According to the article “Most People Have No Idea Whether They’re Paid Fairly” by Dave Smith, “Pay is a crucial component of engagement because it’s not just a number; it’s an emotional measure reflecting how valued an employee feels by their employer.” This quote has a great amount of weight to it since it is true that in this day in age the amount one gets paid, translates to how valued they are to the company they work for. From personal experience, I have declined job offers for the very reason of being offered not enough money for a job that requires a decent amount of skill and knowledge.
In the spring of 2021, I had two internship offers. I was being offered a project engineering internship by a construction company, let’s call them Construction Company A and the wage they were presenting to me was $18 per hour. A project engineering internship typically consists of reading construction plans, organizing permits, and helping with scheduling concerns with a project (office work). I already had experience being a project engineer intern in years past and typically with a little more experience with the tasks at hand, you receive higher monetary compensation. Another construction company, let’s call them Construction Company B, offered me $17 per hour to help out as a general laborer, which is a good wage for an entry-level field position. I had very little field experience and was looking for a more hands-on construction job, however, I wasn’t going to turn down a higher-paying project engineering job if I had an offer.
Since Construction Company A did not offer me a higher hourly wage for the needed office tasks to be done, I decided to go with the well-paying labor-intensive offer at Construction Company B. Eventhough the wage was $1 per hour less, I knew that I would be more engaged with the hands-on work Construction Company B had to offer. I would have felt undervalued and unengaged if I decided to work in an office at the wage presented by Construction Company A.
Work Cited
Gallo, Amy. “Most People Have No Idea Whether They’re Paid Fairly.” Harvard Business Review, 10 Sept. 2020, https://hbr.org/2015/10/most-people-have-no-idea-whether-theyre-paid-fairly.
