30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers: What Your People May Be Thinking and What You Can Do About It

Chapter 20. I’m not paid fairly

Sixty-one percent of employees are dissatisfied with their pay.

During my senior year of high school I held a part-time job loading 50-pound sacks of fertilizer and garden supplies onto large trucks. We were paid by the hour, until the job was completed. There were three of us: my buddy, an elderly General Motors assembly worker, and me. I was anxious to impress, and worked hard and quickly my first evening. The second night, the GM worker cornered me and said sternly, “We work SLOWLY here, GET IT?” He didn’t say that we did this to make more money, but that was obvious.

This behavior is not limited to physical laborers. A colleague of mine works in a management-consulting firm. Most of his clients are government ...