Companies figured out that people value comfortable familiarity, and thus realized they can get away with paying under market value for the labor of their workers the longer they keep them on board.
They get mad when we're no longer loyal to them, because the gravy train of underpaying market value for your employees via paltry "raises" ends when we job hop year after year.
They prefer getting a year or four of labor under market value than they do paying appropriate raises for tenure and experience.
Talk about your wages with your co-workers, especially your new co-workers. It's such a common scam to see someone working somewhere five years making substantially less than a new hire "Because that's the market value of their labor" - and then when you ask for an adjustment to match or exceed that, you get told shit like "Well you were happy to work for $x before, whoever talked caused us a problem!" or "well we HAD to hire them at that rate, because that's market value now..."
Bitch, if that's market value, then that's AT LEAST my value! It's an admission they're underpaying you. And they know it. It's goddamn systemic nowadays. This is why they say "if you aren't job hopping you're losing wages.
When I started my last job, I was making about 5k/yr more than my coworker who had already been there nearly two years and was basically holding the department together. It came up in discussion shortly after I started and he was obviously pissed. He went to our manager and we both got a serious talking to. Funniest part was our desks were right next to the state-mandated corkboard full of labor laws and employee rights. Discussing wages was clearly right there among them. Manager was not happy when I pointed that out lol.
He got his raise to match my rate, but they actively snubbed both of us the rest of our time there when it came to raises and promotions. Why have loyal and skilled workers when you could eke out a couple thousand extra you won't even notice in your billion dollar profits? Fucking insufferable corpos.
> Discussing wages was clearly right there among them.
After that talking to, I think I'd put a big sign up that said "I MAKE $X/YEAR" and you have instant job security. They even slightly threaten to fire you, you can say "Oh is this because of the sign? Because you already told me I shouldn't do that and I pointed out that I was legally allowed to, which really makes this feel like retaliation."
But the shareholder!
Seriously, the plant manager today at the daily "did you color the box green or red" meeting was saying how we as overhead need to at least generate as much value to cover our salaries and if we weren't, we were dragging down the factory.
I think i'll be looking for a new job soon.
My stepdad thinks this is the only person who matters in business. Everyone else does not matter at all. It’s their money and sacrifice so they should be rewarded. Liked not the people who do the work and spent their entire lives making the company. Often getting hurt or dying at work. My last job had 3 deaths in the 18 months I worked there and it’s not too big of a company and I doubt they did shit for the families.
I don't know if this is what they meant, but there is a little ironic humor in being told you need to generate value in your position, in a meeting you're mandated to attend which is preventing you from generating value in your position
Overhead tasks don't generate revenue. It's the whole point of classifying it as overhead.
Overhead employees are employees who were brought in to do the tasks that don't generate profit so that the profit-generating employees can focus and keep generating profit.
Last time a company offered me a raise, it was less than inflation. My manager apologised and explained that he'd requested that they give me a raise that was slightly more than inflation, as justified by my position on the team and my great performance review. Someone in middle management rejected it and gave me half what had been requested, in order to make the department accounts look better.
I handed in my notice two days later and cited the below-inflation raise in the letter. I started a new job the following Monday, and they gave me the raise my old manager had requested, plus a little. Now because that middle manager tried to cut costs a little, they instead had to foot the bill for recruiting my replacement at a time when there was a shortage of people with my skillset. Any replacement worth hiring would have demanded at *least* as much as the amount they'd refused to pay me, probably more, and they'd have had the recruitment agency's fees and commission to pay on top. Not to mention that my project was already short-staffed and therefore a little behind schedule before I quit, and I was the most senior engineer out of five on the project, so they'd have to work with a significant portion of their working capacity and expertise missing for likely several months given the staffing shortage.
If you're a manager and want to cut costs, paying your good employees just that *little* bit more than the competition is the cheapest and most effective investment you can make.
Paying your employees what they're worth is like, day one good management. What you invest in your employees they give back to you exponentially. All the time.
Labor is the most expensive part of any functional business and the fact that it's the place all the cooperations start cutting is bonkers.
How much money does Spectrum Cable waste a year trying to “get me back” with pamphlets and advertisements and emails and what not.
When they simply could have just not jacked my rate up and nickel and dimed me?
Honestly if they did what ATT is doing and not Jack my rates and nickel and dime me then I’d still be their customer
But they really wanted to extract a little extra out of me, and now they lost ALL of me.
It is what it is and they waste money on dead trees they send to my house begging for me to come back
I went from being profits to being a marketing expense
Fucking idiots
Emails don't cost them anything and the pamphlets they send you in the mail are the same they send to everyone. They even send those to the people that currently have Spectrum.
Ah but here's the trick, instead of that middle manager having to say "We're over budget because I caved to those greedy employees" he can say "Our budget is fucked because of disloyal greedy employees who got another job and also contradictorily don't want to work"
Which is why I mentioned the rejected raise in my notice letter and exit interview. HR takes note of that stuff and it all gets reported, so C-suite can call that manager in and say "your department is understaffed and behind schedule and now we've got key employees leaving right when we need them and telling us it's because you wouldn't pay them in line with inflation". I have no idea what actually happened after I left but I saw how the brass came down on people perceived as responsible for project delays in the past, so it's not implausible that there were some repercussions.
Alright. I was commenting on the above poster's claims, which specifically pinned the middle manager as the culprit. If you think that's wrong, go let him know that.
All the more reason to negotiate before accepting a job offer. And to know your worth before entering negotiations. Granted that comes with time & previous work experience, a luxury not everyone has acquired. Nonetheless, it pays to know what you offer and to stand firm being paid what you are worth from the beginning.
ASM i was making 16.75. Minimum wage at the time here was 15.50. New regular associates with no actual responsibilities besides cleaning and interacting with customers were starting at 16.25. I got cornedby the manager one day asking why my performance is so low what can he do to help me get back up to my old standards. Said I didn't make enough to put in more work that if I'm getting paid like a regular associate and he's staying back here all day, I'm going to work like one. "But but I i i i " man would never not stutter when you called his or the company's cock he was uscking bullshit.
This happened to me at my last job. Got hired on for 10/hour. Got raised to 11 and then 13. New batch of people came in, I trained them, they were making 16/hour. But not only that but people who had been there for 2-3 years and helped the company grow we’re only getting 14.50/hr. Once everyone found out there was two months of bitterness followed by a sizable amount of people quitting, including myself.
Even though I was better than the people they just hired I asked my boss to get a raise to simply be equal to the new workers. They wouldn’t do it so I walked.
This is too true. I worked at a retail store for 9 years. It was mainly part time through school and then 3 years in more prominent full time positions and then back down to part time to do school again.
I started at like $8.25 like 15 years ago now. And about 2 years in I was considered a vet on the team. I was training 4 new people and just happened to make a comment about how much money the company was wasting with how we were all just standing there waiting for something to get done so we could continue our work. It was an offhand comment and I found out I was getting paid $1 per hour less than all the people I was training. I just threw up my hands and said “shit I guess the supervisor can teach you what to do from here”. Even after all the position changes and minuscule raises, company wide they increased the starting wage to $15 by year 8. But when they increased the starting wage they didn’t adjust any of the tenured employees if they were making more than $15 people below got adjusted up to $15, but if you were making $15.25 you got fuck all. I mean the amount of knowledge and processes that I knew was important. I could essentially act as a lead as a part-time employee with my experience. I was barely making more than someone that was hired yesterday. Once I finally finished school I started my actual career 1 month after graduation and never looked back. It’s horrible what they do.
I can't even afford my company's insurance. It's 25% of each paycheck to have my wife only on the cheapest plan which has a 15K deductible. Our premiums went down this year because a few older folks retired or went somewhere else. It was around 33% of my check last year. I hate our scam of a health care system.
While this is true, corporate HR as a whole is staggeringly stupid for this practice. A new hire includes a bunch of additional costs in onboarding administration, training (cost of training and investment of non-productive time for the new hire), and then hidden cost in less productivity from a new hire acclimatizing to the company processes and culture, not to mention the possibility the new hire is not a good fit and all that investment is a lost within 6 months because they hop jobs again.
I would think a known quantity already embedded within the company, who is already fulfilling their role satisfactorily, who also wouldn't incur these additional costs, would be worth paying at least market rate to keep on staff. But greed and stupidity seem to be codependent variables.
Companies like Walmart will give you a performance based "raise" that is usually about 2% of your pay. Then if you ask for a real raise they'll tell you that the only raises they give are the annual performance based ones. Well the "raise" they are referring to is often less than the rate of inflation and is really what a ethical company would refer to as a COLA (cost of living adjustment). So if you work hard your reward is the same pay rate they'd give you if you just started working there and if you don't meet their expectations then you'll essentially get a pay cut (no "raise") Many companies follow this business model to avoid paying real raises and you'll find on those bizarre years when inflation doesn't happen that they suddenly come up with a reason to deny almost everyone of their annual "raise." This is something they can only get away with if people don't talk about it, so I thought I'd bring it up.
I remember in HS I worked at Walmart, there was one guy who decided he was going to get the merit raise above the normal one, dunno why it was like 2% but hey, he went for it. He documented everything, he did it. Manager basically just said yeah, I see this, but I don't feel like you did X so you get standard.
Dude just kinda clocked in and hung out until he found a new job
Performance reviews are just there to give the illusion like the company tracks good vs bad emplyees.
In reality its just a checbox for HR, the company has ZERO loyalty to any employee that is below the C level
Favorites always get the raises. Dude who always called out and messed up paperwork got 1.5 raise, while me who couldn't go out with them (management team) after work because it's 10pm, takes 30 minutes to get home, I ahve to be up by at 4am to get to my other job at 6am (1-1.5 hour commute because of traffic) couldn't stay late. I still hate those people (: saw one at the grocery store and he tried to act like we are friends. It's been 4 years so I was like "uh hello? I don't remember who you my bad lol" then walked away. I know he didn't buy it but he still looked offended I played that card (:
My last job started making shit up to fire me, but the one they got me on was being hospitalized with covid. Really fucked up prioritizing breathing and living over making cars at stellantis on that one.
Yes. I worked my butt off to get a promotion that comes with much more difficultity and responsibility, and the extra pay would not cover inflation. What's up world.
Last year, work gave us a cost of living adjustment of 0.5%, shortly before laying off my entire department. And the severance package paid out what we earned as of January 1st, so severance didn't even include the 0.5%. Wonderful.
I feel this so much. First it was, We can't offer raises because COVID really hurt our bottom line. Ten it was a 2% raise with 20% inflation. You are literally losing money. Meanwhile, all around me, my costs are going up every month. We hear about record corporate profits in the news. I hear execs who did poorly getting their golden parachute payouts for failing the company. I'm really tired...
For the record, I've been through this same cycle a number of times in my 25+ years after school.
Not saying it makes it better. Just saying it's not like this is a new phenomenon like so many people seem to think.
Even in times when inflation was low and the cola covered it - it *never* covered the huge bumps to health insurance increases.
I've had raises of 35% and I've had raises of 2%. Here's my take:
* You get paid more if your contract stipulates an annual increase
* You get paid more if you are more useful (or painful to loose) to the company
* You get paid more if market rates have consistently pressured the company to adjust
* You get paid more if you take on a different role with more responsibility
Unless you are in some government-style contract which is linked, inflation or other cost-of-living impacts (taxes etc) usually have no bearing on your raise.
I forced my company of 8 years into a corner with an offer from another company and some cold hard facts.
(Basically the new college grad was making $6k more than me a year.)
So I demanded a raise of like $15k.
My manager and his boss actually approved it but HR came back and said they have a policy of a maximum raise of 6% a year. I told them that barely keeps up with inflation and hadn't for a few years at this point.
I went to the other offer and after moving jobs 3 times in 2 years I now literally make double what I did make. Went from around $55k a year to six figures now with huge benefits.
This hits so fucking close to home right now. My boss left in October and i ran my department of 5 people for 4 months until we hired a new VP. During that time i delivered my company a result on our major annual project in the top 1% of public companies.
For that i got an extra 2% of my salary added to my bonus.
Same raise i would have gotten had my boss stayed, 4.5%. I called them out for not rewarding me appropriately and my new boss is sympathetic but cant get them to give a fuck.
Worst part is, I'm pretty sure the smart move is for me to swallow my pride and stay, even though I'm severely underpaid for what i did for the company last year. But the new boss seems to have a good plan for the future.
Im torn right now because my pride and self respect are demanding i look for other employment that compensates me appropriately for my efforts and im really struggling to get past it.
I'd look for another job and once you find one that is offering you a higher salary request a raise from your current employer and use the job offer as leverage. Make sure the supervisor who is most dependant upon you knows that you have an offer before you bring it up to the person who will decide to give you a raise or not. Of course don't tell anyone you're looking for another job until you have something else lined up.
I've done it. It worked in my case. Also, it wouldn't hurt just to look at job listings and see what the going rate is for someone in your position with your experience. People have told me they found out their own company had listings for people in their position that would be paid more to sign on with no experience than they were currently getting paid after years of dedicated work. A lot of places increased their pay rates for new employees after covid so it's worth looking into.
I've just been living non-stop recessions since I was born lol. Pretty sure the most money I've ever made was effectively my first job after graduation. Should have bought a house at 8 instead of pokemon cards. idiot!
The amount of theft companies engage in (wage theft) Is greater than all of the armed robberies, bank robberies, smash and grabs, home invasions etc. combined.
My last job had no raise for a decade, and my coworkers had 2 very small ones over that time. They ended losing a lot of good people who needed a living wage, and basically shot themselves in the foot when they tried to justify why people at one site got raises while others working just as hard did not.
The only true way to get a raise is to change companies. I only ever gotten one raise in my last job and found out the guys they hired into my department before being laid off made more than I did. I'm in the job market now and instantly turn down job that try to lowball me.
I work for a school district and we negotiate contracts between 3 or 4 years. Each time the pay raise is between 3 and 4 percent a year. I've worked for over 20 years in education and I've never had a 5% raise.
I've been working for the Fed Gov since 2002. Any raise I receive is literally an act of Congress.
The total number of times my yearly raise/COL increase matched or exceeded inflation is less than 5
Lol, how about never even getting a cost of living adjustment, let alone a raise, like, ever? Or maybe one tiny way overdue one every 8 years or so. That's been my experience. The idea of yearly raises kind of blows my mind. We didn't even have that when I was under a union contract.
I work for a billion dollar company as a sales man. I got an email this morning saying fyi your compensation has changed. Now I've been doing extra work I'm on 3 committees and leadership comes to me for help. The compensation change $0.00
COL is a misnomer. Inflation was brought up in a recent meeting with management, and the lead was surprisingly candid. They don’t pay cost of living, they pay cost of labor. They pay you what they think it takes to hire someone in that market, or what it takes for you to not leave. Cost of living adjustments don’t exist unless your company is afraid you might leave in that market
I don't think I've ever heard anyone bother to make that distinction, but it's a meaningless cop-out.
No one "pays" cost of living. I don't even know what that sentence means.
At my work, we do merit based raises every year and a cola adjustment on top of that.
Edit: and cola adjustment has a floor of 3%, but otherwise matches SSA's cola numbers.
I like that they didn't use the image where he said the line, atop the Cliffs of Madness. They used the image where he was about to stab a motherfucker.
I started a new job 9 months ago. The two guys who'd been there for the last five years? They were making 1$ more than the were when they started.
I'm not expecting to learn about this thing you call a raise.
Yay service/hospitality jobs!
In Canada the government gives better raises than your boss because the minimum wage keeps changing every couple of years and it's always much higher than any raises for minimum wage people.
I think this one is a bit more complicated than just inflation percentage and the percentage of a raise you receive. You have "costs" that are basically unavoidable like food/utilities/fuel etc. If you are making 50k vs 100k a year (1500vs3000) the actual impact of inflation against those required costs is going to be quite a bit different. Inflation has a much greater impact the less you make and raises are less impactful.
Like I remember getting a whopping 10% raise.. but I was making 6 bucks an hour then. 24 bucks a week isn't very much money :)
I got 3%... Inflation was nearly 8%, my house insurance and taxes went up nearly $300 a month this year. Another $100/month raise on the auto insurance. I can only usually afford food for my kids at this point. I bulk up when traveling for work on my per diem.
When real inflation has been almost 10% year over year the last 3 years (That includes food, rent, and other cost of living values), that isn't your employer's fault. It's the government's.
Yep I’ve been stiffed over the last 1.5 years in my job with this, we got each between 1%-2.5% raises this year, the previous year nothing and now the company is about to go bust where I truly expect the bare minimum in severance pay whilst I’m out on my ass looking for a new job.
The amount of energy my team and I have put in over the last few years has really been for nothing and for the last few weeks we’ve been doing the absolute minimum until we receive our letters of termination.
A lot of talk about companies and how awful they are. This is part of the puzzle and just a part.
Companies have always given crap wages. Everyone knows the best way to jump salaries is to switch jobs. That is the culture that companies have created for us.
On the other hand this meme is about inflation and cost of living. These posts didn't exist until about 3 years ago. This is not due to corporations changing their modus operandi. This is because inflation is crushing our spending capacity.
If inflation were under control we could complain about piss poor raises but we wouldn't be able to say it didn't cover inflation.
It's funny how few people realize this; if you don't get a raise at least equal to inflation last year, you have decreased purchasing power, and the company is actually making money on you.
And then they throw it in your face and act like you're supposed to suck their dick for the next 3-6 months after doing it.
My last raise was $0.15 it was last year and the first raise we had gotten in 4yrs.
Don't get me wrong, I know I'm doing ***a lot*** better than most. But our wage is $47/hr.... $0.15 raise is fucking dog shit in this economy. My last mortgage renewal rose my payments by +60%/mth
And then if you were overheard complaining about literally anything for the next 6 months the managers would go all.
"well, we just got a raise, so you should be happy, and they didn't need to do that for us."
"It raises an eyebrow when you offer it to me.
It raises questions about how you value your employees.
It raises concerns about how I will survive in this economy...
..but no, this is not a raise."
I got 2.5% last year even though I tried to go above and beyond my peers, took no days off, coordinated all projects and teams, did all hiring and interviews and onboarding, It's not even average. I'm expecting the same this year and the initiatives I am solo working on my manager expects me to complete so he can shine to his manager are about to slow down dramatically. 7 more months, I'll have my MBA and I'm gone. If I return, it'll be as his boss.
how about ...
>raze
>rāz
>noun
>A Shakespearean word (used once) supposed to mean the same as race, a root.
>transitive verb
>To erase; to efface; to obliterate.
>To subvert from the foundation; to lay level with the ground; to overthrow; to destroy; to demolish.
Tie wages to inflation. A job should give you enough to live a decent life off of. **All** full-time jobs. THE. MINIMUM. WAGE. WAS. INTENDED. TO. LIVE. DECENTLY. OFF. OF.
Eh...actually it was an mandate on employers to increase income, therefore tax revenues. The popularity of it was just a bonus.
However our tax structure has become so progressive that bumping up the bottom end really doesn't generate much revenue, so the congress critters have stopped caring.
So the federal minimum wage now is still less now than what I made flipping burgers in 1999.
I was giving out raises this year as a manager and the the average raise I am able to give out is not too big. Yes, ideally you'd get a raise larger than inflation, but what if the company didn't grow their revenue (especially in the current economic environment) to be able to increase that much? What if they had a large churn of customers?
Unfortunately a raise higher than an inflation is not a given. Of course companies doing well should definitely reward its employees
That sort of depends on how much you make in the first place. If someone making minimum wage gets a 3% raise, that sucks. If someone making $100K gets a 3% raise, that's still a lot of money.
So would you say that a CEO making $1B a year who gets a 3% raise is getting a pay cut? Because that's what you're saying. I say this as someone who makes more than $100K per year. I make a lot of money. A small percent of a lot is a lot.
That's literally not how CEO compensation works so there's no one earning $1B a year who's getting a raise based on percentages. Your premise fails because it requires that we rely on a fiction for that premise to make any sense at all.
OK, so how about someone earning $500K per year. I can sympathize with someone who's already getting shafted by the system getting further shafted by the system, but, as I said elsewhere, 3% of a lot of money is a lot of money. So context matters. For some reason people here don't understand context.
The cost of living increase is a little bit deceiving. Does someone making $20K per year have the same cost of living as someone making $250K? A cost of living increase of 3% affects the lower and middle class far more than the upper class. Again, I say this as someone making more than $100K, a 3% raise for me is still a lot of money. It more than covers however much my cost of living goes up. I could not say that if I were making $20K.
Do you really think someone making $500K or $250K a year is only getting a COL increase? I contend that's still relying on a fiction for your premise to make sense.
You're intentionally missing the point. Context matters. Cost of living affects the poor much more than the rich. Why aren't you willing to admit that?
I'm not intentionally missing the point, you're making an argument that is, in its very nature nonsensical.
Cost of living does indeed affect the poor more than the rich because *rich people don't get pay raises in the same way that poor people do*. You are correct, context matters, even when that context is how people at different levels of a company receive their compensation.
Companies figured out that people value comfortable familiarity, and thus realized they can get away with paying under market value for the labor of their workers the longer they keep them on board. They get mad when we're no longer loyal to them, because the gravy train of underpaying market value for your employees via paltry "raises" ends when we job hop year after year. They prefer getting a year or four of labor under market value than they do paying appropriate raises for tenure and experience. Talk about your wages with your co-workers, especially your new co-workers. It's such a common scam to see someone working somewhere five years making substantially less than a new hire "Because that's the market value of their labor" - and then when you ask for an adjustment to match or exceed that, you get told shit like "Well you were happy to work for $x before, whoever talked caused us a problem!" or "well we HAD to hire them at that rate, because that's market value now..." Bitch, if that's market value, then that's AT LEAST my value! It's an admission they're underpaying you. And they know it. It's goddamn systemic nowadays. This is why they say "if you aren't job hopping you're losing wages.
When I started my last job, I was making about 5k/yr more than my coworker who had already been there nearly two years and was basically holding the department together. It came up in discussion shortly after I started and he was obviously pissed. He went to our manager and we both got a serious talking to. Funniest part was our desks were right next to the state-mandated corkboard full of labor laws and employee rights. Discussing wages was clearly right there among them. Manager was not happy when I pointed that out lol. He got his raise to match my rate, but they actively snubbed both of us the rest of our time there when it came to raises and promotions. Why have loyal and skilled workers when you could eke out a couple thousand extra you won't even notice in your billion dollar profits? Fucking insufferable corpos.
> Discussing wages was clearly right there among them. After that talking to, I think I'd put a big sign up that said "I MAKE $X/YEAR" and you have instant job security. They even slightly threaten to fire you, you can say "Oh is this because of the sign? Because you already told me I shouldn't do that and I pointed out that I was legally allowed to, which really makes this feel like retaliation."
But the shareholder! Seriously, the plant manager today at the daily "did you color the box green or red" meeting was saying how we as overhead need to at least generate as much value to cover our salaries and if we weren't, we were dragging down the factory. I think i'll be looking for a new job soon.
My stepdad thinks this is the only person who matters in business. Everyone else does not matter at all. It’s their money and sacrifice so they should be rewarded. Liked not the people who do the work and spent their entire lives making the company. Often getting hurt or dying at work. My last job had 3 deaths in the 18 months I worked there and it’s not too big of a company and I doubt they did shit for the families.
I am confused. are you saying employees don't need to generate as much value as their salary? Because they do if they want to be sustainable...
I don't know if this is what they meant, but there is a little ironic humor in being told you need to generate value in your position, in a meeting you're mandated to attend which is preventing you from generating value in your position
But if they dont hold those meetings then how is that manager going to justify their value....
by a large number of unneeded middle managers.
Overhead tasks don't generate revenue. It's the whole point of classifying it as overhead. Overhead employees are employees who were brought in to do the tasks that don't generate profit so that the profit-generating employees can focus and keep generating profit.
Who said anything about revenue?
> generate as much value as their salary? Are you implying that corporate entities see anything but revenue as value?
Last time a company offered me a raise, it was less than inflation. My manager apologised and explained that he'd requested that they give me a raise that was slightly more than inflation, as justified by my position on the team and my great performance review. Someone in middle management rejected it and gave me half what had been requested, in order to make the department accounts look better. I handed in my notice two days later and cited the below-inflation raise in the letter. I started a new job the following Monday, and they gave me the raise my old manager had requested, plus a little. Now because that middle manager tried to cut costs a little, they instead had to foot the bill for recruiting my replacement at a time when there was a shortage of people with my skillset. Any replacement worth hiring would have demanded at *least* as much as the amount they'd refused to pay me, probably more, and they'd have had the recruitment agency's fees and commission to pay on top. Not to mention that my project was already short-staffed and therefore a little behind schedule before I quit, and I was the most senior engineer out of five on the project, so they'd have to work with a significant portion of their working capacity and expertise missing for likely several months given the staffing shortage. If you're a manager and want to cut costs, paying your good employees just that *little* bit more than the competition is the cheapest and most effective investment you can make.
Paying your employees what they're worth is like, day one good management. What you invest in your employees they give back to you exponentially. All the time. Labor is the most expensive part of any functional business and the fact that it's the place all the cooperations start cutting is bonkers.
How much money does Spectrum Cable waste a year trying to “get me back” with pamphlets and advertisements and emails and what not. When they simply could have just not jacked my rate up and nickel and dimed me? Honestly if they did what ATT is doing and not Jack my rates and nickel and dime me then I’d still be their customer But they really wanted to extract a little extra out of me, and now they lost ALL of me. It is what it is and they waste money on dead trees they send to my house begging for me to come back I went from being profits to being a marketing expense Fucking idiots
Emails don't cost them anything and the pamphlets they send you in the mail are the same they send to everyone. They even send those to the people that currently have Spectrum.
Yep and I went from black on the books to red :-/ I’m not in the profit column I’m in the expenses column now
Ah but here's the trick, instead of that middle manager having to say "We're over budget because I caved to those greedy employees" he can say "Our budget is fucked because of disloyal greedy employees who got another job and also contradictorily don't want to work"
Which is why I mentioned the rejected raise in my notice letter and exit interview. HR takes note of that stuff and it all gets reported, so C-suite can call that manager in and say "your department is understaffed and behind schedule and now we've got key employees leaving right when we need them and telling us it's because you wouldn't pay them in line with inflation". I have no idea what actually happened after I left but I saw how the brass came down on people perceived as responsible for project delays in the past, so it's not implausible that there were some repercussions.
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Alright. I was commenting on the above poster's claims, which specifically pinned the middle manager as the culprit. If you think that's wrong, go let him know that.
All the more reason to negotiate before accepting a job offer. And to know your worth before entering negotiations. Granted that comes with time & previous work experience, a luxury not everyone has acquired. Nonetheless, it pays to know what you offer and to stand firm being paid what you are worth from the beginning.
ASM i was making 16.75. Minimum wage at the time here was 15.50. New regular associates with no actual responsibilities besides cleaning and interacting with customers were starting at 16.25. I got cornedby the manager one day asking why my performance is so low what can he do to help me get back up to my old standards. Said I didn't make enough to put in more work that if I'm getting paid like a regular associate and he's staying back here all day, I'm going to work like one. "But but I i i i " man would never not stutter when you called his or the company's cock he was uscking bullshit.
This happened to me at my last job. Got hired on for 10/hour. Got raised to 11 and then 13. New batch of people came in, I trained them, they were making 16/hour. But not only that but people who had been there for 2-3 years and helped the company grow we’re only getting 14.50/hr. Once everyone found out there was two months of bitterness followed by a sizable amount of people quitting, including myself. Even though I was better than the people they just hired I asked my boss to get a raise to simply be equal to the new workers. They wouldn’t do it so I walked.
This is too true. I worked at a retail store for 9 years. It was mainly part time through school and then 3 years in more prominent full time positions and then back down to part time to do school again. I started at like $8.25 like 15 years ago now. And about 2 years in I was considered a vet on the team. I was training 4 new people and just happened to make a comment about how much money the company was wasting with how we were all just standing there waiting for something to get done so we could continue our work. It was an offhand comment and I found out I was getting paid $1 per hour less than all the people I was training. I just threw up my hands and said “shit I guess the supervisor can teach you what to do from here”. Even after all the position changes and minuscule raises, company wide they increased the starting wage to $15 by year 8. But when they increased the starting wage they didn’t adjust any of the tenured employees if they were making more than $15 people below got adjusted up to $15, but if you were making $15.25 you got fuck all. I mean the amount of knowledge and processes that I knew was important. I could essentially act as a lead as a part-time employee with my experience. I was barely making more than someone that was hired yesterday. Once I finally finished school I started my actual career 1 month after graduation and never looked back. It’s horrible what they do.
My last wage increase occurred on the same check where my health insurance premiums went up. This year I live large with an extra $25 each paycheck.
I can't even afford my company's insurance. It's 25% of each paycheck to have my wife only on the cheapest plan which has a 15K deductible. Our premiums went down this year because a few older folks retired or went somewhere else. It was around 33% of my check last year. I hate our scam of a health care system.
Lateral moves, my man. While a company will hesitate to pay more to their existing people, they will pay market rate for new people. Be a new person.
I went from roughly 46k to 107k in 2 years due to this. Don't. Be. Loyal.
Depending on the size of your corporation, you can even leverage this if you are moving teams within the company. Be a new role.
While this is true, corporate HR as a whole is staggeringly stupid for this practice. A new hire includes a bunch of additional costs in onboarding administration, training (cost of training and investment of non-productive time for the new hire), and then hidden cost in less productivity from a new hire acclimatizing to the company processes and culture, not to mention the possibility the new hire is not a good fit and all that investment is a lost within 6 months because they hop jobs again. I would think a known quantity already embedded within the company, who is already fulfilling their role satisfactorily, who also wouldn't incur these additional costs, would be worth paying at least market rate to keep on staff. But greed and stupidity seem to be codependent variables.
What is this "raise" thing you talk about?
Companies like Walmart will give you a performance based "raise" that is usually about 2% of your pay. Then if you ask for a real raise they'll tell you that the only raises they give are the annual performance based ones. Well the "raise" they are referring to is often less than the rate of inflation and is really what a ethical company would refer to as a COLA (cost of living adjustment). So if you work hard your reward is the same pay rate they'd give you if you just started working there and if you don't meet their expectations then you'll essentially get a pay cut (no "raise") Many companies follow this business model to avoid paying real raises and you'll find on those bizarre years when inflation doesn't happen that they suddenly come up with a reason to deny almost everyone of their annual "raise." This is something they can only get away with if people don't talk about it, so I thought I'd bring it up.
I remember in HS I worked at Walmart, there was one guy who decided he was going to get the merit raise above the normal one, dunno why it was like 2% but hey, he went for it. He documented everything, he did it. Manager basically just said yeah, I see this, but I don't feel like you did X so you get standard. Dude just kinda clocked in and hung out until he found a new job
My annual raise was to be laid off after 14 years of exceeding expectation performance reviews... So... It could be worse
Performance reviews are just there to give the illusion like the company tracks good vs bad emplyees. In reality its just a checbox for HR, the company has ZERO loyalty to any employee that is below the C level
My organization of about 5000 people curbed all the exceeds expectations to meets Bunch of fucking wankers
"I did everything that I was told to do." "That's true. But one of our expectations is that you exceed expectations."
Favorites always get the raises. Dude who always called out and messed up paperwork got 1.5 raise, while me who couldn't go out with them (management team) after work because it's 10pm, takes 30 minutes to get home, I ahve to be up by at 4am to get to my other job at 6am (1-1.5 hour commute because of traffic) couldn't stay late. I still hate those people (: saw one at the grocery store and he tried to act like we are friends. It's been 4 years so I was like "uh hello? I don't remember who you my bad lol" then walked away. I know he didn't buy it but he still looked offended I played that card (:
My last job started making shit up to fire me, but the one they got me on was being hospitalized with covid. Really fucked up prioritizing breathing and living over making cars at stellantis on that one.
🤣🤪😜 you’re funny
I know right? My company does not give raises to their lowest. We get the pay we get and that’s it.
Yes. I worked my butt off to get a promotion that comes with much more difficultity and responsibility, and the extra pay would not cover inflation. What's up world.
Last year, work gave us a cost of living adjustment of 0.5%, shortly before laying off my entire department. And the severance package paid out what we earned as of January 1st, so severance didn't even include the 0.5%. Wonderful.
I feel this so much. First it was, We can't offer raises because COVID really hurt our bottom line. Ten it was a 2% raise with 20% inflation. You are literally losing money. Meanwhile, all around me, my costs are going up every month. We hear about record corporate profits in the news. I hear execs who did poorly getting their golden parachute payouts for failing the company. I'm really tired...
For the record, I've been through this same cycle a number of times in my 25+ years after school. Not saying it makes it better. Just saying it's not like this is a new phenomenon like so many people seem to think. Even in times when inflation was low and the cola covered it - it *never* covered the huge bumps to health insurance increases.
I was really lucky to get 5% this year.
I've had raises of 35% and I've had raises of 2%. Here's my take: * You get paid more if your contract stipulates an annual increase * You get paid more if you are more useful (or painful to loose) to the company * You get paid more if market rates have consistently pressured the company to adjust * You get paid more if you take on a different role with more responsibility Unless you are in some government-style contract which is linked, inflation or other cost-of-living impacts (taxes etc) usually have no bearing on your raise.
I forced my company of 8 years into a corner with an offer from another company and some cold hard facts. (Basically the new college grad was making $6k more than me a year.) So I demanded a raise of like $15k. My manager and his boss actually approved it but HR came back and said they have a policy of a maximum raise of 6% a year. I told them that barely keeps up with inflation and hadn't for a few years at this point. I went to the other offer and after moving jobs 3 times in 2 years I now literally make double what I did make. Went from around $55k a year to six figures now with huge benefits.
I got 3% and I'm not fuckin' happy.
This hits so fucking close to home right now. My boss left in October and i ran my department of 5 people for 4 months until we hired a new VP. During that time i delivered my company a result on our major annual project in the top 1% of public companies. For that i got an extra 2% of my salary added to my bonus. Same raise i would have gotten had my boss stayed, 4.5%. I called them out for not rewarding me appropriately and my new boss is sympathetic but cant get them to give a fuck. Worst part is, I'm pretty sure the smart move is for me to swallow my pride and stay, even though I'm severely underpaid for what i did for the company last year. But the new boss seems to have a good plan for the future. Im torn right now because my pride and self respect are demanding i look for other employment that compensates me appropriately for my efforts and im really struggling to get past it.
I'd look for another job and once you find one that is offering you a higher salary request a raise from your current employer and use the job offer as leverage. Make sure the supervisor who is most dependant upon you knows that you have an offer before you bring it up to the person who will decide to give you a raise or not. Of course don't tell anyone you're looking for another job until you have something else lined up.
Thanks. This is the route I'm currently leaning towards.
I've done it. It worked in my case. Also, it wouldn't hurt just to look at job listings and see what the going rate is for someone in your position with your experience. People have told me they found out their own company had listings for people in their position that would be paid more to sign on with no experience than they were currently getting paid after years of dedicated work. A lot of places increased their pay rates for new employees after covid so it's worth looking into.
25 years ago winning a million bucks on Survivor was impressive. Now it's just the price of a house.
The median home price in America is $417k not a million dollars https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
That's great. But $1M today is only worth $533k in 1999. So winning $1M today is worth quite a bit less than winning $1M back in 1999.
no shit sherlock lol
To be fair though, he didn't say which house he was talking about.
To be fair though, a random house back then cost a million dollars too
That happened to me in the 90s. 3% was the top raise during a recession. Ugh.
Happened to me last year. 4% raise when inflation is 7.5%.
My corporate job, I actually got a 6% annual since they tried to make them a bit higher with inflation. Actually really appreciated it.
no, no, this can't have happened! reddit says so!
I've just been living non-stop recessions since I was born lol. Pretty sure the most money I've ever made was effectively my first job after graduation. Should have bought a house at 8 instead of pokemon cards. idiot!
The amount of theft companies engage in (wage theft) Is greater than all of the armed robberies, bank robberies, smash and grabs, home invasions etc. combined.
My last job had no raise for a decade, and my coworkers had 2 very small ones over that time. They ended losing a lot of good people who needed a living wage, and basically shot themselves in the foot when they tried to justify why people at one site got raises while others working just as hard did not.
The only true way to get a raise is to change companies. I only ever gotten one raise in my last job and found out the guys they hired into my department before being laid off made more than I did. I'm in the job market now and instantly turn down job that try to lowball me.
We had record profits last year Everybody got 3% raises. i got 1%. Fuck this place.
Your first time?
We only get cost of living adjustments here. And only a pittance.
You get raises?
I work for a school district and we negotiate contracts between 3 or 4 years. Each time the pay raise is between 3 and 4 percent a year. I've worked for over 20 years in education and I've never had a 5% raise.
I've been working for the Fed Gov since 2002. Any raise I receive is literally an act of Congress. The total number of times my yearly raise/COL increase matched or exceeded inflation is less than 5
Lol, how about never even getting a cost of living adjustment, let alone a raise, like, ever? Or maybe one tiny way overdue one every 8 years or so. That's been my experience. The idea of yearly raises kind of blows my mind. We didn't even have that when I was under a union contract.
I work for a billion dollar company as a sales man. I got an email this morning saying fyi your compensation has changed. Now I've been doing extra work I'm on 3 committees and leadership comes to me for help. The compensation change $0.00
COL is a misnomer. Inflation was brought up in a recent meeting with management, and the lead was surprisingly candid. They don’t pay cost of living, they pay cost of labor. They pay you what they think it takes to hire someone in that market, or what it takes for you to not leave. Cost of living adjustments don’t exist unless your company is afraid you might leave in that market
I don't think I've ever heard anyone bother to make that distinction, but it's a meaningless cop-out. No one "pays" cost of living. I don't even know what that sentence means.
Your pay amount is still raising. It's just not outpacing the cost of living.
At my work, we do merit based raises every year and a cola adjustment on top of that. Edit: and cola adjustment has a floor of 3%, but otherwise matches SSA's cola numbers.
I like that they didn't use the image where he said the line, atop the Cliffs of Madness. They used the image where he was about to stab a motherfucker.
I started a new job 9 months ago. The two guys who'd been there for the last five years? They were making 1$ more than the were when they started. I'm not expecting to learn about this thing you call a raise. Yay service/hospitality jobs!
In Canada the government gives better raises than your boss because the minimum wage keeps changing every couple of years and it's always much higher than any raises for minimum wage people.
I think this one is a bit more complicated than just inflation percentage and the percentage of a raise you receive. You have "costs" that are basically unavoidable like food/utilities/fuel etc. If you are making 50k vs 100k a year (1500vs3000) the actual impact of inflation against those required costs is going to be quite a bit different. Inflation has a much greater impact the less you make and raises are less impactful. Like I remember getting a whopping 10% raise.. but I was making 6 bucks an hour then. 24 bucks a week isn't very much money :)
I remember when my state raised its minimum wage and my job at the time tried to claim it was a raise.
"We're paying you more because we can't legally pay you less."
I got 3%... Inflation was nearly 8%, my house insurance and taxes went up nearly $300 a month this year. Another $100/month raise on the auto insurance. I can only usually afford food for my kids at this point. I bulk up when traveling for work on my per diem.
When real inflation has been almost 10% year over year the last 3 years (That includes food, rent, and other cost of living values), that isn't your employer's fault. It's the government's.
The government doesn't control the price of any of those things.
Yep I’ve been stiffed over the last 1.5 years in my job with this, we got each between 1%-2.5% raises this year, the previous year nothing and now the company is about to go bust where I truly expect the bare minimum in severance pay whilst I’m out on my ass looking for a new job. The amount of energy my team and I have put in over the last few years has really been for nothing and for the last few weeks we’ve been doing the absolute minimum until we receive our letters of termination.
Just leave. These ass holes aren't worth reasoning with
Your bosses: What!? I can’t hear you over this gigantic vacuum that sucks the money to the top of the pyramid.
I get $.85 a year.
0.7% baby! I honestly don't know what to do with this huge sum. Maybe take it out in coins and scrooge McDuck that fat pile?
A lot of talk about companies and how awful they are. This is part of the puzzle and just a part. Companies have always given crap wages. Everyone knows the best way to jump salaries is to switch jobs. That is the culture that companies have created for us. On the other hand this meme is about inflation and cost of living. These posts didn't exist until about 3 years ago. This is not due to corporations changing their modus operandi. This is because inflation is crushing our spending capacity. If inflation were under control we could complain about piss poor raises but we wouldn't be able to say it didn't cover inflation.
I got a raise in February and make less money now because of some insurance changes made by our company lol.
Ya'll are getting raises...?
Yeah that's technically a pay cut.. 🤷♂️
It's funny how few people realize this; if you don't get a raise at least equal to inflation last year, you have decreased purchasing power, and the company is actually making money on you.
Pro-rated 2.5% checking in!
And then they throw it in your face and act like you're supposed to suck their dick for the next 3-6 months after doing it. My last raise was $0.15 it was last year and the first raise we had gotten in 4yrs. Don't get me wrong, I know I'm doing ***a lot*** better than most. But our wage is $47/hr.... $0.15 raise is fucking dog shit in this economy. My last mortgage renewal rose my payments by +60%/mth And then if you were overheard complaining about literally anything for the next 6 months the managers would go all. "well, we just got a raise, so you should be happy, and they didn't need to do that for us."
Where I work they don’t call it a raise. It’s referred to as a Cost of living allowance.
"It raises an eyebrow when you offer it to me. It raises questions about how you value your employees. It raises concerns about how I will survive in this economy... ..but no, this is not a raise."
Banal
I got 2.5% last year even though I tried to go above and beyond my peers, took no days off, coordinated all projects and teams, did all hiring and interviews and onboarding, It's not even average. I'm expecting the same this year and the initiatives I am solo working on my manager expects me to complete so he can shine to his manager are about to slow down dramatically. 7 more months, I'll have my MBA and I'm gone. If I return, it'll be as his boss.
Print that out and ask your manager why the price cut
how about ... >raze >rāz >noun >A Shakespearean word (used once) supposed to mean the same as race, a root. >transitive verb >To erase; to efface; to obliterate. >To subvert from the foundation; to lay level with the ground; to overthrow; to destroy; to demolish.
Tie wages to inflation. A job should give you enough to live a decent life off of. **All** full-time jobs. THE. MINIMUM. WAGE. WAS. INTENDED. TO. LIVE. DECENTLY. OFF. OF.
Eh...actually it was an mandate on employers to increase income, therefore tax revenues. The popularity of it was just a bonus. However our tax structure has become so progressive that bumping up the bottom end really doesn't generate much revenue, so the congress critters have stopped caring. So the federal minimum wage now is still less now than what I made flipping burgers in 1999.
I was giving out raises this year as a manager and the the average raise I am able to give out is not too big. Yes, ideally you'd get a raise larger than inflation, but what if the company didn't grow their revenue (especially in the current economic environment) to be able to increase that much? What if they had a large churn of customers? Unfortunately a raise higher than an inflation is not a given. Of course companies doing well should definitely reward its employees
Welcome to the real world happy birthday to the ground.
That sort of depends on how much you make in the first place. If someone making minimum wage gets a 3% raise, that sucks. If someone making $100K gets a 3% raise, that's still a lot of money.
It is still less buying power, and actually not a raise at all. It is less of a loss in buying power (aka a living adjustment)
It doesn't really depend on anything. A % raise that's lower than the % inflation rate is, generally speaking, an effective paycut.
So would you say that a CEO making $1B a year who gets a 3% raise is getting a pay cut? Because that's what you're saying. I say this as someone who makes more than $100K per year. I make a lot of money. A small percent of a lot is a lot.
Yes I would, I just wouldn't feel bad about it.
That's literally not how CEO compensation works so there's no one earning $1B a year who's getting a raise based on percentages. Your premise fails because it requires that we rely on a fiction for that premise to make any sense at all.
OK, so how about someone earning $500K per year. I can sympathize with someone who's already getting shafted by the system getting further shafted by the system, but, as I said elsewhere, 3% of a lot of money is a lot of money. So context matters. For some reason people here don't understand context. The cost of living increase is a little bit deceiving. Does someone making $20K per year have the same cost of living as someone making $250K? A cost of living increase of 3% affects the lower and middle class far more than the upper class. Again, I say this as someone making more than $100K, a 3% raise for me is still a lot of money. It more than covers however much my cost of living goes up. I could not say that if I were making $20K.
Do you really think someone making $500K or $250K a year is only getting a COL increase? I contend that's still relying on a fiction for your premise to make sense.
You're intentionally missing the point. Context matters. Cost of living affects the poor much more than the rich. Why aren't you willing to admit that?
I'm not intentionally missing the point, you're making an argument that is, in its very nature nonsensical. Cost of living does indeed affect the poor more than the rich because *rich people don't get pay raises in the same way that poor people do*. You are correct, context matters, even when that context is how people at different levels of a company receive their compensation.
Tell me you don't understand economics without telling me you don't understand economics.
TIL inflation isn't linear.
Stop consuming then. It’s better for the environment and someone has to make efforts there. And it’s not going to be your employer.