When I was in high school, I held a job as a clerk for WinCo foods. This job was a minimum wage position and I dealt with customers occasionally in my work. As a sixteen-year-old, I dealt with customers swearing at me and threatening my employment. I became resentful of my job and I learned that most students didn’t last more than four months in my position. After six months of work, I looked for increased compensation in the form of a raise. I asked my manager about a raise but he declined my request citing that I had not worked the required 1000 hours needed to be eligible for my first raise and benefits. From my standpoint of procedural justice, I found this to be unfair. Procedural justice is a perception of fairness produced through interactions and experiences (The Justice Collaboratory). I knew that my work was very valuable to the store and felt that I was not being compensated enough for the hours I put in.
I put in my two weeks’ notice over the incident and left the job. Looking back on the situation through the lens of the Justice Theory I understand why so many high schoolers before me only made it a few months. The poor working environment and lack of competitive compensation were not seen as fair by procedural justice standards. Even though WinCo may have seen their actions as justified from the distributive justice lens since they treated everyone evenly, the employees saw the unfairness in the way WinCo handled their allocation of resources.
Source:
The Justice Collaboratory. Yale Law School. https://law.yale.edu/justice-collaboratory/procedural-justice
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