We Pay to Work: A Broken System

So here’s the deal. We work. We get paid. But somewhere along the line, someone decided we should pay to work.

And when I say “pay,” I mean more than just the hours we clock in.

We pay in ways that aren’t so obvious at first. The wage gaps, the systems rigged against you, the endless treadmill of competition where everyone thinks they’re in a race—except the finish line keeps getting farther away.

People love to say, “Get a job, get paid.” But that’s nonsense. The job is the payment. The rest? That’s just smoke and mirrors.

The Price of Labor: You Thought You Were Getting Paid?

Look, I know someone out there is reading this and saying, “But I worked hard to get here.”

Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. The truth is, hard work is only as valuable as the pay you’re getting for it.

And what we’re seeing right now is that labor isn’t really the reward. It’s the price of doing business.

Business loves to claim that a job is a reward—an achievement you get by competing with everyone else. But the reality is, companies make profits by paying you less than what you generate.

It’s a game, and you’re not the winner. You’re the pawn.

A lot of us, myself included, have been so conditioned to think of our jobs as these sacred spaces where we earn our stripes.

The employer gets your time, and you get… well, crumbs. If they need you, they’ll pay you. If they don’t?

They’ll replace you in a heartbeat. And I get it. You’re probably wondering: “Well, don’t we all just need to work harder?” Hell no.

We don’t need to work harder, we need to demand harder. But that’s not easy in a world where we’re all fighting each other for a few extra dollars.

Wages and the False Narrative

You’ve probably heard it. “If we raise the minimum wage, it’ll devalue labor!”

Some people act as if a few dollars make or break their income. It’s ridiculous.

Take, for example, the people who say that a raise to $15 for a fast-food worker takes away from their own $19/hour wage. Well, here’s the thing—raising the minimum wage doesn’t devalue anything.

It puts value back into labor. When everyone has a little more, everyone has a little more to spend. More spending means more business.

More business means more jobs. More jobs mean higher wages.

But that’s not the game that’s being played.

Take a look at Amazon, or Walmart. They open their stores, and what do they do? They kill off competition and take advantage of the infrastructure.

The local government, the workers, and the community get stuck with the tab. And where does all the money go? Into the pockets of billionaires.

What do they do with it? Buy back their stock to artificially inflate their value.

Meanwhile, the workers get pushed out, their wages stagnant, and their jobs are reduced to mere placeholders.

Corporate America: A Shrinking Promise

We are being sold a lie. Big corporations—Walmart, Amazon, and the rest—are past the point of growth. They can’t grow anymore.

Everyone who will shop at Amazon already does. Everyone who eats McDonald’s already has.

But the game continues. CEOs are buying back stock with company profits to please shareholders, who demand more and more, until the business no longer serves a purpose except to keep up appearances.

And that’s how the world works. There is no future in this model. It’s a house of cards.

And now, as those houses begin to fall, we’re watching companies like Amazon lay people off to protect their stocks.

I suspect we’ll soon see the same kind of thing in our federal governments: all the schemes to make the system “work” but when it crumbles, no one’s surprised.

Mindset of Competition Over Cooperation

This is where people really get it wrong. We’ve been sold this idea that we need to compete.

The corporate world has done an excellent job making us think that we’re fighting each other for scraps.

And it’s not just the rich, either. We’ve been conditioned to think we need to destroy one another for the sake of a wage.

What does that do? It destroys us. Makes us feel righteous for doing what we’re told, and for making other people feel small.

And so, we fight each other over pennies. All while the richest people in the world are drinking milkshakes made from the money they stole from our time.

They push us to compete for lower wages while they get to play golf in their gated communities, laughing at the very idea of the people below them.

I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the people who are quick to shame others for not wanting to work for dirt wages.

They’ll justify their poor treatment of others by saying, “I work hard for my money!” But here’s the kicker: their bosses don’t care about how hard they work.

They’re too busy making sure they keep their stock options high.

Summary: What’s Really Going On?

Point	Explanation
Wages are a price, not a reward	Employers pay less than the value generated, and you’re stuck in a system where competition overcomes fairness.
Raising minimum wage doesn’t hurt anyone	It’s the trickle-down economics fantasy that’s killing us. More money for everyone means more demand, more jobs, more pay.
Companies play the long con	Big corporations like Amazon and Walmart are beyond growth, and they’re now just inflating their value to keep the game alive.
CEOs and stock buybacks	The focus isn’t on customers, it’s on stock prices. They buy back stocks to please investors, hurting the workforce and destroying businesses in the process.
Conditioned to compete	We’ve been trained to fight each other for scraps while the ultra-wealthy continue to suck up the wealth of the world.
Labor devaluation is systemic	Lower wages, longer hours, and fewer opportunities—it’s a scam that doesn’t end unless we stop competing and start cooperating.
The illusion of upward mobility	The middle class is now competing for scraps. The ultra-rich hold all the cards, and the rest of us are simply pawns in their game.

Conclusion: We’re All Just Another Job to Them

So here’s the thing. We’re all just another cog in the machine. The corporate machine. The government machine.

The system designed to keep the wealthy at the top and the rest of us down here, scrapping for whatever we can get.

But you know what? Maybe it’s time to stop playing their game. Stop competing for the scraps.

Realize that the game was rigged from the start. Maybe, just maybe, we should stop trying to make our wages fit their system and start looking at the bigger picture: We pay to work.

But if we stop paying into their broken model, maybe we get a shot at fixing the system altogether.