If you don't like the pay, do something to better yourself and give yourself better career prospects.
This discussion was in relation to incentivising overtime, not the basic pay. I save half of what I earn (ready for a house when prices bottom out in a few years' time), can walk to work in two minutes, and aim for a work/life balance heavily weighted to the life side; hence sticking with a job which only pays about £18k a year for living on New Zealand time. (I peaked at £26k on 7-day weeks, taking me briefly over the 23k median).
I never said it was a bad overall deal (especially for those with families, when the 10% discount becomes a much bigger incentive), just that in low paid work where you have little or no job satisfaction (it's like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill every night) you need to sweeten the overtime pill to make it attractive. You can't rely on the need for money to drag people in, especially since working tax credits now mean a lot of the people I work with do pretty well on part time work.
The government's subsidised 'get people back to work' concept has somewhat backfired in that respect. I even know one bloke who, since having another child, realised (so he says, anyway, I'm no expert on working/child tax credits) he could drop a night and be better off. He did it though, so I assume he was right.
Anyway, that's a separate topic. In any business you generally rely on the flexibility of about 10% of your workforce to cover problems and go beyond the call of duty when necessary. All I'm saying is that in my experience that 10% has been pretty much de-incentivised down towards close to 0% at our place by a combination of factors. Even a small premium for going over 38 hours was/would be a small token of the company's appreciation. Just giving you another day's pay says the company thinks there's no difference between working a five day week and a six day week.
While recession and inflation may eventually see a return to the days when a six day week was perfectly normal, I do think at this stage it's not asking too much for a small incentive. Still, as I said before, I'm personally grateful for the change because it removes all temptation to go in and push that stone up the hill so that home shopping can come along and start shoving it down again before you've even finished your shift.
Andrew McP
PS Retail management is, I accept, not like running a nuclear power station. However you're dealing with large numbers of relatively poorly motivated staff, and a never-ending heap of work to do (thanks to 24/7 culture). So I can assure you that it is very far from being an easy job. I've been in the business about 18 years now (I never planned it, but life can be strange!) and I've had 21 different managers. At least 9 of those, I know for certain, left the company. Retail chews them up and spits them out. At least another five of those most definitely *should* have left the company if there was any justice in the world.
PPS I appear to have written an essay... my apologies! But when I started out shops were shut on Sunday and closed at 8pm. Nobody starved, funnily enough. I've watched the 24/7 culture unfold from within retail and it's been a fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, experience. Some of it has been for the best. Much of it, I believe, simply reflects the changing values we have, collectively, as a society. And they're not changes for the better.
Still, recession and rampant inflation may knock some common sense into us and remind us there's more to life than shopping.
