Can you believe that the wage gap, and wage inequality because of gender or skin color, still exists? Yes, after many decades of hearing about this, men apparently still make more than women. Politicians of the past have said they are tackling this inequality, but change still has not been made. The big problem is how. How do you really force a business or institution to actually be honest and decent and pay people what they’re worth rather than basing pay on gender or skin color? Now, I wrote a blog post about this a while ago when my daughter brought to my attention the wage inequality among women alone, where an Asian woman makes more than a white woman, who makes more than a black woman, who makes more than a Mexican woman.
In Above the Law, the chief’s wife, Gail, gives Detective Friessen a wakeup call, sitting him down to tell him he makes more money than his co-worker Deputy Carmen, who is both female and not white. Mark is shocked because the inequality wasn’t even on his radar. The problem is that if it doesn’t affect you and you don’t see it, how can you even know it’s a problem? I’ve said to my kids, and I’m sure I sound like a broken record, that it really is up to their generation to fix all the screwups and the inequality, all the problems my generation and the ones before us have created but seem unable to fix.
One of the glaring issues right now, especially with the vast number of low-paying jobs available, is that pay inequality is even more pronounced than ever. Look at your area, where you live. How many jobs are available? Right now, here, there are so many jobs. I glance at the pages and pages of help-wanted ads and see that employers are in desperate need of workers. Okay, great, but while employers need workers, those workers need to be able to live somewhere, to have a roof over their head instead of a tent. So until someone is actually willing to bite the bullet and fix the housing crisis, those pages and pages of positions are not going to be filled.
Of that vast list of jobs, many are in the hospitality and service sector, which was hit hardest during the pandemic. These workers were the first to lose their jobs. But right now, apparently they’re not too interested in returning to the same low-paying jobs in an industry that tossed them aside so easily. I can’t blame them in the least, because one thing about this pandemic is that it has really shone a spotlight on pay inequality, racial injustice, and a shitload of other problems that have never been fixed.
Back to the jobs being offered. What many of these employers are doing is offering a higher rate of pay to new employees than to their current employees, who stayed on and worked through the pandemic. When I first saw this, I wondered whether employers actually believe their employees are so stupid that they won’t look at that same help-wanted section and realize that the starting wage for someone new is more than what they’re making.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve told my kids that they owe no loyalty to underhanded employers who would pay them less and keep paying them less than someone new. As an employer, if you bring in someone new and pay him or her more money than your existing loyal employees who have been with you through the hard times, you’ll have only yourself to blame when those employees walk out the door.
Is this sort of pay inequality illegal? No, it’s not. But it does make the employer a shithead, and word will get out until the business becomes a revolving door of instability, having to constantly train new workers who are looking for something better somewhere else because they know their employer has no loyalty to them. So what do you get? A business that will continue to struggle.
One thing about businesses in the service industry is that when employees are treated well and are happy, not being screwed over, that reflects in the job they do, in their customer service. Great customer service is reflective of a workplace that knows how to look after its employees.
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Broken Promises
What do you do when a woman shows up on your doorstep, suddenly wanting her daughter back?
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