Evil HR Lady readers get a 10 percent discount at AIHR.
Enter the Code “evilhrlady” at checkout for a 20 percent discount.
E-mail me!. Unfortunately, I can’t answer every question, but I do try to do as many as I can. To increase your chances of getting your question answered, please limit yourself to two-three reasonably sized paragraphs and try to figure out what your real problem is. Punctuation and capitalization are pluses.
All HR people are evil, it’s in our job description. Or at least, that seems to be the prevailing theory. In reality, there’s just more going on behind the scenes than most people know. I’m here to demystify your Human Resources department and tell you just why you worked your tail end off all year and still got a 1.7 percent bonus.
At a former company, we weren’t fired for asking for a raise. We just weren’t given a raise. We were told that there was a committee that would decide who deserved a raise and how big a raise. We were also told that unfortunately, the committee was never able to meet, because at least one of them was always out sick or on vacation or on a business trip. We were never told just who was on the committee, supposedly to protect their privacy (and because they didn’t want people constantly pestering them about when the committee would meet), but I believe that it was because this way, we could never prove that all of them were in the office on the same day. We just had to take TPTB’s word for it that they were never able to get together.
So people started leaving in droves. It was customary to hear people saying, “I got tired of waiting for the committee to meet.” Eventually, I joined the choir and said, “I got tired of waiting for the committee to meet.” This was at the end of July. The office manager promised and guaranteed that the committee would meet before the year was up. I said that I didn’t want to wait that long.
On December 30, I met three of my former co-workers for lunch, and I was surprised to hear that the committee still hadn’t met. I said that the office manager had guaranteed that the committee would meet before the year was up, and I said that maybe it would meet the following day. They didn’t think so.
The following March, I was told that someone had asked a VP who people thought was on the committee (but there was no way of being sure), “When will the committee meet? I want a raise.” I was told that the VP claimed that he didn’t know anything about any committee. I was then told that this employee was fired soon afterwards, because he was suspected of having stolen money out of the petty cash box. Since there was no proof of this, he was merely told that his services were no longer needed.
He probably thinks that he was fired because he dared ask for a raise, but he wasn’t.