Now, more than ever, something is clear: people aren’t happy with their jobs

Granted, that’s been true for as long as the modern workforce has existed. From books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and most of Charles Dickens’ bibliography, to shows like The Office to movies like Office Space and Falling Down to comics like Dilbert, even if you didn’t know for a fact that anywhere between 50% and 85% of people are unhappy with their job, you could accurately guess not a lot of people like what they do for a career.

I started writing this post in August of 2023, the end of a summer where unhappiness in all kinds of careers hit a breaking point. The summer of 2023 has been dubbed the “summer of strikes” by some news outlets and “hot strike summer” by some influencers due to the sheer number of industries halted by strikes. The highest profile strikes have been in Hollywood, where one after the other, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) both went on strike. UPS narrowly avoided having its workers go on strike and negotiated higher pay, air conditioning in UPS delivery trucks, the end of forced overtime and more equal pay across the board, according to NPR. Since I started writing this post, a major strike started in my backyard when the UAW, a union that represents workers from major automotive companies Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Stellantis, declared a strike on September 15. But that’s only talking about the strikes that have gotten the most press coverage. I dug deeper and found articles reporting that doctors, food service workers, sanitation workers, nurses, train workers and teachers are either actively striking or threatening to strike. This isn’t an exclusively American uprising either: strikes or strike threats are happening in the likes of Nigeria, the UK, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain.

In the midst of this, until mid-August I was looking for work.

I should put “looking” in quotation marks. I’ve made references and entire posts centered around my working in a middle school. After that wrapped up in June, I didn’t put a lot of effort into finding the next job. When a week had passed and I hadn’t put out any applications, I told myself I was taking a break, recuperating from the emotional rollercoaster that was working with middle-schoolers. When a month had gone by and I’d only put out a handful of applications, I had to confront my own apprehension.

The fact is, I was scared to go looking for another job.

It took more days of inaction on the job hunting front for me to figure out why. The answer: Burger King.

I worked at Burger King for 1 month and 1 day. That was how long I could stay there before my misery on the job made me choose: either bail out for another job ASAP, or bail when I got fired for Batista-bombing a customer in a miserable rage. I chose the former (but not before coming dangerously close to the latter). 32 days, approximately 256 hours in that kitchen, but I think those experiences will stick with me for life.

Not to be dramatic or anything.

All seriousness aside, after running into a mentor on one of my days off and breaking down crying when they asked me how work was going, I found a coffee shop job that had requested an interview around the time I started at Burger King, interviewed, got the job, and left Burger King as soon as I could. But the experience left me with a new set of fears and apprehensions when it came to looking for work. Every time I fill out a job application or even look at job boards, a nagging voice in the back of the head starts debating itself, wondering if this job will be worse than Burger King.

It’s all about dignity.

I hated working at Burger King because of how disrespected I felt there. My manager threw me into the fray with no training–no run-through on working the register, no instruction for drive-thru, nothing–and then he and my coworkers treated me like I was stupid when I naturally made mistakes and had questions. Customers yelled at me for messing up orders I didn’t make. I was working for a purpose: to pay for a bunch of weddings I’d been invited to and to pay for one more semester of college. The breaking point for me, what made me nearly quit on the spot, was when I checked my bank statements and saw the measly amount of money I’d earned through my misery. One check that the house was empty, a screaming fit, and one crying breakdown in front of a mentor later, and I was on the job hunt again.

While there haven’t been such emotional reactions documented during the strikes, that underlying sense of indignity motivates these strikes. Actors no longer want it to be so common to make pennies in royalties that some Hollywood bars give you free drinks if you show a three-digit royalty check. Writers, animators, and visual effects workers want the people in power to acknowledge that nothing happens on set without them, to show that acknowledgment with living wages, and assurance that their hard work and experience won’t be shunted aside and replaced with AI. Similarly, our society doesn’t run without cars and trucks, and auto workers know that. They want the kind of pay that should come with such a foundational career, and they want it from go, not something they work up to. They want stability even as car companies begin to shift their focus onto electric vehicles, and they want job security as the prospect of cheaper labor via shipping jobs overseas dangles in front of CEOs and executive boards like a carrot in front of a horse’s mouth.

I’ll conclude with a direct appeal to any supervisors, managers, CEOs, anyone in an authority position at their workplace reading this: dignify your workers. Pizza parties were never enough. Stop stagnating wages; if your employees are doing good jobs, say so with good pay. Listen to criticism of yourself and your workplace. Build your workers up instead of tearing them down. Be an advocate for them instead of a roadblock.

That’s how you get people who want to work.

That’s how you stop strikes before they even start.