Slashdot Mirror
Are Skimpy Raises the New Normal?
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld just released their latest salary survey, and it finds that IT worker bees have once again only received small raises. The article notes, "IT raises still lagged slightly behind the average of about 3.2% for all U.S. workers as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the majority of respondents (69%) said their 2004 base salary increased from one year ago, 31% experienced either no change in salary or had their pay cut." It goes on to quote LAN specialist Stephen Noisseau as saying, "I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles ... I'll take 4% over nothing. We're getting basically cost-of-living raises.""
I'll say once again:
Blue Collar = Organized Labor
White Collar = Disorganized Labor
Democracy is about working together to be treated fairly. Why should corporate profits leap by huge percentages while employee salaries do not?
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
After 2 years of unhappiness and general lack of hope in my current job, my group has a 30% turnover.
I remember hearing over and over that raises where only 2% for the last couple years. In fact, due to cost cutting they stopped collecting the trash cans on a daily basis. Now, instead of individual trash cans in our cubes, we have communal trash cans in the hallways, which are emptied once a week. BTW, we keep having record quarters.
So, when my boss's boss threatened to give me a bad review and no raise, I shrugged my shoulders and informed him that "My annual 2% raise is close enough to 0% that it didn't matter." I then proceeded to tell him that he had a structural problem. The lack of raises provided him with no "stick" and the lack of advancement opportunities provided him with no "carrot."
I have already decided to leave as soon as the first of the year comes around (and I quality for the End-of-Year bonus).
The funny thing. I honestly believe I got a 2% raise last year. That is what everyone says the raises were. I was doing some record keeping this weekend and noticed that I actually got a 8.25% raise last year.
Sometimes perception and reality don't match.
I am still leaving though.
Salaries in India to go up by 11.4 percent, possibly the highest in the whole world.
As a small mobile software developer in India currently looking for fresh business and perhaps adding employees other than myself to the business, this news makes me have second thoughts!
I've gone both ways in pay scale. When I worked for a university once there was a stretch of three years when we never got a pay raise. Usually we only got a 1% or less pay raise. When I became an assistant manager I found out what was going on - the higher-ups were taking all of the money even when the state congress expressly stated that no managerial personnel was supposed to take a pay raise for that year. Pay raises of 3-5% were the norm.
On another front, a friend of mine was also working at the university. After three or four years of never getting a pay raise he decided to find out what was going on. In his case, he wanted to look at the accounting books. It turned out that the accounting books were on the top floor of the library accesible only by stairs and no photography equipment was allowed on the top floor. Also, no pens, no paper, no pencils, nothing - except yourself. (Althought you could ask for a pencil and paper as you will see here in a sec.) It took several hours (and several days) of making requests for various accounting books, being told they were not available, being denied access to records, and the like to finally get hold of the books he wanted to look at. Turns out they were all done in pencil and several of them had areas that had been erased. Lucky for him, the sections he was looking for were still in good condition. After looking at the pages he asked for some paper and a pencil. The person would only give him one sheet of paper, one pencil, and stood over him while he copied the information from the book to ensure he didn't modify the books. Only one sheet of paper was allowed per person per visit. So it took him a while to get all of the facts. It turned out one person who had hired on with the department had funneled almost all of the funds to themselves. Something like a 30% pay increase each year for the past few years thereby doubling their salary in a very short amount of time. Since the "librarian" had stood over him and watched him copy everything he had the foresight to get the person's name as a witness to what he'd done so there could be no mistake about what he'd found out. He threatened to expose the whole affair if the offending person wasn't fired. They were and the money got distributed like it was supposed to be distributed to everyone. No charges were ever filed against the other person.
This is why I hate the "let's hide what everyone makes" mentality of most companies. As the saying goes "Evil can not stand the light of day but loves the darkness of the night." Which is to say that you can not do covert things unless you hide, misdirect, or mislead others in what you are doing. So remember that the next time raises are (or are not) handed out. Those people above you didn't take a "0%" pay raise. They took their cut out first and then went "Oops! There's nothing left for the rank and file. Oh well! Maybe next year!"
One last thing: Any time your boss gives you little or nothing as a raise; just remember this one thing - Every company has to file their income tax returns and those returns are open to public scrutiny. But more importantly, there is a company that already does this for you. They are Standards and Poor. Any major library in any major city will have the S&P books on hand for each year. All you have to do is to go to the library and look up the year you are told you are not going to get a raise (or even if they cut your pay). You can look up your company's information, see what the head of your company had to say about that year's profit and loss, see what dividends were paid to the stockholders, and even see how much money the company's owner made for that year (and you can compare it to the year before's amount to see what kind of a raise they got). Go and look at it. See how much of a pay decrease they took. I think you will be very surprised to find that even in the worse years they didn't take a pay cut or no raise at all but instead usually take about a 7-10% increase every year. Not to mention bonuses they may have taken on top of their pay increases.
Something to think about.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
If enough tech workers do this then companies may give higher raises to keep their workforce. Or they (Like my company) will replace these people with people will less skills for less pay and train them with experience.
In other words, fire the experienced employees who want a decent wage and hire unskilled workers who don't have the guts to ask for more pay and let the customers suffer with bad support while the new class learns what the hell they're doing..
At my employer (we do contracted support) The client pays for training classes for new employees (these training classes are not as long as they should be but anyway) what happens if the company can't retain the new hires? They have to hire some more and the client has to pay for their training. At some point, the client gets tired of paying for new groups to be trained, and simply don't allow new classes. The result is a hiring freeze for that department. The employees on the project get overworked, irritable, ect. trying to cover the workload of a larger group. We may have oppertunities to earn more from overtime when this happens, sometimes these "oppertunities" are not our choice. In any case, the remaining employees don't get any additional compensation per hours for the extra workload. This situation continues until the company that hired us starts to lose money from their customers leaving from bad support or the employee numbers drop to a point where it is not possible to fulfill staffing hours. The only people who really suffer in the end is the employees who don't quit and the customers (end users) who deal with poor support.
This is what I don't understand. If you feel that a pay-cut is unfair, why do you stay with the company?
Health insurance. It isn't the only reason, but it is decent sized. In particular pre-existing ailments. A lot of health insurance plans will not cover pre-existing conditions until you've paid 12 months worth of fees.
For anyone with a kid or spouse with a pre-existing condition, the thought of no coverage, especially if the condition could dramatically worsen, is enough to keep them from even considering switching employers.
Which, is why I believe employeer-provided health insurance is evil. I don't believe in state-provided insurance either for all the inefficiences that come with socialism. I do advocate for personal health insurance, where you are personally responsible for each dollar spent for fees and it has no ties to your employer or any other group that would use it to coerce you into acting against your own best interests.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.