I'll give an example but it's not exactly what Ron is saying:
During college and for a year after, I worked in a steal yard / warehouse. It was pretty awful. It's hard for me to describe the conditions and the amount heavy physical labor without sounding like exaggerated hyperbole, so I won't. But it paid pretty good. I started at $14, which was really good at that time (hell, still is) and was up to $15.70 by the time I left. The pay was good, but the working conditions were not. There was massive turnover. Everyone was lured by the high hourly wages, but within the first 3-5 months I was there, there had to have been at least 25-30 people who were hired on and quit. Most people would be there the first day then not show up again. This wasn't a huge place, either. There were usually maybe 5-8 people working in the warehouse at any given time. The demands were high. But over time, this selected for a group of people who needed this job and would tolerate ********. Everyone there was young and had a wife and kids, and it paid well enough that they could support them while they went through school, so those with a lot of responsibilities tolerated it. As a result, they were able to reduce their total costs by weeding out a lot of inefficient people, and driving the people there into the ground. So they'd have the 5-8 people doing the work of what would otherwise be the work of 12-15.
But I don't think that's what Ron was going for. Especially since we were there for the money, and the morale was terrible. And though we were compensated well, we were most definitely earning it.