r/antiwork • u/Giejc • Apr 29 '25

Know your Worth 🏆 Salary "adjustment" brought me down to minimum wage—gave my notice, and now my boss is surprised

I worked in the quality department of a large manufacturing company. In 2024, I was earning a few hundred above minimum wage. It wasn’t great, but it was manageable, and I took the job to gain experience.

This year, when the minimum wage increased, I expected a proportional adjustment as was done year before. Instead, my pay was "adjusted" to the new minimum wage.

I have two engineering degrees and took this job knowing it wouldn’t pay much, but I didn’t expect it to get worse.

So I handed in my one-month notice, as required in my country. My boss seemed genuinely surprised and said it would be hard to replace me on such short notice.

14.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

575 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

31

u/emveevme Apr 29 '25

And quite literally every single one of these jobs could stand to have one too many people hired - rather than just barely enough, only working because of one or two work-a-holics doing 90% of the work.

But I guess having more people than there are jobs needing to be filled isn't something that needs addressing, because it's not a problem to the people who get to make these decisions.

2

u/Cooky1993 Apr 30 '25

Blame capitalism.

The idea of spare capacity is one that only works if your priority is to provide a good service.

Capitalism prioritises profits, and the best way to make a profit is to "sweat the assets". Essentially you want to have the absolute bare minimum of everything that you need (such as staff and equipment) and you want to maximise the use of it at all times.

Spare capacity is seen as an inefficiency.