[ryandrake]

Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.

[parpfish]

there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in work if you're being forced to follow a script or the demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork.

i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.

[toomuchtodo]

It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost. We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the complaining as performance art when we know the solution but choose not to implement it. If we want people to care, we have to pay them enough to care.

[edc117]

Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.