Unfair Salary Quotes

It’s unfair to see managers buying brand new cars for themselves when the salaries of their workers still remain unpaid! Good leaders are not selfish thinkers!

Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living. Salary, contract payments, some benefits, a few perks are what I call “baseline rewards.” If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.

Ecclesiastes This is a book of the Old Testament. I don't believe I've ever read this section of the Bible - I know my Genesis pretty well and my Ten Commandments (I like lists), but I'm hazy on a lot of the other parts. Here, the Britannica provides a handy Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes: [the author's] observations on life convinced him that 'the race is not swift, nor the battle strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all' (9:11). Man's fate, the author maintains, does not depend on righteous or wicked conduct but is an inscrutable mystery that remains hidden in God (9:1). All attempts to penetrate this mystery and thereby gain the wisdom necessary to secure one's fate are 'vanity' or futile. In the face of such uncertainty, the author's counsel is to enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy. This is great. I've accumulated hundreds of facts in the last seven thousand pages, but i've been craving profundity and perspective. Yes, there was that Dyer poem, but that was just cynical. This is the real thing: the deepest paragraph I've read so far in the encyclopedia. Instant wisdom. It couldn't be more true: the race does not go to the swift. How else to explain the mouth-breathing cretins I knew in high school who now have multimillion-dollar salaries? How else to explain my brilliant friends who are stuck selling wheatgrass juice at health food stores? How else to explain Vin Diesel's show business career? Yes, life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair. But Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to that fact. There's nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small things - like, for me, Julie's laugh, some nice onion dip, the insanely comfortable beat-up leather chair in our living room. I keep thinking about Ecclesiastes in the days that follow. What if this is the best the encyclopedia has to offer? What if I found the meaning of life on page 347 of the E volume? The Britannica is not a traditional book, so there's no reason why the big revelation should be at the end.

unfairness can take many forms. It can take the form of the inheritance of property—bonds and stocks, houses, factories; it can also take the form of the inheritance of talent—musical ability, strength, mathematical genius. The inheritance of property can be interfered with more readily than the inheritance of talent. But from an ethical point of view, is there any difference between the two? Yet many people resent the inheritance of property but not the inheritance of talent. Look at the same issue from the point of view of the parent. If you want to assure your child a higher income in life, you can do so in various ways. You can buy him (or her) an education that will equip him to pursue an occupation yielding a high income; or you can set him up in a business that will yield a higher income than he could earn as a salaried employee; or you can leave him property, the income from which will enable him to live better. Is there any ethical difference among these three ways of using your property? Or again, if the state leaves you any money to spend over and above taxes, should the state permit you to spend it on riotous living but not to leave it to your children?

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

You think I'm a loser!" Dagou yells. "Am I a loser for keeping us alive when all the decent places are moving to the strip? I keep your business going. You pay me almost nothing. My salary is a joke. I want an equal share of the profits." "Big man," sneers Leo. Ming knows Dagou will turn to Winnie a second before he does it. He always runs to their mother. "He grown up now," Winnie says. "Let him have his share." "You stay out of this! You gave up the business when you left it for this menstruation hut!" The table erupts. "Lay off it." "Don't talk to her like that!" "This is a Spiritual House." Leo pushes back his chair. Standing, he has the look of a beast on its hind legs: hairy, primitive, his long arms hanging almost to his knees. It isn't just the dark, unshaven hair sprouting in patches on his cheeks. There is something hungry yet remote in his close-set eyes. Everyone can see it. Some of them shrink back and turn away. Ming knows this eerie quality well. It has been there in his father for as long as he can remember. Long ago, he learned to escape its worst, to allow other members of the family to confront it. Now he climbs up into a place of refuge in his mind. A kind of hunting blind, where he can watch and wait. From above, Ming watches his brother. Dagou has the blank expression of someone who is only just becoming aware of what he's done. "'Don't talk to her like that,'" their father jeers. "Mama's boy! And you..." He grins wickedly at Winnie. Despite her vow of tranquility, she appears ready to bolt from her chair. The nuns seated on either side hold on to her arms. "You think he's still your diaper-filling lamb. You haven no idea what a dog he is. Ask him why he needs money now. Ask him. Ask him." Dagou looks around the table. "It's true I've fallen in love," he announces. "My whole life is changing." He pauses importantly. People stare at their plates. "Christ," says their father. "All this fuss over a decent fuck." The nuns gasp. Now Dagou's chair creaks, and he also rises to his feet. He is enormous and he swells with rage. His shoulders tense. He points at his father and his finger is shaking. It could be that he has decided, once and for all, to take down Big Chao. As the Sons of Liberty rose against King George. As the sons turned on Chronos, as he himself turned upon Uranus. So it will be in the family Chao.

You know, I always thought it seemed so unfair,” he began, “how movie stars and top athletes pulled down those huge salaries. Or how CEOs and corporate founders could marshal such gigantic earnings. No offense,” he added hastily. She graciously nodded and gestured for him to go on. “But people who were doing such great work, such noble work—like schoolteachers—never got paid what they’re worth. It always seemed arbitrary. But what you’re saying is, it’s not just a question of their value. It’s a question of impact.” Nicole and Pindar exchanged brief exultant glances, delighted at how quickly Joe had grasped this Law. “Exactly,” exclaimed Nicole. “And there are two amazing things about this. First, it means that you get to determine your level of compensation—it’s under your control. If you want more success, find a way to serve more people. It’s that simple.” Joe thought that over for a moment, then nodded. “And the other amazing thing?” “It also means there are no limitations on what you can earn, because you can always find more people to serve.

How much did you make last year?” he asked me. “Why?” I responded. He quickly told me that he would pay my yearly salary to settle our personal case. Without even considering the idea, I said, "That's not fair." Rather than disagree, he retorted, “Well, what does fairness mean to you?” I thought about it for a few seconds and said, “You know it when you see it. I can't give you a universal definition, but at the very least, it means that you take into consideration all factors and not just one.” He surprised me again by inquiring, “tell me all of the factors I should be considering.” From that moment forward, he would incorporate the concept of fairness into every substantive discussion that we would ever have. Not because he believed in it, but because he knew I did. Once he grasped the notion that my entire way of dealing with an adversary was in terms of fairness, he began to speak my language. Whether he was conveying an offer, a counteroffer, or just a general principle of life, he would couch his position in terms of what was fair or unfair.

Franklin made a mistake, however. As the owner of the business, he assigned his nephew number two on the time clock, right under him, which was taken by the other workers as tiresome evidence of the unfairness of nepotism. Kurt was embarrassed.120 Many of the men employed by Vonnegut Hardware were making the same salary he was—fourteen dollars a week. It was his first real-life lesson in social and economic disparity, illustrating what he had read in a book recently given to him by Uncle Alex: Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. He reveled in its attacks on conspicuous consumption, “since it made low comedy of the empty graces and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially my mother, meant to regain some day.”121 With the excitement of a youngster who has at last caught his parents red-handed, he realized he was being raised to become bourgeois. *