60% of US Workers Are Unhappy in Their Jobs

Be happy in your work.

That was the ironic advice given by the Japanese prison commander to the inmates of his slave labor camp who were beaten, starved and dying like flies in the Academy Award winning film "Bridge Over the River Kwai."

Not that your average cubicle patch is comparable to a slave labor camp. But surveys report that employees are mighty unhappy. A majority would rather be doing something else someplace else.

Employee satisfaction and commitment ratings have not returned to even their relatively anemic pre-financial crisis levels. The issue is, primarily, money. They are underpaid for what they do, at least by historical standards. And they are not mollified by claims of global competition as the reason for their new compensation standards because they see executives' salaries increasing exponentially relative to their own.

They understand that under current circumstances they have little bargaining power and even fewer options if they leave or are shoved out. Younger colleagues - the Gen Xers and Yers can afford to treat the situation like a great adventure. But those with homes, mortgages, car payments, school bills and the like, all of which they assumed based on their belief that the system was stable do not have that flexibility.

Furthermore, three decades of stagnant to declining wages have led to depleted savings and reduced circumstances. This could be chalked up to the typical grousing of people trapped in an economic down cycle. But the problem is systemic and structural.

The implications for business are worrisome. Unhappy employees are unenthusiastic and frequently disloyal employees. They will jump if they can. And the cost of replacing even lower level workers has been repeatedly quantified to demonstrate that losing an employee is as expensive as losing a customer. Unhappy employees tend to create unhappy customers. And unhappy customers are prone to share their dissatisfaction far more than happy ones. The result is that in an economy where personal recommendations or criticisms are crucial to sales, the impact can be devastating.

Managers ignore such warning signs at their peril. JL

The Huffington Post reports:

We can’t get no satisfaction.

Nearly 60 percent of American workers say they would choose a different career,
according to a new survey from Yahoo Finance and Parade magazine.

The survey also found that workers value making more money over some R&R; more than half of employees said they would choose a 5 percent raise over a boost in vacation time.

The findings highlight some of the trends that have become all too commonplace during the recession and its aftermath. With the job market tight, Americans are taking any work they can get and corporations are squeezing more money out of each worker than before the downturn.

More than half of working Americans say they have three months of savings or less, according to the Yahoo and Parade survey. And many employees say they’ll be working past traditional retirement age; nearly 30 percent expect to retire between the ages of 66 and 70, the survey found.

All of these factors may explain why American workers hadn’t regained the level of job satisfaction they felt before the recession, according to a Gallup poll from May of last year. Nearly three-quarters of employees say they’re stressed at work, a Harris poll found. The top source of that stress: low wages.

But workers take note: Once you make $75,000 per year, the rest is all gravy. Any money beyond that level of household income doesn’t do anything to increase happiness, according to a 2010 survey cited by The New York Times.