my dad worked in HR for a big company before he retired. they offered summer internships for the children of employees, which I did for a few years during college. the pay wasn’t high, but you still did basically the same tasks as a full-time employee in your department
and it was WILD
I’d finish a task in a day, only to be told that was my task for the week. my boss was blown away and raved about my efficiency. which was very nice but like…dude. you gave me about 6 hours worth of work, and that’s at a leisurely pace with an hour-long lunch break. why are you so impressed?
eventually I started messing around on my phone for hours to drag the tasks out longer, because I felt bad when my boss had to scramble to find things for me to do. I got like ten fanfic chapters written per month that way
meanwhile, at my last retail job, I got in trouble for talking to vendors at the adjoining stalls during slow periods
[ID: Tweet by Josh Fruhlinger @jfruh that reads as follows “An underdiscussed aspect of modern capitalism is that most low-wage jobs tightly regulate what you’re doing at all times while you’re on the clock and most high-wage jobs consist of hours of unstructured time in front of the computer during which you can do whatever.” End ID]
It’s A THING for people that have worked in minimum wage jobs or the service industry for more than a few years to lose their shit when they enter the proper “corporate” world and see just how much “easier” things are by and large. That they’d been told for years that the minimum wage job they were doing was the easy/stress-free job, compared to the big scary corporate gig. When instead at the corporate offices we’re spending two hours out of the day trying to decide where we want to go for lunch and then spending two hours at lunch, because we make our own hours. At least back when we actually went into the office.
Don’t get me wrong, I will randomly have a couple of weeks/months where I’m working 17 hour days back to back, but you know what’s not happening on those days? I don’t have a manager yelling at me for taking longer than a 15 minute break, I don’t have to clock in during that time because A) I’m salary, and B) even if I was hourly my time would be tracked at the end of the week as billable hours rather than some by the minute system that a manager could look at with a microscope to find out if I was “goofing off”.
The other truly irritating part is, the deal is supposed to be, low wage means low responsibility and low stress. High responsibility means high wage and probably high stress, though that part isn’t an inherent part of what the inherent trade-off is supposed to be.
