S
Shaant
Guest
A raw look at why the hardest workers barely survive while executives cash in big.
Photo by Tushar Gidwani on Unsplash
Iβve always thought that a street sweeper hunched over his broom early in the morning represented a form of quiet dignity. His work truly keeps the city alive, yet no one thinks to thank him, and even in a full month he made a fraction of what some consultants charge for one three-hour meeting.
This juxtaposition has haunted me for years.
When I first started out in my career, I believed that money careened after effort. I was raised watching men and women sweat in the sun to pull twelve-hour shifts while still going home worried about rent, while people were getting ten times as much in glorious glass offices above for what seemed to be endless ruminating.
They come in and sit on Zoom calls all day, move numbers on an Excel sheet from one side of the cell to the other, and drive home in their sedans every day at five oβclock.
How can you get someone who is literally bearing the weight of society not valued at all?
The first time I went to one of those corporate meetings, I was expecting some grand secret to be revealed.
However, much of the meeting was spent aligning on jargon, arguing about slides or waiting for someone senior to give a nod.
By lunch time, I was left questioning whether or not we had created anything at all.
The janitor who was emptying the rubbish bins that day had achieved something visibly useful, while I had spent most of my time faking it.
It was actually the day I felt I was starting a long battle within myself.
The people at the top donβt always do the most, they carry the liability
A doctor told me once that he was not paid for the hours he spent in surgery, but for the years of liability he took on. If something went wrong, it was not going to be the nurse who was going to get sued, it would be him.
The nurse could be fired, but his name was going to appear on the malpractice lawsuit.
That conversation helped me to understand the reason why money attaches to certain roles. Money is not always about output but rather who takes on the failure if it collapses.
In finance, I saw the same thing. My boss explained to me that I was not valued because of the number of hours or amount of effort I put in. He valued what I was able to save or earn.
He would say, βShow me the return on your salary.β If I were to switch one insurance plan and saved the firm sixty thousand dollars, that was important. If I established a payment in a way that freed cash flow, that was important too.
Nobody cared about how many hours I worked, but the cash I protected or generated.
Nonetheless, the rationale broke down when faced with reality.
I remembered the nursing aides I saw in the US, they were given tremendous accountability and entirely taken for granted.
They were flexibly managing to care for patients through long nights, cleaning up after others, and emotionally caring for the sick. They were interchangeable as caregivers in everyoneβs eyes, and their compensation reflected that.
Hospital administrators were sitting in air-conditioned offices making decisions from graphs and data, then going home after work with hundred-thousand dollar bonuses.
The same hierarchy played out in every industry I experienced.
Sometimes the work looks invisible, but that doesnβt make it fair
Once, a contractor friend told me, βWith one email I can change a project from profit to a substantial loss.β
That leverage is why for some jobs that may seem quiet from the outside are compensated very well. The engineer with his feet up on his desk thinking about a code problem might look lazy, but he could make a decision that costs the firm millions.
Knowing this as an advisor to large systems, I appreciated this more once I was having to work on large systems myself. A small code change or process change that seemed small on printed paper had ripple effects for thousands of transactions.
For example, if a cleaner misses a mop stroke it may cost twenty rupees for the shop, but if an analyst misses a decimal point it can cost millions.
That consequence in different ways has the most significant contribution to pay rather than the amount of sweat put in.
Yet, even with that clarity, I could not shake the truth of unfairness.
A friend of mine who was a bar manager once told me that if any of his staff ever served underage, then he would be the one fined $10,000 and barred from carrying on in that position again.
From that position, he made an adjustment wage of fifty cents more than the bartenders on the floor.
Who borne the liability never added up correctly.
For the little guys, the liability never translated into salary. For the executive, maybe it meant a golden parachute.
They failed and walked away with stock and bonuses amounting in millions and the people below them were out of work.
The philosophical differences went further in hardening my position that this system is fundamentally not only a system of risk but a system of power.
In this situation, who negotiates the contract, who is closest to money and who can walk away clean mattered much more than how much use you made to society.
The truth I carry now is that money follows power, not usefulness
I once thought the economy was broken.
However, maybe itβs working as intended.
Wages donβt follow usefulness, rather they follow profit and scarcity. If youβre good at your work and hard to replace, and youβre close to where the money flows, youβll get compensated. If you work for your boss and your work is obvious and abundant, you wonβt be compensated.
I have done minimum wage work and now I sit in a career that pays far better. I say itβs strange because in my past, the hardest work, the one that made my shirt soaked with sweat, had the least pay.
Now the easy and most specialized work Iβm doing pays the most.
The economy rewards scarcity and not effort.
Some say itβs greed, some say itβs efficiency. I just say itβs truth.
Still, every time I walk past a construction site where men gather to eat lunch in the sun in steel tiffins, I feel the imbalance in my chest. Their labor builds the world we stand in and my labor is shifting numbers on a mobile phone screen.
The heart canβt reconcile that I earn more now, even if the market can justify it.
Looking at this more broadly, there is a larger cultural narrative at play. Cultures get to choose what they value.
We have chosen profit over care, liability over effort, and scarcity over abundance.
The nurse, the teacher, the cleaner, the driver, they are the only glue that holds the world together.
And since they are replaceable, we treat them as disposable.
Until we reach a point where we run out of them and then the world starts to feel flimsy.
What I know now
As I get older, the more I am persuaded that utility and payment will never sync.
The market pays for profit and leverage, not dignity or effort.
Still, I do not take that at face value. This contradiction influences how I present myself.
I am not going to change systems, but I refuse to wash my hands of people who create those systems. I have respect for them, I tip well, and I acknowledge their labour.
Because I know that money does not determine value.
It is a simple and weighty truth. Money follows power, not use.
Why Society Pays Millions for Useless Jobs While Life-Saving Work Gets Pennies was originally published in Ride the Wave on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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