by Pedgerow » Wed Jan 04, 2023 10:31 pm
I posted a good thing in the good-things thread; now here's a real frustration.
My work's owner has never been a big believer in giving us raises. Work should be its own reward, and we should all work there because we love each other so much. And we do, apart from him. But we started complaining in summer, and were told we'd get the big raises we so richly deserve in August. Nothing came, but on the 1st of September, it was announced the company was being sold. Go ask the new owners for raises, you filthy ingrates. All right; we will.
The new owners love giving out raises. They've certainly been enriching the fucks who never do anything, one of whom is the boss's wife and HR lady. She's a lovely person, but how much HR really needs to be done in a company so small that your complaints will immediately be identified as coming from you? Nobody says anything, except to demand more money which we never get. The months since this summer have come and gone, and we keep hearing promises and receiving £0.00 more each month. We were eventually told it would all be sorted in November, and in November we were told it wasn't done yet because they were fine-tuning the exact details to make sure everything was right.
So imagine my utterly incendiary fury when I was finally called into a meeting with our hardworking HR lady who has been promoted by the new owners, and she gave me a letter with my raise in it. I will paraphrase the letter below:
Dear Pedgerow,
Congratulations on all your hard work; we are pleased to offer you the below fabulous salary increase:
[£2,500 a year less than you make now]
Please note this includes all bonuses you receive for on-call work and out-of-hours IT support you provide.
Kind regards,
Work
I told her it was less than I get now. She disagreed. Nobody in my company knows how much I make, which is pretty absurd already. Also, other colleagues have apparently had the same issue, including someone who makes minimum wage and was gleefully offered less than minimum wage. I'm pretty sure that's a crime. My theory is that someone, behind the scenes, gave the boss's wife, sorry, the HR lady, salary information from a couple of years ago by mistake. That would explain why she thought she was increasing a salary past minimum wage (which was lower a couple of years ago) and wound up with a number that it's illegal to pay someone.
I have since found out that I include bonuses and extra payments in my salary, while they were adding the money to my base salary, and that's why my raise (which is less than the bonuses) resulted in a lower salary than before. But of course, the letter said that this new salary includes all bonuses. So am I losing those?
This is by far and away the most egregious shitshow I have seen at my already amateurish workplace. And most annoyingly of all, it took months to get this raise because they were, supposedly, making sure all the contract details and numbers were correct. If they were going to just get it completely wrong, why not get it wrong months ago instead? They've obviously been lying when they said they were closely scrutinising all the figures. It's absolutely shambolic. I will have to wait till the end of this month to see how much I get paid, but I hope everyone involved in this utter catastrophe feels appropriately humiliated. (I will consider forgiving them if I do actually get a raise, of course).