>Or the ever popular "I don't get paid enough for this!" The danger of criticising this behaviour is that it is putting the onus on the employee to earn their

>Or the ever popular "I don't get paid enough for this!" The danger of criticising this behaviour is that it is putting the onus on the employee to earn their money rather than the employer to pay their employees. Doing so is actually anti-employee, and given that most of us are employees - self-destructive. While I fully agree people should have some self agency to earn their wage, it is naive to think companies don't hold most the power in the employee-employer dynamic wrt salaries. When they can't force competition amongst applicants to drive down salaries, they simply move their operations to foreign countries to use cheaper migrant work. The migrants are happy to work hard because they're seeing an effective pay-rise so it's a win for them. It's also a win for the employer as they're paying less for work. So the loser here is the domestic worker. On a personal level, how would you feel if I told you to work harder at a pay cut? In most professions, this has happened - wage inflation has not kept up with the economy in both the US and UK so people have seen their effective quality of life eroded over the past 20-30 years. Governments exist to protect their citizens from precisely this kind of exploitation by business. But protectionism and regulation have become dirty words nowadays...