First of all, you and all employees are not “taking” anything. You’re earning it. And most people are working very hard after decades of employers “doing more with less”. This is true of both white collar and blue collar work. Nobody who works hard should just be “getting by”, often one crisis away from financial disaster.
Meanwhile, the top 1% gets richer and richer off the backs of their employees who are often not getting paid what they need and deserve. The income gap between those top executives and owners and their employees just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And it has not always been this big. Where does it stop? When do we stop it?
You say you’ve never earned more than $20/hr (with a college degree!). With all due respect to you, Vicky, that is just wrong. That is not okay. Nobody can buy and maintain a house, support a family, pay for their kids’ educations, pay medical bills, take vacations, etc on $20/hr. And, have you seen the estimates of what they say we should all be saving for retirement?
The only way any of this gets better is when people fight to make it better. It’s the rare employer who really cares about their employees. People are Human Resources to them — replaceable when they break us (burn us out). They care about increasing their profits. They aren’t going to give us anything that we don’t ask for. Union workers fighting for a fair contract are not the greedy ones here. Companies that are making billions annually and saying they can’t afford to pay their employees more, can’t afford better health insurance for their employees, etc are lying. They can afford to pay the people who do the work for them more. They just don’t want to.
If I sound angry, it’s because I am. All of this makes me angry. Because it is just so incredibly unfair.
