"meager compensation" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when talking about a situation where someone has received only a minimal or insignificant amount of something (money, recognition, etc.). For example: "The family was disappointed when they heard that the company was offering meager compensation for the loss of their loved one."
And they were almost certainly discouraged by the meager compensation.
The forbidding gray of the English Channel and the stony beaches of Britain's South Coast were meager compensation.
Legislation to reform the rural land requisition system and shield peasants from land grabs and meager compensation remains mired in contention.
A major source of unrest, including in Wukan, is the seizure of land by well-connected private developers or government officials, which involves forced evictions for meager compensation.
He also looked back on his life as an artist and described it witheringly: "Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire".
Second, in protesting the hardship of their life and their meager compensation (a grievance they should take to their publishers), they admit their real agenda: they should get paid for every use (and even "re-use") of a work.
What meagre compensation.
They can continue to live in cramped temporary housing and collect relatively meager monthly compensation from the government.
After that season, I decided that the meager financial compensation and slight status no longer justified the physical demands and the risks I had to take.
He was right there, teaching us one more lesson: that compensation is meager consolation, that loss is painful, no matter what replaces it.
Miriam Cherry, an associate professor of law at the University of the Pacific, tried Mechanical Turk and says she found out for herself that the compensation was meager.
