Wages and compensation - Backed ourselves into a corner

I came into this field long after the precedent was set on pay.  I knew coming into this that the average wage ran from 6 cpl to 10 cpl, with most jobs hovering around 7 to 8 cpl.  What I didn't account for was that in more than 10 or 15 years, we'd still be at that rate. 

Not only has our wage not gone up in over a decade, even with cost of living increases, but that when they came out with speech recognition, someone thought, "Well, it's doing half the work, so you should get half the pay."  And we went along with that!

So now our wages are smaller than ever, and often we are doing the same amount of work. 

But I was just thinking about those original wages, the ones they came up with when many of us were sent home, to work in our own home offices (which now they always credit how much we're "saving" by working from home, when really they sent us home in the first place so they could save money and space!), that those wages were based on the work we were doing then:  One account (usually one hospital or clinic, even if it was a large hospital or clinic) with one set of specs that rarely changed (sure, some docs had their own "special" way of doing things, but most things were standardized or had normals/templates), and often times we were assigned a specific pool of dictators to type from.  We weren't thrown in a pool with over 100 different dictators, rarely typing more than 2 to 3 notes by the same person in day, having to know the specs and "nuances" (pardon my pun) each dictator required, and often times needing to know the specs of at least 2, if not 3 to 4 accounts at a time. And though the specs have started to become "standardized" here (this is a Nuance-specific post, so hopefully it stays on that Board), you often have at least 20 to 50 e-mails from your TSM regarding the account about little details of things the client has requested, or things that QC/QA have noticed we're not following. And when we get "trained" on a new account, they consider spending 30 minutes reading over the account specs "training," yet throw you to the wolves immediately, yet still expect you to produce their minimum lines per hour on this brand new account, usually with horrible dictators that you can't understand and no previous reports to look at.  And if it's a new account to Nuance, it was probably won because of how horrible an account it is, with lots of mush-mouth dictators or ESLs that can barely construct a sentence, each having their own "requests" to bold this, to not follow the specs on that, etc.  In other words, bottom of the barrel stuff. 

What I'm trying to say is, that original wage was based off of a much simpler system, one where we often could get into a rhythm and build up speed so that, over time, our take-home wages increased despite the stoic and stagnant cents-per-line wage. 

Yet we need jobs.  This is what we know, and even thought we all know that this is a dying field, we stick with it because of our circumstances, because it's what we know, and because this has been our lives for 20+ years!  And yet, there are thousands of new graduates each year joining our ranks, all willing to take on these jobs at these dismal wages, oftentimes even less than what us experienced folk get (by 1 cent, usually). 

Sorry.  I just had to get this off my chest.  I know I've contributed to the problem by being complacent and accepting these terms forced upon me.