I have posted several times on this blog about employees not wanting to work. They may be lazy, but the way some employers have treated the help in the past haven’t encouraged a work ethic.
My first job in Kansas was loading cabinets at a cabinet company in Neodesha, about 30 miles from my house. The temp agency was paying $9.35 an hour, the same starting wage as the shipping employees. This was a dollar an hour more than the starting wage of the rest of the employees. The building was not air conditioned and barely heated. Shipping department people worked long hours so with the overtime I got by.
Just before the plant moved to Coffeyville, I got hired by the company with no pay raise. When the plant moved to Coffeyville, the employees got a small gas allowance raise which varied between ten and fifty cents an hour depending on how much farther they had to drive. Meanwhile they raised the starting pay for new hires by a dollar because they couldn’t even get people to apply. A third of the employees made less than people coming in off the street. The company said the current employees would get a raise at the annual wage review four months later. Some employees left. It’s a wonder all of them didn’t.
The rest did get a raise that put them just above the new hires, but the damage to morale was done. Word got out in town that this was about the last place you wanted to work and the plant shut down at the end of the year.
Footyfried 