[MrBonus]

It's a rough world hiring unskilled/low-skill positions. You walk a fine line between maintaining appropriate motivation, maintaining proper discipline, and not creating a toxic work environment.

As someone in financial services, finding the right employee to manage administrative duties has been difficult and our experience is that most people get burnt out or move on after 2-4 years in the role. Simply "firing" someone at every moment of mild insubordination creates a treadmill of reemployment, training, and higher unemployment premiums. Allowing it to continue for too long leads to errors, liability, and inconsistency.

That said, the lower you go on the pay scale, the flakier and less caring the employees become and I imagine the manager in question is stuck in a rock/hard place situation where firing the person means either not replacing them or finding someone with a similar lack of initiative and propensity towards insubordination. I also think many of us (I'm 41 - I imagine many of you are my age or older) started our careers with a promise, whether explicitly stated or not, of hard work leading to advancement even in the most mundane of positions. Even in the positions where we weren't headed towards a promotion, we knew they were building blocks to a better career and we didn't want to alienate employers or develop any reputation of poor work ethic, knowing this could affect recommendations or resumes for a future endeavor. I tend to believe that many low skilled employees (we all were this at some point, right?) don't see the same carrot anymore.