We work hard.

[Meili04]

I keep seeing this on threads about Middle income families having to make cutbacks. The hardest job I ever had was when I worked in a care home as a care assistant doing 12.5 hour shifts for minimum wage. I now do a different job I have more paperwork to do and responsibility but I earn lots more and it's less tiring work. Same with my OH he works from home and his work is a lot less hard then it was when he started out and gets more pay.

AIBU to think if you are earning more money sometimes it's down to luck/personality/ rare skills more so than simply working hard?

What are you calling luck though?

A middle class person might have to work extremely hard to get that 100k role whilst an upper middle class person might walk into the same salary via connections.

My friend was the first in her family to go to university - Cambridge - then joined a top law firm. At times, she was working 120h weeks. These firms operate on a frankly insane survival of the fittest model. She was definitely working BLOODY hard. But was also educated and intelligent.

There's literally a nationwide shortage of carers and they're still only offered NMW, so it's not about supply and demand, it's about certain jobs being looked down on by society and vastly underrated.

Not anyone can be a carer, etc, in fact I'd say more so than other jobs, not everyone has what it takes, which is why so many new starters leave after a few weeks (some go home for dinner first day and just never come back).

Literally the only thing that got me through my time as a carer was knowing I was only doing it for a few months. If I’d thought jt was a long term prospect I’d have left the first day and never gone back. Hard work indeed.

Realistically, people that brag that they have what they have because they’ve ‘worked hard’ are ignorant. They’ve made good choices and had good opportunities, but lots of people who are paid incredibly poorly work so so hard. And these are people like carers for the elderly and disabled, nursery teachers for children and so on. Not people doing some easy job that they just skip away from at 5pm with no stress on their minds. They’re overwhelmingly people who didn’t have the opportunity to go to uni and become a top lawyer/surgeon/engineer etc. And their contributions to society are incredibly necessary, and sadly totally undervalued.

I don't disagree for the most part.

But I'm also spectacularly wound up by a lot of exec level staff who lack basic office skills. For example, our CEO sent out an excel document. Half the writing was hidden because she didn't know how to adjust it, and half the trustees didn't know how to expand the cells to read the contents.

I know that not everyone has excel knowledge - that's fine. But all of these people work in roles where BASIC excel knowledge would be the norm.

Senior execs who have assistants because they would not have the time to do all their own admin - fine. I find that senior execs who are simply not able to do those things are also more generally clueless, but CONFIDENT with it.

(I've taken a part-time role to fit around training, and the way I get treated by the senior staff in my org, and seeing them confidently bluster their way through things I KNOW to be incorrect, is eye opening)

The hardest jobs I’ve ever done have been the ones that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve worked physically and mentally harder in some roles, but because I was motivated and invested, the impact has been far less than when I’ve just been grinding through the hours, not doing much, but waiting to go home.

Some of the good, well paid jobs I’ve had were down to the effort I had made to have the right skill set and experience. And some of them were just down to being in the right place at the right time. So whereas I’m not saying there isn’t a link between hard work, luck and money, it’s probably a lot more elastic than I’d have perhaps once thought.

It's not just working hard it's working smart and strategically. My dad probably works harder than I do day to day in his manual job vs my senior management role, he would hate to know what I earn and would probably think it wasn't deserved, however, I have spent a lot of time in education, volunteering, keeping on top of my CPD, going to conferences, networking, making 5 year plans, keeping ahead of the industry to recognise skill gaps, changing jobs regularly to not stagnate. My career is a living, breathing thing I develop, I don't just go to work every day. I've made sacrifices especially in terms of my family, so yes it does really sting when I've been doing this for 15 years but my disposable income will not reflect this to the degree it would have done prior to this mess. So I am bitter, not at anyone else, just generally! And I recognise it's not the same as not being able to eat or heat on a lower income.

(And firmly in the camp of recognising the amount of luck involved too, I couldn't do what I do without my health, my family's health, the leg up my steady childhood got me etc etc)

This is so true when it comes to the supply and demand thing, there's a shortage in hospitality - wages are rising, I moved out of care and back into hospitality because the wages, conditions and treatment are better, ultimately because people are willing to pay more for leisure experiences than they are for their elderly and vulnerable families to be cared for.
I don't work any harder, some days it's on par with my days in care, but I don't feel anything near the level of responsibility - for other people's lives, giving out medication that can kill someone if you get it wrong (with an hour's 'training' to 'qualify' you to give it out) being physically and verbally abused daily, dealing with bodily fluids smeared everywhere, never having enough people to deliver the care expected but then knowing you might end up on the wrong end of a safeguarding for not being able to do it. And I'm paid more for the same level (supervisory) - I might piss someone off by giving them no ice in a drink they wanted ice in, but I'm highly unlikely to kill them, or for it to have a long lasting, life changing effect (although with some customers you do wonder 🤣)

And let's be honest, hospitality is not exactly a high bar when it comes to wages and job benefits is it?! Yet it's markedly better than one of the most essential services to society.

It's not supply and demand, it should be, but if it were we'd be seeing care assistants earning double or treble what they are now.

What I think is really interesting is in all this mess since Covid I've not once heard of supermarkets having shortages of staff (correct me if I'm wrong), except logistics which is a separate thing, and my understanding is supermarket staff are paid relatively well, not minimum wage. Staff discount. Presumably flexible shifts. I suspect that is not a coincidence, and yet the aviation industry couldn't understand why they were in such chaos over summer, it really is simple, pay staff well and you won't struggle to find people, good people.

YANBU. My own experience is that as I've progressed to increasingly 'better' jobs, higher paid, more senior, the less hard I've had to work.
I'm very aware that the staff I manage, despite my best efforts to make their work life the best i can, work harder than I do, with less autonomy, variation and flexibility and obviously for less money; by the sheer nature of the jobs we do.
There comes a point when you're paid more for what you know and the responsibility you carry than for what you actually do day to day, leading to very limited correlation between hard work and income.

There's also something to be said for personal dispositions, which are born not made.

Take sales people. They have a certain energy and attitude to them - almost wolfish. They always WANT something. They can learn techniques, but the attitude is just fundamental to who they are, even if they're crap at it.

Sure, we should always reward people sufficiently, but I think any sort of parity is a pipe dream. People are too different for that.

I, by the way, am middle class, educated, and highly intelligent. People expected huge things from me.

They didn't pay attention to the fact that I'm anti establishment, anti institutional, and a total hippy. All of which don't lend themselves to mega bucks success in most ways.

This on one shift back in the day it's been me and one other carer for 30 people. I had to get 15 people washed , somehow toilet them , change and feed them some with dysphagia. It was the hardest most stressful shift as I had people crying to be changed while I was changing someone else. I now work in management HCP it's more responsibility but more money I've never felt as overloaded and I did for minimum wage.

The hardest job I ever had was when I worked in a care home as a care assistant doing 12.5 hour shifts for minimum wage
I did this work for a few years too. It was tiring but nothing like mentally and psychology tiring as the jobs I later had that involved having to make pressurising decisions and face the consequences of making wrong ones.

A bit like cooking Vs deciding on the menu each day making sure it is within the home budget but also pleasing the who family so people don't complain, insuring it's not boring, introducing variety but so much that everyone think it's too odd, work out which item is cheaper at which store, what time is best to go to avoid traffic, making sure that no item has been missed out from the list ect...

Preparing the food just following the recipe is tiring but nothing as much as the whole organising of it.

A tiny tiny bit over NMW. Online they’ll advertise more but it will be with the T&C that you’ll get £2 an hour extra on bank holidays or after 1am or similar. Shifts you’ll rarely get. But realistically it’s usually NMW or just over. And that’s for really stupid shifts most of the time too, not particularly flexible.

Still better than caring or childcare work though, because it’s easier for the money.

It depends on the job. You'll always get people who are lucky, and who just know the right people .. but then there are others who work very hard, study for years, and work their way up the ranks - and that's definitely down to hard work rather than luck.

If you decide to work in industries that typically pay minimum wage, you know there's no scope to rise above that. You need to look at potential career progression when you decide the career you want to be in.

Then change career so you earn more. Nobody forces anyone to do the same job in the UK.

"If you choose to work in lower paid industry "

Your choice is determined by what your parents know about, what your school makes you aware of , and your moral compass

People don't go into nursing rather than banking ) example £ because they had a complete free choice - they go because they thought that it's very useful and because from a small child they have been aware of how nursing is a job that looks fun and should pay ok

Not everyone is motivated by money alone - most just want enough to get by - a home , food , sone socialising and have a few savings

Not everyone wants the bankers life - especially as it's portrayed in films and tv which is likely to be the basis on which a child makes choices

I know someone like this. She had pretty poorly paid jobs but then her dh set up a very lucrative business which she now works for. She makes out she had lowly origins but she went to private school. Thinks if she can make so much money through hard work anyone can. Doesn't realise she's been lucky and could have ended up like the struggling people/single mums she talks disparagingly about.

It's also about level of risk. In the example of cooking a meal. The only risk really is to poison the family, under cook chicken, burn it all, or burn oneself. All these are unlikely with good training.

The manager takes a risk by working out menu that are not healthy, that cost too much putting the family in debt, use ingredients not available, not bringing them in time to be cooked, injuring themselves going to get them, etc.... AND being blamed for anything that the cook does wrong.

And the cleaner gets sacked if the manager messes up

And the cleaner gets sacked if the manager messes up
How?

I couldn't agree more.

Because that's what happens seniors duck up and the people at the bottom suffer

At worst the manager gets a big payout but usually it's just the lower levels that take the hit

I am talking legally. A manager can be sent to court, deemed responsible (lack of training, supervision etc...), even sent to jail for a staff member making a huge mistake.

A cleaner is not going to end up in court because their boss didn't ensure the building was secure.

I don't know who said it but I suspect the statement "the hardest working person on Earth likely lives in poverty" is unfortunately very true.

I work hard but I also earn enough money that if I quit my job and take 3 months finding another I would be financially okay, I also have the experience in my current profession that finding another well paid job is much easier.

I have been poor before and lived going into my emergency overdraft every month, counting every penny and eaten 10p crisps and a 19p roll for lunch. I don't think people realise the toll and stress being poor adds onto also working very hard and having to tolerate toxic bosses because you can't just quit. It's not just the hard and sometimes soul destroying work, it's the lack of options when you're at the bottom. I have been very lucky in my breaks and pay my taxes willingly.

The vast majority of high paid managers are not in that position

Why do you think there is all that "compulsory training ?" For example - it covers their arses -