People also get old advice that no longer applies. "Stay with a job, arrive early, go the extra mile and they will reward you down the road!"

In these sort of things, your direct manager probably doesn't even know what you make. There is a tight pay band set by HR and virtually no room for differentiation between employees. There is no mechanism in most roles to truly be rewarded for going the extra mile. The only surefire way to increase your takings is to be active in the employment marketplace and always looking for a better deal.

Working for someone is like this old Seinfeld bit[0], if you want to be rewarded you have to get someone to agree to it before you do the work, once the project is delivered and they are satiated they won't be feeling as generous. "We don't need labor now why are we giving this guy a raise?"

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-hk5turqgA

Friend of mine sat in a meeting between the CEO, CFO, and their senior store manager while they argue whether to give an assistant manager a $0.35/hr raise or a $0.25/hr raise. For 45 minutes.

there is a power relationship between those people, and they are being paid quite well to engage privately. Of course it is obnoxious if you have any empathy at all -- many employers remove empathy as "weak" .. they have key-word one liners between each other to signal about it. not fun

My mother tries her best to pay her reports fairly and it’s been a constant source of conflict between her and her manager. The amount in dispute? Always <$100 a month — that’s the total across ~30 employees. It’s insane how petty some people can be.

That's a $21 annual delta at 40 hours a week, I knew retail had thin margins but sheesh.

In my math it's a $210 annual delta.

Ahh you are right

> Many people were working these jobs without realising what a bad deal it was. They were kicked out during the pandemic and learned that any other job is better. > The only thing that was keeping this jobs in place is imperfect knowledge

It's not just knowledge. Many of these jobs are TIRING jobs because you are physically on your feet a lot. You just don't have the energy to go looking for another job at the end of the day.

The break COVID gave people was a huge boon to job mobility.

> Many people were working these jobs without realising what a bad deal it was.

Can you share some details on where you're getting this data? I'd like to dig into it more.

Imperfect information certainly is a thing, but many public jobs have public wage information. Large corporate jobs also have public wage information (say a delivery driver or warehouse worker -- everyone knows what Amazon is paying for these positions). Claiming people stay in these jobs due to ignorance goes against my experience growing up poor, where my parents and their peers constantly hunted for better paying jobs.

I don't know anything about Ireland, but a quick Google for "ireland jobs" leads me to https://ie.indeed.com/jobs-in-Ireland where I can clearly see wages and salaries for many positions.

I've known lots of tech workers who went as much as years without realizing how badly they were being underpaid, even by the standards of their weak local market. It can take a surprising amount of pushing to get someone who thinks their current pay is OK to realize that it's very much not—I think there's a certain amount of disbelief people tend to default to. "Well, those others must be more skilled, or got lucky". Nope, you're just getting fucked.

And that's a segment of people who ought to be very good at using technology to find out that kind of stuff. I would be very surprised if this didn't hold for most other fields. I'd expect the only markets in which this kind of thing isn't common is ones that are extremely comp-focused (finance, say, and maybe sales).

> I've known lots of tech workers who went as much as years without realizing how badly they were being underpaid, even by the standards of their weak local market

I agree that white collar jobs obfuscate salaries and that power dynamic overwhelmingly favors employers.

That isn't the situation with lower paying jobs, especially ones that aren't salaried, which was what the OP was about. Those low skill jobs (I'd argue baggage handler making minimum wage at the airport to be in that category) openly list wages on the advertisement. Thinking those folks stay in their jobs due to the same information asymmetry is what I'm questioning.

Some friends I know returned to Poland and other countries. It does not make a sense to stay in ultra expensive Dublin, if there is no work during covid.

When you were younger, it was worth it to work. Today basic wage often does not even cover rent and other living expenses. You loose money by working.

To get some perspective go to www.daft.ie and try to find studion near airport...

In my country many young people people found out that delivery apps are a much better deal. Working for Wolt has given them enough money to live and total flexibility over their schedules. In the case of airport security and information jobs the salary offered now is between 1.5-2.0 the minimum wage with some seasonal bonuses added and they can't still have huge difficulty to fill those positions.