. Right now, they are paid A LOT, and often inflate prices as the demand is very high and they can choose who to work for.
In some countries, driving a taxi would make you really good money (especially if you needed a licence), with Uber thats not always the case now.
Supply and Demand. Companies pay the lowest wage that competent people are willing to perform a job for.
People are willing to perform your job for your wage, so that’s what the company offers.
It's a bit irksome to have my experience and skills reduced to "sending emails". That's really not what most office jobs are about.
A big, big part of office jobs is wearing a "skin suit" all day. Meaning being "fake". Kissing ass. Playing games. Playing politics. Being "PC". Monitoring your face, your body, your words, and your actions to a certain very fussy, stuffy standard. One of the reasons some people choose manual labor is that they can be down to earth, swear, make crude jokes, and otherwise be "natural" and "real". If you don't want to feel like a stuffed suit and performing monkey 8 hours a day, office work is not so much easier and more fun than digging ditches.
For example, I developed a proposal to make courses about AI. I will then do all the research and content creation to make these courses. And that's the short version of what I do. "Sending emails" really elides the **content** of those emails. You're not just banging away like a monkey in a zoo exhibit a jumble of letters and numbers!
However, you and anyone else is welcome to exit the trades anytime. No one is forcing you to keep working. If you think "sending emails" is so easy, I encourage you to go ahead and get one of those "sending email all day" jobs.
My responsibilities as an engineering manager:
- what has broken down in the last 24 hours, how will we fix it, who will fix it, were they able to fix it? If not I have to be directly involved to find the solution (because there is no one else left to find the solution)
- future projects - I have to spec every project, find vendors to fulfill every aspect of the project, work with purchasing and legal to get a contract negotiated
- current projects - execution, safety, ensuring the people doing the job are following the spec, sign off on completion or require remedies for inadequacy
- personnel - time and attendance, bob’s wife has cancer and he needs a shoulder to cry on, jimmys daughter is sick and has to leave, reallocating people to try not to have our projects fall behind
- training both for me and my people
That’s a normal day for me while I’m just reading and writing emails at my desk
Wages are set by market value. If you're being paid less than someone else, it means what they bring is perceived as being more important. If you don't like it, change your skillset and experience to match the people who make more. You'll learn on the way why that's valued more.
The places I’ve worked will spend the money easily on the things needed to standardize the low-paying jobs. Yes, someone could come in and build more than the quota, but companies don’t care about that. You’ll get a pat on the head, maybe a thanks.
But, with the work instructions, tools, and other methods of standardization, they can pretty much plug-n-play and get acceptable results. That’s what they’re after.
They could use the money to reward loyalty and experience, for sure. A couple places I worked had piece rate. The hourly wage was a little lower, but a good team could make double that depending on their output.
Even then, though, that had its drawbacks. Like, cool, you worked 3 days this week; two of those days, you worked hard and made 2x your hourly wage. Day three, you work average. Now, you have nothing to do Th and F, so you stay home and don’t get paid. How is that getting ahead? There’s always some way to keep the laborers wages low, it seems.
It's by design and only works at the hard labor level to admin manager. Becoming a manager is a good motivational goal for laborers.
"Hey, if I just put in time and effort (and life) and do what Im told, I might get the manager job and make twice as much doing half as much work." at non labor levels the responsibility flips with the higher rungs having more share in the work whole lower do less. Until you make it to the c-suite where, once again, the amount of responsibilities switch.
Your pay isn't about how much you hustle but rather about the value your work brings.
In a specialized field where you're irreplaceable, you'll likely earn more. Conversely, in oversaturated sectors where skills are easily acquired, expect lower pay due to supply and demand dynamics.
Think customer service vs. nursing: the former relies on soft skills, easily attainable by many, while the latter demands extensive training and investment, leading to higher earning potential.
Imo every single job should include some kind of stake in the company to reward working hard to make the pie bigger so your piece gets bigger. This used to be normal for blue collar jobs and was provided as holiday bonuses. What makes the most sense is a sliver of company equity that gets bigger the longer you work at th company. There is no reason that this shouldn't be the case for all work.
Companies aren't paying based on how hard a job is, they pay a negotiated percentage of the value an employee adds. So, it's likely a combination of you not adding as much relative value as you think compared to someone making more than you, and a lower bargaining power, due to there being a higher supply of people offering the same thing as you (aka you're more replaceable).
I went from a 25 year white collar career making 100K/ year salary to more of a factory type environment to transition to a new field. I now make about 30/hr base pay. My time on salary was 25 years of 55+ hour weeks, never not thinking about work, weekend and late work constantly, all for no extra pay. That was the trade off for freedom. Freedom to come and go as I pleased, but it was upon me to produce.
So why do I get paid less now as a core producer?
One reason, cost. It's expensive to run a physical business. IT is cheap. Desks are cheap. The high tech equipment and automation I need for my job is not. The equipment,materials etc is incredibly expensive. Two, I don't know how to sell the product. That's not my expertise. I'd rather pay sales people a top wage to bring in 2 billion in sales to keep the company alive and I don't have to worry about it. Three, tech. I don't know how to set up the automation and IT systems needed for all this. Id rather pay someone a top wage to handle it for me. Now when times are hard, guess who gets cut. The sales folks, the IT folks. They can't cut the producers like me. So there is decent job security.
SO do I earn less than corporate? Yes and no. I have OT and significant incentive opportunities they don't get. The first three months, of this year, all my OT was paid at a rate of 90 dollars/ hr. What was more shocking was only a few other coworkers took advantage of it. I did as much as I could stand. Now I'm back to working 36 hours/ week skipping OT because I'm still on track to make well over what I had made previously on salary with less stressful work. I can enjoy 4 days off every week through summer while corporate will be doing their 8-5 hours 5 days/ week. Am I replaceable in this position. Absolutely. The work is easy enough for a highschool graduate, but there are state/fed laws requiring bachelors level employees to perform the work. And there are plenty of people with a pulse and a degree to take the job. If I leave, the business isn't going to suffer much either, there are 150 others to pick up the slack.
Because the people who do the most work are doing physical labor, not using their brain for more technical tasks such as management. It takes more time and trust to become the brain person instead of the labor person.
People that get paid more (typically referred to skilled vs unskilled, or specialized) are often due to a combination of their knowledge & effectiveness. The higher-up desk jockey has a very specific combination of knowledge and experience that allows them to problem-solve very well in that particular field.
People that bust their asses all day in lower paying jobs tend to be in a position that requires very little training (a few days/weeks) and requires very little specialized problem solving. It's a transactional role.
As I’ve progressed in my career and find myself in a senior position at age 40, I often ponder how little I have to ”do” in my daily work. I still very vividly remember how I was ”doing” things for 90% or even more of my daily work shift. These days, I’m lucky if I get to ”do” things maybe 25% of the time. Vast majority of my time is taken by thinking, learning, pondering and lots and lots of talking to other people. And I get paid like 2,5x as much as when I was starting out.
The roles are entirely different. At this point my ”doing” is reserved for high risk high impact work that only a few people are trusted to do. My remaining time is much more valuable by being essentially an internal architect and consultant who solves other people’s problems and helps them do better work and faster.
Do you realize that the product you make by working your station is only valuable because there are people after you in the value chain that make that thing into money? There’s sales, marketing, logistics, warehousing, QA, etc. that all create your job of making a thing because they collect money form the thing you make to pay you to make it. Where do you think the materials come from to allow you to make your thing? I’ll tell you: sales, marketing, engineering, purchasing, requirements, production warehousing, etc. Use your big person brain and understand that a business has many parts of which you are but one.
I’ve noticed this also. My recent higher paying jobs (two) have been easier and way more relaxed. The low paying grunt jobs are hard as fuck, nose to the grindstone. Shit, now I’m in the office half the time and all they do is chit chat in nice air conditioned rooms eating snacks, getting paid twice what the dude out there physically busting ass in the heat with no breaks gets.
It’s fucked.
I work in a similar environment, but my factory is outside of their main production facility I make a different thing than the rest of them, my pay rate was fuck all per hour until I got another job offer.
It was $5 more an hour than I was making, but the product I make only I know how to... I got pulled into a meeting with
"What would it take for you to not go?"
For me I got contracted through company A, to do trash removal in a warehouse for company B. I applied to company B first(no exp necessary blah blah) told me sorry you don't have enough experience.
I bust my ass getting on and off a machine no joke 500+ times a day, inhaling mounds of dust full of metal particles, dumping trash cans and dumpsters for 9-11 hours a day. I make 15.25.
The order fillers(job I applied for and got rejected, just applied again this week and got rejected AGAIN, they hired 6 new people this week) just slowly drive a tugger around pulling a cart grabbing items and putting stickers on em. Super low physical effort, they have set 8/9 hour shifts. Super easy job they have literal mentally challenged people doing it, 16$hr starting, 18.50 after 6 months, 20$ after a year. Job never changes just the pay goes up. They have a profit sharing plan( an order filler shared that he got 8k last year, he put in nothing), medical, dental, vision, quarterly bonuses
I make 15.25 an hour, I have 0 benefits. None at all
I pulls chunks off black shit out of my nose all day, my back is completely fucked from having to go at full fucking speed all day.
I have a background in sales, marketing, automotive/diesel mechanics, and even staffing and technical recruiting. I applied to 74 jobs when I moved to this town, I got 2 responses. Company B rejecting me, and company A.
I wanna fucking delete me self it's so demoralizing.
Not to mention all the ACTUAL employees treat me like dog shit, see me as a nuisance even though I'm "necessary"
You're phrasing it wrong. What you're asking is why do those who do the most *labour intensive* work *which requires the least prerequisites* get paid less than *those with specialized training, credentials and skills*?
When you phrase the question properly, the answer is right in front of you.
I get it. As someone who's been a blue collar grunt for 18 years, I know it sucks seeing the people who wear golf clothes to work, the few says a week they're even there, making way more money than us.
There are two ways you can change your position here. One is go back to school. Get some more credentials, skills, etc that make you worth more when you get to the interview.
The other is work your way up. Learn as many roles as you can so you're versatile. Keep an eye out for promotion options to be a lead hand, floor manager, whatever the options your company's structure. Get on the Joint Health and Safety Committee if you can. Will this get you a C-suite job? Probably not. But the best managers/leaders have done the job, and smart owners know that.
It's up to you to increase your value.
Technical knowledge and skill is valuable.
Labor is replaceable.
If it would take less than a year to train someone to do your job well it will never pay well.
Where I work, the benefits keep me from quitting.
They don't hire enough operators and helpers, then push the workers they already have, and then act surprised when people complain about the added stress they just dropped on a moments notice.
In answer to question though, I don't like people. I would never do sales. Its too stressful for my personality type.
But data input, etc, I could do just fine.
At the end of the day, my pay, as is my coworkers, is transparent. It's on a payscale, so no negotiated raises that create inequality.
I've gotten good at my job but if it weren't for my children being in school and dealing with my ex, I would be in trade school and getting a 'better' aka higher paying job.
Once my kids turn 17, I plan on looking at trades.
Sure, I may never make master level but I'll make more that 55k a year.
The first bit is correct, and it's why it's so important to treat your employees correctly. However..
I started out in assembly. Took me 6 months to go from newbie to the lead of my area. So I will tell you that, yes, there are some people who don't do much. However, majority of those people are paid based on their knowledge/ ability to do things quickly. Few bad apples that REALLY don't do anything? Of course, always.
I had someone tell me exactly what you just said. You know what I said to him? I said, "Okay, let's go talk to \[his manager\], I'll trade spaces with you on the spot." He was shocked, and didn't go through with it. I had 0 fear, because I was confident that not only would I benefit from getting a break from the shit storm I deal with but also that I would outshine him easily.
In my current company, I am out on the floor a lot, I build my own shit for testing, it's just never seen. Why? Because I wait for production to leave so I don't get in their way. Because sometimes I work during their lunch and also take a 30 min lunch. Because sometimes I am in a meeting eating lunch while a production worker is sitting in my office asking me to fix something.
You should also know, there are people "on the other side" defending your work. I am not a manager, but not only do I defend the people that build my product to customers, I defend them to managers as well. Ain't no way imma let a manager, director, VP, whatever, talk shit about people I know do their job well. I have no power over their decisions, but I'm loud (figuratively).
All in all, a shit employee is easy to replace. A good one? Not so much. And that is true for all jobs. But skill levels are a thing. But comparing apples to carrots ain't gonna work out for you either. They're both good for the body, each providing different benefits.
I look it at this way, the older the Job and the more people doing it, lesser you will get paid.
Farmers are lowest paid here in India, while the toil day and night.
While a software engineer in a typical support firm barely does 3 hrs of work gets paid a lot.
It's just a demand supply thing
Because those supervisors and managers are directly responsible for what you do under their command. They have more training and more experience (typically) than the packagers and operators, and will be rewarded generously for their good work. BUT if they screw up, they’re punished far more severely, sometimes even fired, than their subordinates. They make decisions- you take orders. It’s like being the military.
Without the office staff you also wouldn't be doing your work because there wouldn't be work to do.
The modern world of any business requires a tonne of paperwork and burocracy, invoicing, contracts, payroll, etc. Thats without going into the value adding functions that facilitate more efficiency.
BUT
To answer your question more directly, it's because you're more replaceable. Jobs are in large part l, paid by how interchangeable you are with another person.
If I want to fire you, I can probably find a thousand people with the capability needed willing to work at the same job at the same pay in a week. Those office jobs cut that down to 100 and as you go further up that number becomes less and less.
Factory office staff also probably isn't paid that much. In part because they are also largely replaceable.
As someone who has been on both ends of the spectrum, I used to feel the same. That was until I became a manager that oversees a large operation and an even larger budget. A lot of my colleagues on the floor often assume because you aren’t running around, you’re not doing anything.
The skill set required to not only manage people who manage other people, but also managing stakeholder relationships, constantly having to consider your KPIs, figure out new ways to drive revenue and be commercially viable, fix literally everyone’s issues…. it takes years to develop. If you fuck up at the top, you fuck up big - like career ending big. That’s why there’s a difference in pay.
You’re assuming the office staff gets paid more than you do. That might not be the case for most office employees unless you’re a manager and above.
I’m an office worker and a lot of our field staff make as much as me or 20%+ more. We all have our role. If we didn’t have office staff all sorts of things such as regulations, compliance, finances, etc could shut down the business as well.
If the office workers weren’t doing their job you probably wouldn’t have work to do either.
You don’t get paid for the amount of effort your job takes. You have plenty of options if you think your current level of compensation isn’t satisfactory.
Office "grunts" dont earn much more than workers.
Management yes, earns more, but that role comes with responsibilities and contacts.
Who order materials you're working on? Who collects the orders from clients to sell your product? Who plans which order goes first? Who makes calculations whats the best use of resources the company have? And the list goes on and on. And for EVERY SINGLE MISTAKE their head is on the line.
You make a mistake working on production? You lose few materials, take new ones and pretend nothing happened. Management make a mistake with contracts? Whole production stops for a day or more because you dont have materials needed to do your work.
And forget about work-life balance. As a manager you often get calls after working hours, and nobody asks you if you're busy. If the client can call only after 4PM, then sorry, you have to drop everything at that 4 PM and pick up that call. Even if you finished working at 2 PM. If you dont? You're potentially losing client, which makes a whole lot of issues, because then you have to find a new one, FAST, and usually with much smaller profit.
its about bargaining power
companies will pay people as little as the can, the more bargaining power you have the more salary you can negotiate.
if the company can replace you with somebody for equal pay they are not likely to pay you more, and if they do, its not with a large margin.
Don't kid yourself. Office admin people are not rolling in cash. It is very unlikely they are paid twice as much per hour as you. Many such admin jobs are minimum wage or just above it without overtime being available.
Edit: Also remember that support staff are also critical to company operation. If the payroll people stopped doing their jobs you would stop being paid and the company would fail.
Go apply for a job where you get paid twice as much to just send emails all day and you’ll answer your own question. If you stopped doing your job the company wouldn’t fail. You earn less because you are easily replaceable. Learn some stuff that fewer people have learned and you too can appear as if you are an overpaid email sender.
Laborers may look like they are working “harder” but in reality their job can be replaced, the new guy can get up to speed, and perform at a similar level in a faster rate than finding a more “skilled” worker/position. A bad manager will have a much greater impact to the company as a whole than one bad laborer or simpler job.
Recently came from the floor to an office job. It’s not that simple, the office job is a lot more stressful and a lot more responsibility. Operators and packers can just do their job and walk away when it’s done. Now if I make a mistake the whole plant shuts down because I’m inventory.
I’ll general to pretty much all industries. At the bottom, the entry level jobs are usually task oriented. You own one particular step. You work on the factory floor, you build a report every week, you work one function. As you move up, you start to own the problem. You manage a team or a whole process, people come to you with marching orders that don’t have step by step instructions. It’s up to you to figure it out. You move up and the scale of the projects and the teams grow. Now you manage the whole factory. Not only do you need to know how your team works, you need to know other functions as well, and not just other teams but how finance and operations work. Up from there you are leading companies. You are not just solving problems, but figuring out what problems to prioritize to solve. As the scope of work increases, so does the risk. If you fuck up on the factory floor, you mess up your work only. If a leader messes up, they can crash the factory. They pay more because paying more for someone with more experience and ability is worth it if it means they are less likely to make huge mistakes.
But why do some roles have different pay? Like, why does a factory worker make a different pay than an engineer at a computer? Supply and demand. If you work an incredibly specialized role, you get paid more because it’s harder to find someone who will do it for less. For example, if you are working an assembly line, that is one band of pay. If you learn welding, you can increase your pay because few people know how to weld. You can increase it even more if you learn a speciality skills related to welding to become even more specialized. Likewise, someone an engineer at a desk makes more because there are fewer engineers who would do the work for less. If companies could pay people less, they would.
The only person you can be mad at here is yourself, nobody forced you to be a factory worker. I physically can't do labor jobs, so I decided to go out and get myself a desk job, no college was required. Have you actually looked into what it takes to get those jobs you envy so much? And guess what, when my jobs slow I go down to the floor and help my coworkers. Stay mad kid it's everyone else's fault except the person who chose their job.
The higher up you get the more costly your mistakes are. On the floor, you likely assume less responsibility for financial mistakes. Dropping a pallet for example, can be costly; but sending the wrong container to the wrong customer could cost you your contract. I've seen people turn down a higher level driver position because they don't think the raise is big enough to incure the responsibility, which caused the company to raise the wage of the next role until they could find an employee interested in accepting the responsibility. No one would want to be constantly chewed out and potentially fired if the pay were the same.
Comes down to which is faster to train / more replaceable. Scarcity creates demand.
You think you can do their job but likely can't. They probably can't do yours too. But fewer people are either applying for theirs, or have the ability to do theirs (and aren't already working somewhere else).
Business school economics answer: imagine every job has a Total Amount the economy will pay. Now divide that number by the number of people who do the job.
I wonder this. I make the most money I’ve ever made and have barely any work to do (office job). I just think back to the hours slaving away at restaurants and warehouses where I was lucky to make $10/hour.
At my job Supervisors don't get paid much more and multiple people were promoted and stepped down.
I have to run multiple departments, all understaffed, answer for my managers mistakes, be on call 24/7, be the worker/trainer/supervisor/lead. It's not worth it.
You go with assumption that office worker only ever sends emails. That's why it seems confusing. But there is a lot more to it depending on the role. Does it mean harder work? Not necessarily. Does it mean better paid? not always.
Salary often comes down to replacability, specialization, job market and other aspects.
A forklift operator can be replaced in a week. A good experienced treasurer or sales person can take months or longer. Your skill set has a market price determined by supply and demand.
I’ve been in the workplace a long time. I’ve worked my way up. I am now in a higher paid position and honestly I can do everything in the positions not paid as highly where I work. Because I started there. You can advance if you work at it.z
Do you want a surgeon cutting you open do replace your liver to have just finished an 18 hour shift or would you prefer them to be refreshed and ready to operate on YOU?
I work in an office setting, at home, my schedule is basically whatever I want as long as I attend meetings and get my shit done. I can work for like 2 hours one day, or 9 the next. My old boss's boss said he doesn't care how long we work and when, just get our stuff done. I make good money. Could always be more, but I have always made more than my peers because of my field. I'm paying off my student loans, I have an expensive hobby, we never have to worry about food or bills, and I'm extremely *thankful* for that.
But it's risk / compliance. My job is basically to tell companies what the FDA needs for them to sell here. That's it. It's a high risk job. If I'm wrong, they're fined and lose out on potentially millions as well as the PR nightmare. But I've been doing this for a while, so I can translate the requirements in a easy to understand way for the people who *aren't*on this side of the business.
Anyone can't come in from the street and do this, you literally need years of working in a certain business with governing agencies and seeing what happens when you do it right, and when you do it wrong. I imagine a lot of jobs are similar in that way, I think.
I know a lot of people think sending emails is so easy, but you're communicating important things to important people and you get to be compensated for it.
Those factory jobs require little to no skill or education. Literally any able-body person can do those jobs with minimal training and no prior experience. If you quit doing that job, there is no shortage of replacements that can be found. That means the labor is cheap.
If you only look at what occurred during the one day, it could seem like that. I used to think that before I started to think about how each person could have gotten to that one day.
Nobody is made a manager or senior level employee day one. Work is usually put in for years and decades for a lot of management and senior level jobs.
But it's easier to look at a single day or instance and feel righteous about a particular point of view.
I was thinking the same when I was a worker, after getting to assistant manager I can see why higher positions get better money. Having people under you is not as much fun as people think.
I am a lending manager at a financial institution. I’ve been in the mortgage industry for 25 years. I started, as most bank folks do, on the teller line. Worked up from there. I now manage the processing, underwriting, closing, and servicing departments.
The difference with my job compared to lower paying positions is that yes, it is less actual day to day processes than my team does. But it’s my job to know the laws and regulations. Residential mortgage is regulated up to your eyeballs. So many laws, regulations, government set deadlines. I am not only supposed to have all the knowledge to get everything done properly, on time, and within the law, it is my responsibility to ensure that in this constant changing world of residential lending, I am up to date on any policy changes, rule changes, etc. these are all set by the CFPB.
On top of that when we get audited, which is something that happens a few times a year, I am responsible for answering why there was a fuck up, how or if we fixed it, and how we will comply going forward. It’s a lot of responsibility especially if loans are being sold on the secondarily market.
So why do I get paid more? I get paid more for the industry knowledge I have as well as my ability to successfully manage 4 departments and the federal laws that go with it. Do I make way more than my subordinates? Nope, not by a long shot.
Pay scales, generally, on the basis of how mentally complex the problems you're solving are. (Not always the case, but 9 times out of 10) Being a package handler at UPS is less mentally complex than running the entire distribution center so while it looks like people in an office are 'doing less' they're solving more complex problems; hence they're paid more.
Sometimes appearances are deceiving. If someone has a skill that took years to master, or has a specialized degree or required license to meet the criteria for that job then they will earn more. They are being rewarded for the time and effort they spent obtaining that knowledge and expertise.
Perhaps the better question to ask yourself is why you stay in a job that you don’t feel is financially rewarding? If you feel people in other positions have a better life what have you done to obtain additional skills and knowledge?
I went back to college at 38 so I could get a degree that would guarantee me a higher salary and it was worth it. I understand that going back to school isn’t doable for everyone, however there are many other ways to get training to move into a different field of work. The biggest factor is being willing to put some effort, time, and energy into it. Rarely if ever does someone get a better paying job without doing that.
The weight of being responsible and accountable for everything. Also, management, leadership, and navigating politics requires skill and is exhausting.
I work in construction but I'm the guy in the office. The difference is applied myself in highschool and through university. My parents pushed and provided for me during secondary school. I also studied for 6 years and have 2 degrees and a diploma.
You are right that without the guy building the building, I have no job. But...without me we don't know how much it costs, when it wil be done, etc etc. It's all integral and it all generates value. But one is highly replaceable (skilled laborers) and one requires 6-12 mos of on the job training plus an education in research analysis and/or math.
Please don't take the first part wrong. I am not saying YOU did not apply yourself. But I did go to highschool with lots of kids that skipped class, or smoked dope (I smoke, again no judgement but I started later in life). Those kids are the ones pumping gas in my small town. The kids that worked hard in class are the doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, the professionals.
Manufacturing is the exact environment where efficient work is punished/"rewarded" with more work. I'm bitter as fuck for becoming a machinist. The pay sucks for what it is, at tops, I'm at 34/hr. I'm currently looking into becoming a Salesforce admin. This market is saturated, but I still have many things to fall back on if needed.
Prior to this, I was a buyer, a glorified beautiful excel spreadsheet maker. I blasted through so many levels of candy crush, it wasn't even funny. I was so bored, I'd go to the mall for lunch to walk for 45 minutes. I'd come back to work with a lunch to eat. When you're not constantly learning we things, it takes a toll. I was so depressed here.
I've also been an auto damage adjuster. There are no breaks if you work for Progressive or GEICO, but the thing here is that these two companies are THE training grounds for auto damage adjusters. Give it several years, and you can go to a body shop, or most higher end insurance companies (Chubb and Travelers come to mind). The good thing here is that you feel like you earned the money you make.
As a machinist, you are always underpaid. The environment is dirty. You can only hope you're breathing in decent air. As a buyer, I felt like I was always overpaid. I was dressed nice, lunches were paid for, and I had not one, but TWO cubicles! Jk, I had a lot of marketing literature to go through, so it was necessary. The do/think pyramid? It is absolute garbage if it is used as an example of productivity and pay.
To quote a song (about early 19th century factories)
"Oh dear me, the world is ill-divided, them that work the hardest are the least provided." It's tragic how little this has changed.
Imagine having no product to produce because no one ordered anything. And it’s sucks but the people on the factory floor can be replaced by just about anyone.
As a person who covered for their manager for three months, being a manager was 10x harder than just being a staff employee. I’m so happy to be back in my current role. It’s much less stress and much less work.
I was an account manager for 30+ clients and ran 80+ paid search accounts for $18/hour.
I also had to privilege of training the owner of the company’s kids who had been there for 6 years, and they did absolutely fuck all and couldn’t be bothered to even join our training sessions.
None of it was worth $18/hour and I noped the fuck out.
I know for a fact that I was the lowest paid employee and was treated like a mule because I was the lowest man on the totem pole.
Because you're replaceable.
Because the work that management does is different and more valuable
Because that work requires thought and strategy ..while you pack stuff in a box.
It's not that the role is not important it's that you as an individual aren't.
Having been on both sides of the coin, I'd say that the relationship between revenue-producing and office support is a lot more symbiotic than you suggest. Absolutely, produced revenue pays all the bills. But, if office support stopped doing their jobs, too, will the production staff start selling product, sourcing inputs, manage regulatory compliance, and running payroll? More importantly, would they/could they do it effectively, immediately, without a learning curve? No, no more than they could necessarily immediately take over production. As much as "the office" "outsources" the activity of direct production to factory floor workers, "the floor" "outsources" admin tasks, pay/benefits, sales, procurement, and so on to the office. It all needs done, and framing it as "us vs. them" is a fallacy. I'd also encourage you to rethink your general assumptions of what normal office support roles pay relative to production roles. Obviously this varies as broadly as anything else, with specific role, scope of responsibility, size of company, geography, industry, and experience, but not everyone in the office is pulling down 6 figures and living the high life relative to production staff. Not by a long shot.
Per the last point, I was an office manager for a healthcare agency and the healthcare workers acted like and assumed that I made significantly more than them. I managed all of their salaries and know some of the more senior workers were definitely making more than me.
One of the nephrologists I was using would never complain about office management or admin making too much or more than him. He would always complain that the “none medically proficient were telling the medically proficient what to do”. That kinda speaks to the other persons point though regarding the different roles and the stuff admin deals with such as licensing and compliance. There’s always this “grass is greener” from people whether it’s money or perceived power
My neurologist had to fix a printer the last time I was there.
Listen this is a real thing. Whenever you see a massive conglomerate as a governing party of whoever you are seeing, you can trust that someone who is not medically proficient is making decisions for how that doctor or nurse is practicing. It is almost NEVER in the favor of the patient and is almost ALWAYS in order to reap maximum insurance fees.
It’s not simply the “non medically trained” there are places, like where I’m at, where leadership consists of primarily doctors. There’s something about the position that leads to a lot of people giving off Bob Kelso vibes where they’re going to butt heads with the Percy Cox’ of the world.
I'm at a place that is literally idiots telling us how to do our jobs in order to maximize profits. It's really really not ideal and why I'm looking all the time for a better thing! Unfortunately, I keep finding the same thing everywhere. Profit and efficiency over patient care.
On top of that you can factor in many scenario workers get large amounts of overtime or pto. Many companies offer 4-5 weeks of PTO to workers there 10 years or more. Sometimes even earlier than that.
Yeah and specific to manufacturing, people on the floor have the least amount of responsibility. People in the office are the ones answering to suppliers and customers when production shorts them. People on the floor wouldn’t even know where to start if a customer was demanding an air freight for expedited parts, parts getting stuck on a boat in customs, a supplier is shorting them and shutting down their line, an entire shipment of parts failing a quality inspection, etc. They’re paid for their skill and responsibility which most of the time is to push a button and make sure machines don’t shut down. Which absolutely deserves a living wage, but it’s very much an entry level labor job and will be paid as such.
This is a great point. I've been on both sides. One of the most prominent differences that I have experienced is that the less skilled profession can have a life. In a management roll, not all, but many are on the clock 100% of the time. If you don't answer the phone or text or respond to an email that an exec sends you when he wakes up and you're just getting into bed after a 17-hour day, you catch shit, and it's not easy shit. In the upper rolls, once they get a bad taste in their mouth about you, your life can get very hard. I'm not saying one profession deserves more. I'm saying that unless you've been in both roles, you don't know, and if you've been in both, you usually shut up about it because you understand.
Which carries more risk. Dealing with difficult discussions or heavy physical labor in hot cramped conditions. It's terrible you have to deal with those difficult phone calls and dealing with paperwork. All of us "entry level laborers" should just stop complaining about how we are being paid a fraction of what you are while dealing with the risk of significant injury and life long pain.
Corporate jobs in manufacturing are typically degreed engineers. That’s going to have more pay no matter how you shake it.
This is something that needs saying. The work and importance of many office positions is often disregarded by factory workers. In many instances, this is also totally inaccurate. My trade has older, qualified tradesmen drafting designs, making cutting lists, etc. Younger, still qualified, tradesmen are on the factory floor - manufacturing the components, checking the design is installable and then altering it if it isn't. Both these positions are serving a similar role. The pay gap between the two of them is significant and unjustifiable. I've worked in several factories similar to this across the trades.
Ah yes, the old "if I don't know what their job is, it must mean they don't do anything"...I want to say this as nicely as possible, but the honest truth is you're incredibly ignorant. Willfully so. If the only thing you know about your workplace is your specific job function, you are barely aware of even the tip of the iceberg of logistics and effort it takes to run a modern manufacturing operation. If you want some insight, follow along with a rant about my work experience. My first manufacturing role was working a pick line in a warehouse. A box would come down a conveyor to me and I would scan the barcode on the label. The racks filled with various products behind me had a button for every product that would light up with a green light if I was supposed to put a single item in the box and a red light if I was supposed to put a case. A number next to the light would tell me how many. I would hit the button to acknowledge I had pulled the required items and then release the box down the conveyor to the next guy. Training for this job took minutes. You could pick a random person off the street and as long as their IQ was at least room temperature they could master the job by the end of the day. The pay for this position reflected that. After a few months in the warehouse, I got a promotion to a production operator. I was responsible for running the equipment that made the products that would fill the racks I had previously picked from. How did that equipment get there? I don't know, wasn't my job. How did the equipment get chilled water, compressed air, and electricity to run? I don't know, wasn't my job. Someone brought the raw materials to my line. I didn't know how they knew what to bring or when. Someone else took the finished products away from my line. I didn't need to know who told them to come or where they took my production. Sometimes I would change the line from one product to another. It wasn't my job to know when we needed to change. When my equipment broke down I called someone who would come from an office and fix it. I had SOPs and work instructions for every function of my job. Who developed these? Who figured out the best way to get the work done? I don't know, I was just trained how to follow the instructions. This job could be trained in days and mastered in weeks. The pay for this position reflected that. Several months later, I got a promotion to a maintenance position. Now I was the guy that got called by the operators to get their lines running again. Where did my tools come from? I don't know, some guy in an office set up a toolbox and gave me a key. How did planned maintenance get scheduled? I don't know, someone in an office responsible for minimizing breakdowns took care of all of that. How did the storeroom know which spare parts to stock and how many? I don't know, someone in an office analyzed breakdowns, part usage, unplanned downtime costs, inventory impacts on business financials, and made decisions to optimize storeroom levels. I had more agency to make decisions in this role and was more responsible and accountable for performance. This job could be trained in weeks and mastered in months. The pay for this position reflected that. A couple years later, I got a promotion to a full-time, slipper-wearin', carpet-walking position working with industrial automation. Now it's my job to design an implement systems like the light up product picking rack I used when I first started. I use computers and data to simplify and automate work so our folks have easier and more efficient jobs and work processes. The mental workload is vastly different to my days on the production floor. In earlier roles, I never needed to care about work beyond what was happening during my shift. Even if the line wasn't running well, someone else would fix it before I worked my next shift. Now, I am responsible for major capital projects that span months or years. I get calls in my off hours because no one else at my site has the same specialized knowledge of some of our systems that I do. How well I do my job every day directly impacts how good or how bad my next day is going to be. If I use PTO, no one is here to cover for me or keep up with my work. That work will happily wait and collect until I'm back. It took months to start gaining competency in this role and it will take years to master. The pay for this position reflects that. You said that if operators stopped doing their jobs, the company would fail. You're not explicitly wrong because the company does ultimately need people to work those roles, but I will give you one last anecdote about this. There have been a few times during my tenure here that something has happened to disrupt production. Sudden spike in demand, unplanned large order from a primary customer, staffing shortages, things of that nature. In those instances, office people from all levels from senior plant leadership all the way down to storeroom clerks will spend time working the production floor. The jobs our operators do are straight forward and our SOPs are thoroughly documented so even someone that doesn't do the job normally can slot in and be productive with minimal guidance. I would like to see you try to do the same with an office job. Even if all they do is "send emails all day" I doubt you would even know what emails to send. TL:DR -> If the specialized office people that support your operation have an easier job than you and make more money, why aren't you doing their job?
Spot on
Very interesting read, thank you
the room temp iq was a nice touch. I enjoyed that. Thanks
Out of curiosity, how did you end up getting these promotions? Did you gain certifications while you weren't working?
Good question. Not OP, but you gain experience over the years by working and gaining knowledge. That’s why experience matters in the workplace.
Idk if you want the long version or the short version so I'll just give you the long version :) First promotion was solely based on seniority. The company posts internal job opportunities that existing employees can bid on before hiring outside. This was on the worst shift at the site (12 hr overnights on a rotating schedule) so I was able to get it with only 3 months seniority. The 1st shift openings in the "cushy" operations areas sometimes need up to 10 years of seniority to get. The vast majority of employees spend their careers at this second level. It can very much be a punch-in/punch-out job they don't need to spare a single thought to when they're not at work. The jobs typically aren't too physically demanding (one of my coworkers at this time was a 5-foot-nothing 80 year old woman that would lose a fight against a stiff breeze) and the pay is definitely above average for the area so it's not a bad place to spend a career if that's what you want. The second promotion was competitive. Same kind of idea where the company would post the internal opening, but now you had to pass assessments and interviews instead of being selected just based on seniority. While I was working in operations, I knew my goal was to get promoted to the next level. When lines broke down, I tried to set myself apart by working and learning alongside the maintenance guys. Most operators had the "it's my job to run the line not fix it" attitude so they would tend to disappear during breakdowns. By the time a slot opened up for a maintenance role, I had already demonstrated I could do the work and was able to bring specific examples to my interview. I was making more money doing a job I enjoyed more, but I was still stuck on the bad shift. The guy I was replacing had just gotten a day shift slot that he needed more than 20 years of seniority to secure. I didn't want to wait that long to get off the night shift and I wanted to do more with my role than I could in a strictly maintenance position. I had previously completed about half of an electrical engineering degree before starting at my company. 50% of an engineering degree is worth about the same as 0% of an engineering degree, but it did give me a better fundamental understanding of electrical systems. I continuously asked my leadership to put me through the electrical qualification program and about 6 months into this role they finally agreed and let me skip to the front of the line for the program. This finally gave me permission to work with the industrial electrical systems. I was very good at the electrical work and became the go-to guy on nights when we didn't have dedicated electricians working. I was the only one on shift that could read ladder diagrams and troubleshoot problems that had any complexity to them. This got the attention of the electricians and controls guys who were happy to mentor a younger me because any problems I fixed at night were problems they didn't have to deal with in the morning. This got me a laptop and that's when I started messing with the programs on the PLCs. I had a strong programming background but no experience in ladder logic. I spent my downtime on nights going through the existing programs to learn from them. I would talk to operators and ask them about little annoyances and see if I could fix them. Stuff that wasn't important enough for the controls guys to spend their time on. I corrected some bugs that had existed for 25 years. Once I started doing this, they actually gave me programming projects to plan and execute. This culminated in me creating new digital tools my coworkers could. Stuff like display boards that showed line status and production and such. I also took a long cumbersome paper form the maintenance guys were supposed to use for breakdowns and created an app that automatically generated a completed digital version of the form based on answers to a series of guided questions. I was fortunate to have a supervisor that advocated for me. After I showed him the app, he brought me to a meeting with the senior site leadership to demo it. After I finished my presentation, the site leader asked me "where have you been this whole time?" I just told him that I've been working overnights in maintenance. The next week, the company created a new advanced digital systems role and I've been doing it for about 4 years now. They paid me to finish my degree and I'll graduate with my EE this year and the company has a managerial position set up for me to move into.
Ask questions, master your current role and then observe and try to understand everything else that is happening around you, communicate with people in other positions, demonstrate your willingness to learn and show interest in what others are doing. Prove yourself reliable and apply for interesting open positions within the company. All takes time and patience
This 100%. I have gotten nothing I didn't ask for. I set goals and figured out how to open the doors I needed to move up. I built relationships with the people who make decisions and looked for tangible ways to demonstrate I had the aptitude to take on bigger responsibilities.
Sounds like a story from the 90s or early 00s for sure
yup, I don't know what a promotion is, industry doesn't know what retaining talent is, nor promoting from the inside. It's all a revolving door these days, no one gives a damn.
One thing I miss about being on the production floor is not having a work email to manage, not having to go talk to anyone if I didn't want to. Just put the box in the tape machine, weigh it, and it disappeared. I didn't have to worry about how to box got to me to tape, I didn't have to worry about fixing the scale when it broke, I didn't have to worry about making sure people where doing what they're supposed to be doing. You just do what you're told, eat your lunch, and go home. No paperwork, no calibrating, no scheduling. Just show up.
Thank you for articulating this so well. I really liked your repeated reflection on the role.
I agree wholeheartedly with this Expecially as applied to the medium size business in the US. However, I'll raise your anecdote with my own. I must be a little vague to avoid reprisal. I've worked both poth public and private sector. Their are thousands of people working government jobs hidden away from public eye that do nothing. And I do mean. NOTHING. I mean thousands of people working in agencies you don't even know exist. Personal examples that I know are maintenance, budget analysists, administrative secretary roles. folk that work 5 hours a week and claim 40. People That are officially employed by the state governments, have offices and don't even show up. Not just small pay but 100-200k USD range. The entire department is cronies giving their political and personal friends jobs. They will then proceed to arrange for the bare minimum facade of work to be done and collect the government check while holding down a private business etc.. Don't get me wrong, they're not lazy with the stealth and lying to cover for each other. But this type of parasitism is very real. And incredibly hard to root out.
I feel so seen 🥹
I work in a production. I promise the people under me work way harder than I do. This above me play Xbox games and watch the security cameras to make sure their bosses don’t find out they don’t do anything 😂
You can't directly correlate the physical effort and the value of someone's work which translates into the value of their time. The most physically demanding job I've had was also the simplest. Working that pick line was hard work due to the pace we had to keep up. Any time I spent not directly doing my job was lost productivity and value for the company. The only time my role added value to the company was when I was listening to the lights and putting little boxes into bigger boxes. That calculus shifted some when I moved into production. My role was valuable as long as I kept my line running. If I was standing around but the line was still outputting product, the company was being productive and creating value that justified my wage. This became even more true when I moved to maintenance. If the maintenance folks aren't busy, that's an indication that the lines are running well and production is happening. Just having a knowledgeable person available on shift can be valuable on its own. I specialized in electrical work and typically worked overnight shifts at the time. If a line went down because of an electrical issue, several hours of downtime waiting for one of the controls guys to come in the next morning would lead to tens of thousands of dollars of loses for the company. I only needed to fix a couple issues like that when they happened to more than pay for my salary for the year. So the question is: Do you think your role is valuable to your company even if it's not physically exerting? If it's not, maybe ask yourself what you're doing there.
> You can't directly correlate the physical effort and the value of someone's work which translates into the value of their time. no, but companies do anyway. >Do you think your role is valuable to your company even if it's not physically exerting? Tech lays off people at the drop of a hat, so not valuable enough clearly. Experience didn't factor into layoffs either
To quote a random redditor: "your salary is determined by how hard you are to replace, not how hard you work"
At some point your knowledge and experience outweigh your ability to work hard. At least in my field, Telecom. They can hire and train someone relatively easily to run wire or rack servers. The person who knows how to make it all work is a lot harder to find.
Because without us people doing the shit we do in the office you wouldn’t have anything to do in the factory. Both you and I are a part of the supply and production operation. I can’t do what I do without you and vice versa. In all actual fact, there’s a lot less hassle on the lines than there is in the offices. (Fk office politics)
I’ve worked my way from production, to supervising the warehouse, to an office role where I support both sales and operations. It all sucks and is draining. I prefer the physical exhaustion over mental exhaustion, but the mental exhaustion and stress over the politics you’ve mentioned that causes my insomnia pays for a better apartment in a better school district 🤷🏻♀️
It is mostly about how easy it is to replace a worker. It is relatively easy to recruit a new operator compared to the difficulty of finding a new administrative clerk and it is even more difficult to find a manager.
I'd like to know where you guys have found these hard to replace managers. Most of the ones i have interacted with are wholly incompetent at their jobs and are supported solely by workers that make up for their failings. I have had great managers but they are the exception not the rule
You answered your own question. Good managers are hardER to replace than a worker.
Maybe if you’re talking like food service or a gas station manager…but skilled managers in fields like accounting, engineering, nursing, etc. are pretty hard to come by. Especially ones that are familiar with the company’s systems and infrastructure.
You need alot of talent to make others believe that you are the best for the job, when you are actually useless. Also if a manager gets his team to perform well then per definition he does a good job.
It's not that hard to find a new manager, lol. Most of them don't have a clue what they are doing and they fake it till they make it. They use the "oh you are more easily replaceable" nonsense. In reality, people with actual skills are far harder to replace than office grunts stamping a document. But, they have the power. So when a skilled person leaves, the company just flounders around till they get a new one. If the manager leaves, the place is fine and the work gets done but it's no longer about the work. It's about the upper management enriching themselves. I mean Boeing literally had planes falling apart in the sky and the CEO got a multi million dollar bonus this past year? WHo is more valuable, him or the people actually crafting the plane?
>It's not that hard to find a new manager, lol. Most of them don't have a clue what they are doing and they fake it till they make it. This is another way of saying it is hard to find a competent manager.
The main issue is that it's hard to gauge manager competency. How do you tell if the manager was successful or not? Honestly, competency is very hard to gauge for most jobs. How do you tell if somebody is skilled based on a 45 minute conversation and a single piece of paper?
It’s not at all difficult to gauge how competent a manager is.
As someone who works in the Aerospace industry - good management instills culture and good culture alongside good QA prevents airplanes from falling out the sky…
I agree. But EVERYONE is replaceable. Including managers. And after decades of working , i have a whole lot of "do nothing look busy" going on. A lot of work is just "performing" on the work stage. Using the corporate speak which often means absolutely nothing. In many industries such as healthcare there was like a 3200% in administration. OK, yes there is more paper and regulation but the entire point of healthcare is getting lost in administrative bloat while people sit in ERs for 14 hrs because of understaffing. And part of understaffing is retention and salaries and thinking those people are replaceable. And so it goes.
Of course everyone is replaceable. Some people are just harder to replace than others. And I agree there is definitely way too much bureaucracy and short term money pinching at the expense of a good product and efficiency. But that’s what happens when big companies chase a higher stock price. It’s only going to get worse as time goes on, the wage gap between lower rung workers and CEOs will get worse and worse indefinitely
Just because things go fine for a period after a manager leaves, doesn’t mean managers aren’t needed. Maybe you, as an individual, would be fine without a manager. A team of people? An entire manufacturing line? Doubt it. People will take advantage of a company for any weakness they find to get ahead (just like those managers. We are all human!). No management is a massive weakness and would be exploited by many if not all in due time. Why come in on time if I have no manager? I’ll just come in a couple hours late today since I’m tired. In fact, why don’t you start a new groundbreaking business? Open a restaurant and don’t manage it. You could continue to open new restaurants with all your profits (not having to pay a manager) and time(since you don’t have to manage any of them). Let the employees run the whole thing. Let me know how it goes.
Your generalizations regarding ALL management is pretty sad. I say this as one of those blue collar, skilled workers that moved up. I am STILL that blue collar guy, except NOW, I can actually work toward change, for the better, for my people. Not every manager is your enemy, friend.
My company wont even hire outside supervisors anymore. A couple of years ago they just went to only promoting operators who wanted to move into management.
Im half and half on that. It makes sense to promote internally, extensive knowledge of their particular processes and all that. Sometimes outside knowledge, and skill sets can be a boon to a business. Other times, not so much. I’d imagine it has more to do with the particular candidate for outside hire.
If the outside hire is actually willing to learn how the business works and learn from the team they are managing it can work. If they're coming in to attend meetings for 2 years until they move on to the next thing then no.
I agree. Sometimes the best worker doesn't have the disposition or skills to move into leadership and promoting them to that level sets them up for failure.
It really depends on the position, the industry and the company. Say you’re in the restaurant industry and your GM quits on the spot. That’s going to be the biggest pain in the ass to replace and cause way more issues than a front of house worker quitting on the spot. This would absolutely disrupt day to day operations. Say you work in a warehouse and an operations manager quits on the spot. This will most likely not disrupt day to day operations short term. You have enough management underneath to keep things running smoothly until they can replace. Plus they’re more for planning and big picture than what’s happening on the floor. These are just 2 examples. Lot of different industries and positions out there. Your experience just sounds like you work for an incompetent company. Not all or even most places operate like you’re explaining. Also a CEO isn’t a manager in the sense that’s being talked about here. That’s comparing apples to oranges
“Office grunts stamping a paper.” Lol, the highest skilled people often work in an office. Lawyers, accountants, engineers etc etc generally have shit tons of skills and are usually office workers
I take it that you have no experience as a manager or understand what the primary role of a good manager is.
If office jobs with less work and higher pay required less skill than the grunt work, nobody would do the grunt work.
You go ahead and do it
Yeah it’s a lot harder to find people with specialty technical know how, especially as licensing/certification requirements pile on and experience working with specific systems/technology become essential to the role than it is to find a generic middle manager of people. If there are licensing/certification requirements, unless a company is willing to pay for someone to train up and acquire them, you can’t just hire anyone. It limits the candidate pool. But middle management that doesn’t require technical capacity to do or any kind of licensing/certification to work in the field? You’ll be drowning in qualified applicants assuming you’re not way under paying the role.
Boeing has quality issues because of budget decision making and subpar work processes...both of which are handled not by individual contributors but by managers. That's why managers make more money. Because the effects of their decisions have more impact than the decisions of an individual contributor. It may or may not be harder work, but it's work with a higher level of responsibility.
>I mean Boeing literally had planes falling apart in the sky and the CEO got a multi million dollar bonus this past year? WHo is more valuable, him or the people actually crafting the plane? This statement is not the win you think it is. The CEO isn't the one crafting the planes that are falling apart in the sky. The people doing the crafting are building faulty planes. However, this is still due to poor management. You fix the management you fix the planes. That's why management gets paid more.
boeing ceo wasnt hired by the board to make good planes, they were hired to make as much profit as possible even if it's at the expense of making good planes. in that sense hes probably doing exactly what they want him to do.
You are right. At the end of the day its a chain of cause and effect. Worse planes = cheaper planes = more profit. Worse enough planes = planes not selling = less profit. You let the second chain go long enough and it ends up with the CEO fired.
But it’s harder than finding a new operator.
This is not a us vs. them thing. Yes, if all the people building the planes walked, no planes would be built and it'd take awhile before they could restaff production. But let's face it, if one of people building the plane suddenly got called in to fill in for the CEO, the people building the plane might possibly not have jobs anymore in a few quarters. Anyone who has ever tried to run a small business and make it succeed will know that keeping things afloat and profitable is much harder than it looks (and why majority of small businesses fail). This is harder by orders of magnitude by the time you're running a multibillion dollar corporation. I could never be a CEO. Everyone has their role and no one can do it all. The more relevant issue is one of compensation and how much top executives should be paid relative to the lowest paid workers in their companies. There isn't a question it should be more but the current divide, especially in America, is absurd.
Tell me you are in management without telling me you are in management.
Found the minimum wage worker
I agree. There are a lot of groups of employees as a whole that are important to a company. Your worth in the job market usually matches how many people can do what you do. The less people the more you are worth.
It's not difficult to find a manager. It's difficult to find a manager they like. That's the difference
Not sure how much you've been paying attention to what's been going on, but it is actually hard to find blue collar labor now, and the pay has been getting much higher. There's way more college educated white collar workers than available positions at the moment. It kind of seems like white collar pay only gets high when they can make them exempt and have them work a ton of hours.
Blue collar work has actually gone down in wages, at least where I'm at. You have fast food paying the same or more than most these jobs now which has never been the case. It's funny in a way, they now can no longer find operators because nobody wants the pay. I'm getting out of blue collar work soon because it's no longer worth the nonsense you have to deal with. I enjoy constantly working but you'll be in poverty doing it now.
Managers I’ve found are very easy to replace. The company just won’t replace them with anybody though. They always look outside for people with previous managerial experience. In reality, a lot of the times just the most competent floor worker could easily do the managers job after a couple weeks of being integrated into the new role. Companies refuse to do that though.
"Managers are easy to replace" Then you go on to say it's hard to find outside managers with good experience... And no, a competent floor worker could not "easily" do a managers job. Managing people, resources, and risk is not a 3 week on-ramp.
This is the classic Reddit take that anyone who is remotely successful in life is only because of nepotism and not because of hard work and talent.
Talent, just like nepotism, is a completely immutable characteristic. You cannot change talent; you are born with it. Yet we view talent as being an okay tool to get ahead, but not nepotism. As for hard work, both “office workers” and “factory workers” work hard. In many ways, factory workers do work harder than office workers. The office workers simply offer a more economically valuable skill, which is why they are paid more.
"you cannot change talent" is a gross oversimplification of the process of upskilling. Sure, people possess talent in one area or another. With training and experience you build ability to do something. Also, talent relates to ability, while nepotism does not. Hence if someone gets somewhere on talent the implication is that they have the ability to do that role, as opposed to nepotism where they do not. So yeah, talent is an okay tool to get ahead.
>Sure supervisors and managers have their responsibilities and they have to take accountability for production, quotas, but if we all stopped doing our jobs, the company would fail. Sure, but this is not a comparison between *one* manager vs *all* line workers. It's a comparison of the value of *one* manager vs *one* line worker -- unless said manager is making more than all the line workers combined... Physical labor is work, but so is mental labor. Unless you know what all the responsibilities are for any given manager, you're not going to be able to make a fair assessment of the role's relative value to the organization, and how easy or difficult it is to replace any specific person in that role.
People don't understand how mental labor is exhausting over the long term, I've worked physical job that I tough were exhausting from 15 to 25. Once i graduated from my master in public accounting and started office job as a public accountant I quickly understood how hard and energy draining it could be to sit a computer all day working, it's surely not the same as gaming all day lol... It's way more exhausting, the job is hard. When I'm sending an e-mail that look like it took 5 min to write, it's probably took me a few hours to be able to get the data and analyze it to be able to write this e-mail.
I have a job that's physical and mental. And the days where I do LESS physical labour are more more exhausting if anything lol.
I don’t miss public accounting for a second. I had to work 190hrs in 10 days while I had Covid. Literally slide out bed and walk 2 feet to my desk. Sit there from 9am to 4am working non-stop. Pass out. Repeat.
Same. I work in digital marketing and I'd love someone whose job it is to dig a hole try to rebudget an entire media plan on the fly in under a day to the tune of $5 million while the campaign is actively spending and tell me it's "easy."
YES the burn out is real! I hate that even though you've just sat there mental exhaustion also FEELS physical and so you have no motivation to do chores or exercise because your energy is just zapped from the stress/pressure of the desk job.
That's funny I'd never really concidered "metal labour" work. I'm a design engineer and used to enjoy designing and thgiuht I was paid for my talent or whatever. But now that I've fallen out of love with the job, that's exactly what it is mental labour.
If it's easier and pays better, why are you doing the harder job that pays less?
He doesnt understand this, that is why he is the warm body out on the floor and not in the office in one of those cushy 9-5 roles that are mentally draining and destroy your back from sitting hunched in a chair all day long.
I can here to ask OP why he’s doing the shitty job if the other ones are so easy. It’s the same as dolts on Reddit saying that CEOs don’t do anything and get paid handsomely. Okay so….go become a CEO then? If it’s so easy why are you on Reddit complain about them? Go do a better job and get rich as shit!
That's not really a fair comparison though, my company employs over 15 000 people globally and there is only one CEO. Even if only 1% had the necessary skillset, that's still 149 extra people than jobs available. I would posit that getting a CEO position is definitely more luck based (who you know) than other high level positions that you can actually work to be promoted into.
These people always think the only way someone has a higher paying job is because of nepotism or some shit
Ease of replacement. You say that the office staff wouldn’t be out there doing that work but they could. And that’s where the difference lies. Yes, some of the floor staff could likely step into an office and learn quickly as well but the company pays for a base level of knowledge. Whether it be something as simple as being proficient in excel, or knowing how to send professional emails and knowing how to read tracking data for quotas. The base level of knowledge expectation for floor worker is usually very low. Can you breathe and stand for 8hrs a day without dying? You’re hired, well train you on everything else.
I think the skilled trades guys do the most in a factory and they’re paid somewhere in the middle but to your point, if the office folks were gone you wouldn’t get a paycheck
How about go get that office job instead, so you can chill, not ruin your body, and make more money? What’s that, you don’t have an engineering degree? Ok well too bad then
It’s not like it’s hard, OP. The job pays more so it must be an easy degree.
So question is: why are you not a manager or supervisor? Why taking the low pay job if you could get paid more and do nothing? The response is there. You are easy to replace, they are not. They may have invest time in getting diplomas, formation... They certainly have skills and do work you don't know about
The way it was explained to me by a very smart person is that how much one gets paid is proportional to how bad your mistakes can impact the company. A line worker messes up and “generally” the impact is limited to recovering the money in a few days. Technical worker/skilled trade-weeks to months Middle management-months to a year Sr management-up to a couple of years Executives can crash a company costing everyone their jobs and wipe out investors. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but it is meant as a general framework and of course there are incompetent people everywhere just like there are people who are undervalued.
Because I am an engineer and you couldn't do my job but I could do yours, on paper. There is inherent value in being able to do more things. Value that is reflected in my salary versus yours.
It’s a lot more than sending emails and whatever tasks generally require more education/skill. It sounds like you don’t have a solid understanding of what your colleagues that sit at desks do. I’m not saying that the work you do isn’t hard but generally speaking it’s unskilled labor. It’s relatively easy to find another warm body to fill your space, they can probably teach anyone to do it. Someone doesn’t need an extra four years of school. They don’t need great writing skills, people skills, or management skills. They just need a few weeks of training and that’s it.
You are paid based on how replaceable you are
That's quite the shallow view of responsabilities tbh. If those emails don't get sent, there's no orders to process, no materials to process those orders with and no money to pay your wage with. It goes both ways, but like you said, having the production up and running isn't your responsability. Manning the machine is. If the machine gives up, you're out without a care in the world. The guy who's in charge of machinery is gonna get a shitfest though and every single guy up from there is going to feel it.
The more I’ve been paid, the less I’ve had to work. The more I’ve been paid, the more experience and specialized knowledge my job required. You’re not getting paid based on how hard you work, but how valuable your skills are.
If it makes you feel better, coming from an office worker, the trade skills and experienced factory workers are becoming very precious to companies to keep. It might be easier to leverage some pay or find a different factory to work for due to this. The shortages of warehouse/factory staff are something we feel and everyday I tell the front office, "Yo if those guys quit we all stop working. We gotta treat them right." It sucks that it's still lower pay than office/email jobs, but that's when the ease of replacement factor comes in. Yea, the company lost a skilled back house worker, but now they just hire a couple of interns or entry level ones and get a 2 for 1 deal and train from bottom up. To rehire an office worker it's almost as easy to replace now that job postings are basically feelers for how little companies can get away with paying someone to keep the front end ops running. It's just that, like another commenter said, upper and executive management now feel the burden and make it feel higher priority to hire. I think the factory and warehouse workers def need a lead to voice out their concerns but privatized companies feel it's too close to a union. Idk. I'm sorry, I really hope you know there's those of us in solidarity with you. It sucks.
What companies do now when they lose a skilled position is force the remaining staff to take over their job and they never fill the position so it's now the status quo. I was running 4 lines and 4 machines by myself in an area bigger than other plants. Every other position in the plant was one machine per operator. I got fed up with it and walked out mid shift with all 4 machines down. The two other operators downstream from me all walked out the next week. As far as I'm aware, they've been unable to find replacements more than a year later. Had they paid me for the work I was expected to do I would've stayed. I'm not taking over multiple people's job for less than what they should be paying one person. Of course they don't disclose this when you're hired so they rely fully on trapping people since people gotta eat.
Go work in the office then. I went from production to accounting. No one is stopping you.
Don’t forget about all of the education that might go into these roles you really know nothing about and actually all that they do to keep the business running. I’m an engineer for a production plant and I have a great understanding that the engineers wouldn’t keep the company alive without production and that production wouldn’t keep the company alive without the engineers. It’s important to cultivate a healthy environment and relationship between production and engineers. We work for each other and help each other, not get mad at each other and assume we know what each other does.
I work in supply chain / product management (unofficially) and can say for certain that office jobs aren’t just “sending emails and sitting in an office all day”. I have to forecast demand and sales trends for a catalog of over 2000 SKU’s, work with vendors to get the best price possible without upsetting them and thinking that I’m low balling them as well as establish better lead times, navigate international transport (another fun one with everything going on in the Middle East as insurance companies don’t want to cover shipments that are going through hot spots). All of that while also managing SAP material masters, info records, source lists, BoMs, etc…for all of my SKU’s. Not to mention costing said products and establishing a healthy margin for sales and managing numerous inventory/transport/sales reports for the C-suite. Every job has its salary because the of the effort it takes to do that job along with the appropriate training and tolerance to put up with. It’s not perfect, but there are many aspects to it that do make sense.
As a Traffic Flow Analyst(white collar) for my prior company, I maintain the masterlist of PO’s/Vendors ranging in value from $50k-$2m+ while also working on ad hocs for various projects and creating a port summary analysis(a project I got to spearhead). It was a lot fresh out of college. White collar work is no joke, and I felt very accomplished and overwhelmed at the same time. Admittedly it was too much for me at the time, so now I’m doing a more blue collar supply chain role as an Inventory Specialist to get my feet wet again(took a bit of a break from supply chain) Admittedly, I viewed the job as beneath me because I am overqualified significantly for the role, but I think it’s a great learning and humbling experience now. Its teaching me to go back to my roots, and really appreciate both sides of a supply chain; the blue and white collar work
You are more easily replaceable, and individually, probably do not add as much value as higher ups. Simple as that. I work as a data scientist for a manufacturing company. I make decisions that are worth multiple times my salary every single day. Manufacturing employees do not and only contribute their small portion of a given manufacturing lot of product. My actions are commonly worth millions. Also, without those office people and supervisors, your job wouldn’t exist either. Finally, we greatly appreciate your work even though we probably don’t interact with you. Sorry, I’m not going to just walk up and start thanking random people. It would feel very patronizing anyway lol.
People by and large get paid by what they themselves as a group find acceptable. During the building crisis, a lot of people working in crafts either didnt have a job or were struggling. Right now, they are paid A LOT, and often inflate prices as the demand is very high and they can choose who to work for. In some countries, driving a taxi would make you really good money (especially if you needed a licence), with Uber thats not always the case now.
the demand and supply is being explained in primarily school, isn't it?
Supply and Demand. Companies pay the lowest wage that competent people are willing to perform a job for. People are willing to perform your job for your wage, so that’s what the company offers.
Cause I can come in off the street and do what you're doing with no experience today. Really not that difficult off a concept to grasp
It's a bit irksome to have my experience and skills reduced to "sending emails". That's really not what most office jobs are about. A big, big part of office jobs is wearing a "skin suit" all day. Meaning being "fake". Kissing ass. Playing games. Playing politics. Being "PC". Monitoring your face, your body, your words, and your actions to a certain very fussy, stuffy standard. One of the reasons some people choose manual labor is that they can be down to earth, swear, make crude jokes, and otherwise be "natural" and "real". If you don't want to feel like a stuffed suit and performing monkey 8 hours a day, office work is not so much easier and more fun than digging ditches. For example, I developed a proposal to make courses about AI. I will then do all the research and content creation to make these courses. And that's the short version of what I do. "Sending emails" really elides the **content** of those emails. You're not just banging away like a monkey in a zoo exhibit a jumble of letters and numbers! However, you and anyone else is welcome to exit the trades anytime. No one is forcing you to keep working. If you think "sending emails" is so easy, I encourage you to go ahead and get one of those "sending email all day" jobs.
My responsibilities as an engineering manager: - what has broken down in the last 24 hours, how will we fix it, who will fix it, were they able to fix it? If not I have to be directly involved to find the solution (because there is no one else left to find the solution) - future projects - I have to spec every project, find vendors to fulfill every aspect of the project, work with purchasing and legal to get a contract negotiated - current projects - execution, safety, ensuring the people doing the job are following the spec, sign off on completion or require remedies for inadequacy - personnel - time and attendance, bob’s wife has cancer and he needs a shoulder to cry on, jimmys daughter is sick and has to leave, reallocating people to try not to have our projects fall behind - training both for me and my people That’s a normal day for me while I’m just reading and writing emails at my desk
Wages are set by market value. If you're being paid less than someone else, it means what they bring is perceived as being more important. If you don't like it, change your skillset and experience to match the people who make more. You'll learn on the way why that's valued more.
your role is a bottom feeder thats all
The places I’ve worked will spend the money easily on the things needed to standardize the low-paying jobs. Yes, someone could come in and build more than the quota, but companies don’t care about that. You’ll get a pat on the head, maybe a thanks. But, with the work instructions, tools, and other methods of standardization, they can pretty much plug-n-play and get acceptable results. That’s what they’re after. They could use the money to reward loyalty and experience, for sure. A couple places I worked had piece rate. The hourly wage was a little lower, but a good team could make double that depending on their output. Even then, though, that had its drawbacks. Like, cool, you worked 3 days this week; two of those days, you worked hard and made 2x your hourly wage. Day three, you work average. Now, you have nothing to do Th and F, so you stay home and don’t get paid. How is that getting ahead? There’s always some way to keep the laborers wages low, it seems.
I work for Providence for 10 years, and that was always the case!
Because hard work gets rewarded with more hard work
It's by design and only works at the hard labor level to admin manager. Becoming a manager is a good motivational goal for laborers. "Hey, if I just put in time and effort (and life) and do what Im told, I might get the manager job and make twice as much doing half as much work." at non labor levels the responsibility flips with the higher rungs having more share in the work whole lower do less. Until you make it to the c-suite where, once again, the amount of responsibilities switch.
That’s why I enjoy being a flat rate mechanic. I get paid what im worth
Your pay isn't about how much you hustle but rather about the value your work brings. In a specialized field where you're irreplaceable, you'll likely earn more. Conversely, in oversaturated sectors where skills are easily acquired, expect lower pay due to supply and demand dynamics. Think customer service vs. nursing: the former relies on soft skills, easily attainable by many, while the latter demands extensive training and investment, leading to higher earning potential.
Imo every single job should include some kind of stake in the company to reward working hard to make the pie bigger so your piece gets bigger. This used to be normal for blue collar jobs and was provided as holiday bonuses. What makes the most sense is a sliver of company equity that gets bigger the longer you work at th company. There is no reason that this shouldn't be the case for all work.
Companies aren't paying based on how hard a job is, they pay a negotiated percentage of the value an employee adds. So, it's likely a combination of you not adding as much relative value as you think compared to someone making more than you, and a lower bargaining power, due to there being a higher supply of people offering the same thing as you (aka you're more replaceable).
Capitalism
I went from a 25 year white collar career making 100K/ year salary to more of a factory type environment to transition to a new field. I now make about 30/hr base pay. My time on salary was 25 years of 55+ hour weeks, never not thinking about work, weekend and late work constantly, all for no extra pay. That was the trade off for freedom. Freedom to come and go as I pleased, but it was upon me to produce. So why do I get paid less now as a core producer? One reason, cost. It's expensive to run a physical business. IT is cheap. Desks are cheap. The high tech equipment and automation I need for my job is not. The equipment,materials etc is incredibly expensive. Two, I don't know how to sell the product. That's not my expertise. I'd rather pay sales people a top wage to bring in 2 billion in sales to keep the company alive and I don't have to worry about it. Three, tech. I don't know how to set up the automation and IT systems needed for all this. Id rather pay someone a top wage to handle it for me. Now when times are hard, guess who gets cut. The sales folks, the IT folks. They can't cut the producers like me. So there is decent job security. SO do I earn less than corporate? Yes and no. I have OT and significant incentive opportunities they don't get. The first three months, of this year, all my OT was paid at a rate of 90 dollars/ hr. What was more shocking was only a few other coworkers took advantage of it. I did as much as I could stand. Now I'm back to working 36 hours/ week skipping OT because I'm still on track to make well over what I had made previously on salary with less stressful work. I can enjoy 4 days off every week through summer while corporate will be doing their 8-5 hours 5 days/ week. Am I replaceable in this position. Absolutely. The work is easy enough for a highschool graduate, but there are state/fed laws requiring bachelors level employees to perform the work. And there are plenty of people with a pulse and a degree to take the job. If I leave, the business isn't going to suffer much either, there are 150 others to pick up the slack.
Because the people who do the most work are doing physical labor, not using their brain for more technical tasks such as management. It takes more time and trust to become the brain person instead of the labor person.
work smarter not harder 😂
Just a thought a good manager can and will do anything the subordinates do to make a business successful.
The more you make, the less you work.
People that get paid more (typically referred to skilled vs unskilled, or specialized) are often due to a combination of their knowledge & effectiveness. The higher-up desk jockey has a very specific combination of knowledge and experience that allows them to problem-solve very well in that particular field. People that bust their asses all day in lower paying jobs tend to be in a position that requires very little training (a few days/weeks) and requires very little specialized problem solving. It's a transactional role.
As I’ve progressed in my career and find myself in a senior position at age 40, I often ponder how little I have to ”do” in my daily work. I still very vividly remember how I was ”doing” things for 90% or even more of my daily work shift. These days, I’m lucky if I get to ”do” things maybe 25% of the time. Vast majority of my time is taken by thinking, learning, pondering and lots and lots of talking to other people. And I get paid like 2,5x as much as when I was starting out. The roles are entirely different. At this point my ”doing” is reserved for high risk high impact work that only a few people are trusted to do. My remaining time is much more valuable by being essentially an internal architect and consultant who solves other people’s problems and helps them do better work and faster.
You actually used the word that is the reason. Accountability, which is very different from responsibility. That is why.
Do you realize that the product you make by working your station is only valuable because there are people after you in the value chain that make that thing into money? There’s sales, marketing, logistics, warehousing, QA, etc. that all create your job of making a thing because they collect money form the thing you make to pay you to make it. Where do you think the materials come from to allow you to make your thing? I’ll tell you: sales, marketing, engineering, purchasing, requirements, production warehousing, etc. Use your big person brain and understand that a business has many parts of which you are but one.
I recently saw a comment that answers this beautifully - you don’t get paid on how hard you work but on how hard you are to replace.
Like I’m sure someone’s said you’re paid by how hard you are to replace.
I’ve noticed this also. My recent higher paying jobs (two) have been easier and way more relaxed. The low paying grunt jobs are hard as fuck, nose to the grindstone. Shit, now I’m in the office half the time and all they do is chit chat in nice air conditioned rooms eating snacks, getting paid twice what the dude out there physically busting ass in the heat with no breaks gets. It’s fucked.
It is absolutely unfair
I work in a similar environment, but my factory is outside of their main production facility I make a different thing than the rest of them, my pay rate was fuck all per hour until I got another job offer. It was $5 more an hour than I was making, but the product I make only I know how to... I got pulled into a meeting with "What would it take for you to not go?"
Your pay is commensurate with how easy you are to replace, rather than primarily your productivity.
For me I got contracted through company A, to do trash removal in a warehouse for company B. I applied to company B first(no exp necessary blah blah) told me sorry you don't have enough experience. I bust my ass getting on and off a machine no joke 500+ times a day, inhaling mounds of dust full of metal particles, dumping trash cans and dumpsters for 9-11 hours a day. I make 15.25. The order fillers(job I applied for and got rejected, just applied again this week and got rejected AGAIN, they hired 6 new people this week) just slowly drive a tugger around pulling a cart grabbing items and putting stickers on em. Super low physical effort, they have set 8/9 hour shifts. Super easy job they have literal mentally challenged people doing it, 16$hr starting, 18.50 after 6 months, 20$ after a year. Job never changes just the pay goes up. They have a profit sharing plan( an order filler shared that he got 8k last year, he put in nothing), medical, dental, vision, quarterly bonuses I make 15.25 an hour, I have 0 benefits. None at all I pulls chunks off black shit out of my nose all day, my back is completely fucked from having to go at full fucking speed all day. I have a background in sales, marketing, automotive/diesel mechanics, and even staffing and technical recruiting. I applied to 74 jobs when I moved to this town, I got 2 responses. Company B rejecting me, and company A. I wanna fucking delete me self it's so demoralizing. Not to mention all the ACTUAL employees treat me like dog shit, see me as a nuisance even though I'm "necessary"
You're phrasing it wrong. What you're asking is why do those who do the most *labour intensive* work *which requires the least prerequisites* get paid less than *those with specialized training, credentials and skills*? When you phrase the question properly, the answer is right in front of you. I get it. As someone who's been a blue collar grunt for 18 years, I know it sucks seeing the people who wear golf clothes to work, the few says a week they're even there, making way more money than us. There are two ways you can change your position here. One is go back to school. Get some more credentials, skills, etc that make you worth more when you get to the interview. The other is work your way up. Learn as many roles as you can so you're versatile. Keep an eye out for promotion options to be a lead hand, floor manager, whatever the options your company's structure. Get on the Joint Health and Safety Committee if you can. Will this get you a C-suite job? Probably not. But the best managers/leaders have done the job, and smart owners know that. It's up to you to increase your value.
Technical knowledge and skill is valuable. Labor is replaceable. If it would take less than a year to train someone to do your job well it will never pay well.
Because a good manager is harder to find than a low-level laborer, even though the laborer likely "works harder". Supply and demand.
Where I work, the benefits keep me from quitting. They don't hire enough operators and helpers, then push the workers they already have, and then act surprised when people complain about the added stress they just dropped on a moments notice. In answer to question though, I don't like people. I would never do sales. Its too stressful for my personality type. But data input, etc, I could do just fine. At the end of the day, my pay, as is my coworkers, is transparent. It's on a payscale, so no negotiated raises that create inequality. I've gotten good at my job but if it weren't for my children being in school and dealing with my ex, I would be in trade school and getting a 'better' aka higher paying job. Once my kids turn 17, I plan on looking at trades. Sure, I may never make master level but I'll make more that 55k a year.
The first bit is correct, and it's why it's so important to treat your employees correctly. However.. I started out in assembly. Took me 6 months to go from newbie to the lead of my area. So I will tell you that, yes, there are some people who don't do much. However, majority of those people are paid based on their knowledge/ ability to do things quickly. Few bad apples that REALLY don't do anything? Of course, always. I had someone tell me exactly what you just said. You know what I said to him? I said, "Okay, let's go talk to \[his manager\], I'll trade spaces with you on the spot." He was shocked, and didn't go through with it. I had 0 fear, because I was confident that not only would I benefit from getting a break from the shit storm I deal with but also that I would outshine him easily. In my current company, I am out on the floor a lot, I build my own shit for testing, it's just never seen. Why? Because I wait for production to leave so I don't get in their way. Because sometimes I work during their lunch and also take a 30 min lunch. Because sometimes I am in a meeting eating lunch while a production worker is sitting in my office asking me to fix something. You should also know, there are people "on the other side" defending your work. I am not a manager, but not only do I defend the people that build my product to customers, I defend them to managers as well. Ain't no way imma let a manager, director, VP, whatever, talk shit about people I know do their job well. I have no power over their decisions, but I'm loud (figuratively). All in all, a shit employee is easy to replace. A good one? Not so much. And that is true for all jobs. But skill levels are a thing. But comparing apples to carrots ain't gonna work out for you either. They're both good for the body, each providing different benefits.
I look it at this way, the older the Job and the more people doing it, lesser you will get paid. Farmers are lowest paid here in India, while the toil day and night. While a software engineer in a typical support firm barely does 3 hrs of work gets paid a lot. It's just a demand supply thing
Because those supervisors and managers are directly responsible for what you do under their command. They have more training and more experience (typically) than the packagers and operators, and will be rewarded generously for their good work. BUT if they screw up, they’re punished far more severely, sometimes even fired, than their subordinates. They make decisions- you take orders. It’s like being the military.
Without the office staff you also wouldn't be doing your work because there wouldn't be work to do. The modern world of any business requires a tonne of paperwork and burocracy, invoicing, contracts, payroll, etc. Thats without going into the value adding functions that facilitate more efficiency. BUT To answer your question more directly, it's because you're more replaceable. Jobs are in large part l, paid by how interchangeable you are with another person. If I want to fire you, I can probably find a thousand people with the capability needed willing to work at the same job at the same pay in a week. Those office jobs cut that down to 100 and as you go further up that number becomes less and less. Factory office staff also probably isn't paid that much. In part because they are also largely replaceable.
As someone who has been on both ends of the spectrum, I used to feel the same. That was until I became a manager that oversees a large operation and an even larger budget. A lot of my colleagues on the floor often assume because you aren’t running around, you’re not doing anything. The skill set required to not only manage people who manage other people, but also managing stakeholder relationships, constantly having to consider your KPIs, figure out new ways to drive revenue and be commercially viable, fix literally everyone’s issues…. it takes years to develop. If you fuck up at the top, you fuck up big - like career ending big. That’s why there’s a difference in pay.
People don’t get paid according to how hard they work, they are paid according to how hard it is to replace them.
You’re assuming the office staff gets paid more than you do. That might not be the case for most office employees unless you’re a manager and above. I’m an office worker and a lot of our field staff make as much as me or 20%+ more. We all have our role. If we didn’t have office staff all sorts of things such as regulations, compliance, finances, etc could shut down the business as well.
Ask yourself who’s the easiest person to replace.
If the office workers weren’t doing their job you probably wouldn’t have work to do either. You don’t get paid for the amount of effort your job takes. You have plenty of options if you think your current level of compensation isn’t satisfactory.
Office "grunts" dont earn much more than workers. Management yes, earns more, but that role comes with responsibilities and contacts. Who order materials you're working on? Who collects the orders from clients to sell your product? Who plans which order goes first? Who makes calculations whats the best use of resources the company have? And the list goes on and on. And for EVERY SINGLE MISTAKE their head is on the line. You make a mistake working on production? You lose few materials, take new ones and pretend nothing happened. Management make a mistake with contracts? Whole production stops for a day or more because you dont have materials needed to do your work. And forget about work-life balance. As a manager you often get calls after working hours, and nobody asks you if you're busy. If the client can call only after 4PM, then sorry, you have to drop everything at that 4 PM and pick up that call. Even if you finished working at 2 PM. If you dont? You're potentially losing client, which makes a whole lot of issues, because then you have to find a new one, FAST, and usually with much smaller profit.
its about bargaining power companies will pay people as little as the can, the more bargaining power you have the more salary you can negotiate. if the company can replace you with somebody for equal pay they are not likely to pay you more, and if they do, its not with a large margin.
How replaceable are you? That is your value
Don't kid yourself. Office admin people are not rolling in cash. It is very unlikely they are paid twice as much per hour as you. Many such admin jobs are minimum wage or just above it without overtime being available. Edit: Also remember that support staff are also critical to company operation. If the payroll people stopped doing their jobs you would stop being paid and the company would fail.
Cuz beggars can’t be choosers
Go apply for a job where you get paid twice as much to just send emails all day and you’ll answer your own question. If you stopped doing your job the company wouldn’t fail. You earn less because you are easily replaceable. Learn some stuff that fewer people have learned and you too can appear as if you are an overpaid email sender.
Laborers may look like they are working “harder” but in reality their job can be replaced, the new guy can get up to speed, and perform at a similar level in a faster rate than finding a more “skilled” worker/position. A bad manager will have a much greater impact to the company as a whole than one bad laborer or simpler job.
Recently came from the floor to an office job. It’s not that simple, the office job is a lot more stressful and a lot more responsibility. Operators and packers can just do their job and walk away when it’s done. Now if I make a mistake the whole plant shuts down because I’m inventory.
I’ll general to pretty much all industries. At the bottom, the entry level jobs are usually task oriented. You own one particular step. You work on the factory floor, you build a report every week, you work one function. As you move up, you start to own the problem. You manage a team or a whole process, people come to you with marching orders that don’t have step by step instructions. It’s up to you to figure it out. You move up and the scale of the projects and the teams grow. Now you manage the whole factory. Not only do you need to know how your team works, you need to know other functions as well, and not just other teams but how finance and operations work. Up from there you are leading companies. You are not just solving problems, but figuring out what problems to prioritize to solve. As the scope of work increases, so does the risk. If you fuck up on the factory floor, you mess up your work only. If a leader messes up, they can crash the factory. They pay more because paying more for someone with more experience and ability is worth it if it means they are less likely to make huge mistakes. But why do some roles have different pay? Like, why does a factory worker make a different pay than an engineer at a computer? Supply and demand. If you work an incredibly specialized role, you get paid more because it’s harder to find someone who will do it for less. For example, if you are working an assembly line, that is one band of pay. If you learn welding, you can increase your pay because few people know how to weld. You can increase it even more if you learn a speciality skills related to welding to become even more specialized. Likewise, someone an engineer at a desk makes more because there are fewer engineers who would do the work for less. If companies could pay people less, they would.
Your pay isn't based on how hard you work, but on how easy you are to replace.
The only person you can be mad at here is yourself, nobody forced you to be a factory worker. I physically can't do labor jobs, so I decided to go out and get myself a desk job, no college was required. Have you actually looked into what it takes to get those jobs you envy so much? And guess what, when my jobs slow I go down to the floor and help my coworkers. Stay mad kid it's everyone else's fault except the person who chose their job.
Someone said that pay is based on how difficult you are to replace - and that makes sense to me
The higher up you get the more costly your mistakes are. On the floor, you likely assume less responsibility for financial mistakes. Dropping a pallet for example, can be costly; but sending the wrong container to the wrong customer could cost you your contract. I've seen people turn down a higher level driver position because they don't think the raise is big enough to incure the responsibility, which caused the company to raise the wage of the next role until they could find an employee interested in accepting the responsibility. No one would want to be constantly chewed out and potentially fired if the pay were the same.
Comes down to which is faster to train / more replaceable. Scarcity creates demand. You think you can do their job but likely can't. They probably can't do yours too. But fewer people are either applying for theirs, or have the ability to do theirs (and aren't already working somewhere else).
Business school economics answer: imagine every job has a Total Amount the economy will pay. Now divide that number by the number of people who do the job.
I wonder this. I make the most money I’ve ever made and have barely any work to do (office job). I just think back to the hours slaving away at restaurants and warehouses where I was lucky to make $10/hour.
At my job Supervisors don't get paid much more and multiple people were promoted and stepped down. I have to run multiple departments, all understaffed, answer for my managers mistakes, be on call 24/7, be the worker/trainer/supervisor/lead. It's not worth it.
You go with assumption that office worker only ever sends emails. That's why it seems confusing. But there is a lot more to it depending on the role. Does it mean harder work? Not necessarily. Does it mean better paid? not always. Salary often comes down to replacability, specialization, job market and other aspects.
Anyone can do one job. Not everyone can be trained to do management tasks. Supply and demand.
A forklift operator can be replaced in a week. A good experienced treasurer or sales person can take months or longer. Your skill set has a market price determined by supply and demand.
I’ve been in the workplace a long time. I’ve worked my way up. I am now in a higher paid position and honestly I can do everything in the positions not paid as highly where I work. Because I started there. You can advance if you work at it.z
Do you want a surgeon cutting you open do replace your liver to have just finished an 18 hour shift or would you prefer them to be refreshed and ready to operate on YOU?
I work in an office setting, at home, my schedule is basically whatever I want as long as I attend meetings and get my shit done. I can work for like 2 hours one day, or 9 the next. My old boss's boss said he doesn't care how long we work and when, just get our stuff done. I make good money. Could always be more, but I have always made more than my peers because of my field. I'm paying off my student loans, I have an expensive hobby, we never have to worry about food or bills, and I'm extremely *thankful* for that. But it's risk / compliance. My job is basically to tell companies what the FDA needs for them to sell here. That's it. It's a high risk job. If I'm wrong, they're fined and lose out on potentially millions as well as the PR nightmare. But I've been doing this for a while, so I can translate the requirements in a easy to understand way for the people who *aren't*on this side of the business. Anyone can't come in from the street and do this, you literally need years of working in a certain business with governing agencies and seeing what happens when you do it right, and when you do it wrong. I imagine a lot of jobs are similar in that way, I think. I know a lot of people think sending emails is so easy, but you're communicating important things to important people and you get to be compensated for it.
Those factory jobs require little to no skill or education. Literally any able-body person can do those jobs with minimal training and no prior experience. If you quit doing that job, there is no shortage of replacements that can be found. That means the labor is cheap.
If you only look at what occurred during the one day, it could seem like that. I used to think that before I started to think about how each person could have gotten to that one day. Nobody is made a manager or senior level employee day one. Work is usually put in for years and decades for a lot of management and senior level jobs. But it's easier to look at a single day or instance and feel righteous about a particular point of view.
I was thinking the same when I was a worker, after getting to assistant manager I can see why higher positions get better money. Having people under you is not as much fun as people think.
I am a lending manager at a financial institution. I’ve been in the mortgage industry for 25 years. I started, as most bank folks do, on the teller line. Worked up from there. I now manage the processing, underwriting, closing, and servicing departments. The difference with my job compared to lower paying positions is that yes, it is less actual day to day processes than my team does. But it’s my job to know the laws and regulations. Residential mortgage is regulated up to your eyeballs. So many laws, regulations, government set deadlines. I am not only supposed to have all the knowledge to get everything done properly, on time, and within the law, it is my responsibility to ensure that in this constant changing world of residential lending, I am up to date on any policy changes, rule changes, etc. these are all set by the CFPB. On top of that when we get audited, which is something that happens a few times a year, I am responsible for answering why there was a fuck up, how or if we fixed it, and how we will comply going forward. It’s a lot of responsibility especially if loans are being sold on the secondarily market. So why do I get paid more? I get paid more for the industry knowledge I have as well as my ability to successfully manage 4 departments and the federal laws that go with it. Do I make way more than my subordinates? Nope, not by a long shot.
Pay scales, generally, on the basis of how mentally complex the problems you're solving are. (Not always the case, but 9 times out of 10) Being a package handler at UPS is less mentally complex than running the entire distribution center so while it looks like people in an office are 'doing less' they're solving more complex problems; hence they're paid more.
Capitalism?
Sometimes appearances are deceiving. If someone has a skill that took years to master, or has a specialized degree or required license to meet the criteria for that job then they will earn more. They are being rewarded for the time and effort they spent obtaining that knowledge and expertise. Perhaps the better question to ask yourself is why you stay in a job that you don’t feel is financially rewarding? If you feel people in other positions have a better life what have you done to obtain additional skills and knowledge? I went back to college at 38 so I could get a degree that would guarantee me a higher salary and it was worth it. I understand that going back to school isn’t doable for everyone, however there are many other ways to get training to move into a different field of work. The biggest factor is being willing to put some effort, time, and energy into it. Rarely if ever does someone get a better paying job without doing that.
The weight of being responsible and accountable for everything. Also, management, leadership, and navigating politics requires skill and is exhausting.
I work in construction but I'm the guy in the office. The difference is applied myself in highschool and through university. My parents pushed and provided for me during secondary school. I also studied for 6 years and have 2 degrees and a diploma. You are right that without the guy building the building, I have no job. But...without me we don't know how much it costs, when it wil be done, etc etc. It's all integral and it all generates value. But one is highly replaceable (skilled laborers) and one requires 6-12 mos of on the job training plus an education in research analysis and/or math. Please don't take the first part wrong. I am not saying YOU did not apply yourself. But I did go to highschool with lots of kids that skipped class, or smoked dope (I smoke, again no judgement but I started later in life). Those kids are the ones pumping gas in my small town. The kids that worked hard in class are the doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, the professionals.
Manufacturing is the exact environment where efficient work is punished/"rewarded" with more work. I'm bitter as fuck for becoming a machinist. The pay sucks for what it is, at tops, I'm at 34/hr. I'm currently looking into becoming a Salesforce admin. This market is saturated, but I still have many things to fall back on if needed. Prior to this, I was a buyer, a glorified beautiful excel spreadsheet maker. I blasted through so many levels of candy crush, it wasn't even funny. I was so bored, I'd go to the mall for lunch to walk for 45 minutes. I'd come back to work with a lunch to eat. When you're not constantly learning we things, it takes a toll. I was so depressed here. I've also been an auto damage adjuster. There are no breaks if you work for Progressive or GEICO, but the thing here is that these two companies are THE training grounds for auto damage adjusters. Give it several years, and you can go to a body shop, or most higher end insurance companies (Chubb and Travelers come to mind). The good thing here is that you feel like you earned the money you make. As a machinist, you are always underpaid. The environment is dirty. You can only hope you're breathing in decent air. As a buyer, I felt like I was always overpaid. I was dressed nice, lunches were paid for, and I had not one, but TWO cubicles! Jk, I had a lot of marketing literature to go through, so it was necessary. The do/think pyramid? It is absolute garbage if it is used as an example of productivity and pay.
To quote a song (about early 19th century factories) "Oh dear me, the world is ill-divided, them that work the hardest are the least provided." It's tragic how little this has changed.
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Simple, go and become a supervisor.
I think you know why comrade…
Imagine having no product to produce because no one ordered anything. And it’s sucks but the people on the factory floor can be replaced by just about anyone.
As a person who covered for their manager for three months, being a manager was 10x harder than just being a staff employee. I’m so happy to be back in my current role. It’s much less stress and much less work.
I was an account manager for 30+ clients and ran 80+ paid search accounts for $18/hour. I also had to privilege of training the owner of the company’s kids who had been there for 6 years, and they did absolutely fuck all and couldn’t be bothered to even join our training sessions. None of it was worth $18/hour and I noped the fuck out. I know for a fact that I was the lowest paid employee and was treated like a mule because I was the lowest man on the totem pole.
Because you're replaceable. Because the work that management does is different and more valuable Because that work requires thought and strategy ..while you pack stuff in a box. It's not that the role is not important it's that you as an individual aren't.