Business managers are complaining about how people won’t work like they used to in the good old days. As the linked Los Angeles times article points out, this is a complaint as old as the Republic. The problem isn’t the workers, it is the wages.

I once worked at a call center. I supervised workers who made hotel reservations and they, on a busy day, may receive 20 or more calls in an hour. Having performed the job as an employee, I can assure you it was boring job full of mindless tasks. It did pay the bills. Barely. Call center operators are taking calls pretty much the whole time they are on the clock. This is the way companies want it. They want just enough operators to make sure that they only lose a small percentage of incoming calls. That’s right, they would rather their employees are always working than all of their customers get served.

The call center’s biggest problem was employee turnover. Because the pay was low and there was rarely any employee commitment to do anything other than an all right job, and, if they lost their jobs that could easily replace this job with one making the same wage, people quit or lost their job on a fairly regular basis. This meant that management generally was in a hiring and training mode most of the time.

Sometimes, the Uppity Ups would wonder why we couldn’t slow employee turnover. I’m sure my bosses, who were all a pretty smart lot and knew the answer to the problem, would suggests more money for labor. It was a dance that everyone knew had to be danced but that never really changed anything. Because more money for lower level employees is always off the table. The Uppity Ups received the truth and then acted as if it was never proposed. More money for lower level employees is a budget buster. Strangely, more money for higher level employees is not.

The Uppity Ups that counter the idea that more money will make lower level employees happier in their job. They have read some article in a business management magazine which site scientific studies that say people don’t just work for money. Money isn’t even one of the top reason that people work. Try to work on these other non-money reasons to bring down worker turnover because these studies prove that more money isn’t the answer. Employees want recognition, they want challenges, they want better jobs, and then they want money. So we would go off and see how we could improve those other areas.

We found that we were just as restricted in improving employees work life in those other areas as we were in more money. We needed employees on the phones not at the better jobs. This being the fact. We had significantly more entry level jobs than upper level jobs. Once anyone managed to get one of the upper level jobs, they stayed forever. So these better jobs rarely became available and just as a side note that me be obvious but I feel compelled to mention, a better job meant more money. The reason many people go for better jobs is they get more money. Regardless, this option was off the table as well.

Challenges. The job was answering the phone and booking hotel reservations. Almost every call was exactly the same. Different cities, different dates, maybe but there were no challenges except getting the customer off the line quickly and making no mistakes. The company already had a negative incentive on those two tasks — if you failed to meet standards after a three month period, you were fired. There was no challenge we could add to the job and there was no incentive in doing either task much better than you were. There, also, was an amazing disincentive to getting better at either task. If you worked faster, you made more mistakes. Which could put you on warning. If you made less mistakes, you talked too long. This too would put you on warning. Once you found the right balance, you maintained it. All management was left with was recognition and there are only so many pats on the backs a person can take before it looses its effectiveness.

In reality, all we could do was give them recognition. Everything else was off the table. Recognizing good work without spending a dime. More money isn’t the answer says the uppity ups. But it is and they know it is because this, of course, is their defense of the income imbalance between the top wage earners and the bottom. You have to pay top management top salaries in order to interest them and keep them in the job. Why doesn’t that same philosophy work for lower wage workers?

But I never stopped believing that if low level employees got more money for their jobs and, because they received more money, these jobs might be something they value and would want to keep, that there would be less employee turnover. The Uppity Ups refuse to believe this. They just can’t believe that people don’t value the crap wages they are paid. Herein lies the problem.