WANTING MORE: Business is improving, but workers say their salaries aren’t. (Getty Images)
She’s going to quit her job. Not today, not tomorrow, but sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she says. Right after her annual review, when her boss will tell her what great work she does, how invaluable she is, how much he appreciates her taking on projects that no one else is willing to touch and, how for all that, he’s giving her a 3.5, maybe 4, percent raise.
“Even if I get a 5 percent increase, big whoop,” says Mary, a marketing manager whose last name we can’t use for obvious reasons. After taxes and other contributions she figures that would amount to a whopping $54 additional dollars per week.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” she exclaims, noting that it won’t do squat to help her pay off her college loans or buy a house, so she and her fiancé can start a family.
“I like my job. I like my boss, this feels like home,” Mary says. “But if I don’t get 10 percent or higher. I owe it to myself and to my future to pack up and go.”
Yesterday’s recessional anthem of “Keep Your Job and Love It (and feel lucky to have it)” no longer resonates with workers, it seems. And while not every disappointed wage earner plans to break out into a chorus of “Take This Job and Shove It” at her annual review, if bosses don’t cough up the bucks for 2013, three out of four workers say that they’ll ditch their current jobs as soon as a better offer comes along, according to a recent survey conducted by Jobvite, a social recruiting platform used by companies and third-party recruiters.
It could be a wise move. Experts say that job changes typically yield a salary increase of 7 to 12 percent. Meanwhile, Zahir Ladhani, the president of Salary.com, notes that the projected national average for raises in 2013 is a mere 3 percent.
It’s not just the small raises that workers are projected to get for 2013 that are the issue; it’s also all the lousy (or nonexistent) raises they got in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Add to that the fact that many wage earners are now not only doing their own jobs but also those of their former co-workers who were laid off during the height of the recession and never replaced.
It seems that good, hard work isn’t producing the rewards that Mary and many others need or think they deserve.
Fred, a software engineer at an investment bank puts it this way: “When the market crashed, the big kahuna gave us a pep talk about how we needed to work together to pull through the storm, and how we’d soon be sailing high again and that we’d all share in the victory … ”
Well, the bank is doing better than ever, Fred says, but he predicts that his total compensation for 2012, after his holiday bonus is factored in, won’t be much more than it was in 2008. “Factor in inflation, and I’m losing ground,” he says. “Some victory.”
What Fred and others might not realize (or at least sympathize with) is that while employers aim to be fair to their employees, their obligation is to maximize profit for their shareholders, which in many cases means not paying more than they must. “Companies operate in a competitive environment,” says Kevin Hallock, a professor at Cornell University and author of “Pay: Why People Earn What They Earn and What You Can Do To Make More.” “Just because a company is doing well, it doesn’t mean that workers deserve big raises — or that the market demands it.”
But Fred understands how markets work too, and he’s sure that his particular skill set is worth more. So, if his employer can’t show him the money, he’s leaving. He sounds more sad than angry as he speaks; he’s been selected to lead a project next year, and he’d really like the challenge — but he’d also like to be able to send his twin girls to ballet lessons, take them on a Disney vacation and buy his wife an anniversary ring.
“If my boss can’t find a way to pay me enough to cover all that, I need a new boss,” he says. “Otherwise, I’m not doing right by my family.”