Everyone got a raise to them same amount, lost my higher pay than the newer employees
"Why do you think you are entitled to ""fairness""? In this world you get what you get. I am pretty sure your employer is not paying you for how you ""feel"" either. And by-the-way turning up on time and not leaving early is not exceptional behaviour; it is expected behaviour. Bottom line: do you add more value to your employer's business then the new hires? If so, ask for a raise, if not find a way to add more value and then ask for a raise or keep doing what you're doing and accept what you get." This is one effect of rising minimum wages: compression of lower pay tiers. The new employees might have been offered a lower starting rate than the result of your raise, but your employer did not have that option as a matter of law. The same thing happened to me when I worked retail during my college years. I agree that it is unfair however, it is what it is. With that being said, there may be several factors that you should consider: the new employees might have more experience or qualifications then you, your work performance based on your manager's perspective, and like in my situation when I worked retail, I started out as a cashier which get paid less than sales associates but when I moved to a sales associate position I still got paid less and when I got my raise I got the same pay a new sales associate would get. I suggest you suck it up and ride it through until you get a real job because in retail, in my opinion, you are expendable, if you don't like their pay they will find someone else. This question is largely opinion based but I wanted to balance out the people jumping on you. There are lots of factors that go into salary/pay, such as what you contribute to the company and whather you go above or beyond whats expected of you. I would say seniority is one factor, or at least there is a case to be made that it is important. If someone has worked 5 years for me, that is five years that I have not had to search, interview, and train a replacement. I am not a business owner but I do employ people and when someone quits its an extremely stressful process. Not having to go through that, again in my opinion, is worth a small bump in pay. I cant comment on if its fair or not. That is opinion. What is fact is that whenever a broad group of people are given a pay raise for arbitrary reasons and other employees arent, its creates discontent, it hurts morale, employees leave, and in severe cases the business becomes crippled. So Im not sure if its fair, but is it a bad idea? Generally. See here and I highly recommend going here for anyone who thinks dramatically raising pay 'because its the right thing to do' is a good idea "You didn't get laid off or have your hours cut back when the minimum wage was raised? I guess you have much to be grateful for, including a higher hourly rate. An excellent record is its own reward. When you finish your degree you will be grateful for the good habits you have established. You won't ever lose a nights sleep looking back and thinking ""I wish I didn't do the right thing."" It's sad that there isn't a more immediate reward for doing more than average, but that's life, doing the right thing over a long period of time does eventually lead to the reward you're looking for. Sometimes those rewards aren't tangible."
I'm okay if the union sticks up for those only in the Union. If I get a pay raise because of my union affiliation, you don't deserve the same benefits. For what it's worth, in many other countries they've always sided with the Union.   To me this is a a direct attack on the middle class. If it hasn't already eroded enough it's only going to get worse. "The only thing worse than finding out you are paid less than a co-worker is finding out that you are paid more than all of your co-workers. A lot of people who *think* they would prefer an open and transparent pay-scale (as in unions), change their minds, when placed in one.   I have worked in and implemented both types, as both an employee and as an owner/manager. There are pluses and minuses to both.   - ""Transparent"" pay-scale is most effective in a high-turnover, aggressively performance-metric-oriented environment where you expect people to be competing for jobs, including their own job, every day. For example, a pool of commissioned sales-agents: the more you sell, the more you make. Winner gets a Cadillac. Runner-up gets a set of steak knives. Loser gets fired, that kind of thing. If you can't meet your numbers, we let other people start poaching your territory/clients and see what they can do.   - Where it doesn't work is in a salary-type position where people are expected to have multiple ""soft"" duties outside of core performance metrics. The reasons are multi-fold:  - One immediate effect of implementing performance-based pay for salary-type employees is that people who are in the office for 8 hours a day, five days a week, immediate start devoting their time and energy towards getting another notch up on the pay-scale, even at the expense of their co-workers, or the company. It intrinsically incentivizes ""gaming the system"", finding ways to attach your name to easy metrics, and to remove yourself from the most difficult problems. The people who are best at hitting metrics are often not even close to the MVPs.   - If instead you take a ""soft metrics"" or subjective/holistic approach to evaluation, then you get a culture of brown-nosing and office-politics. People start sabotaging the ""boss's favorite"" and pursuing approval and credit, rather than performance. Instead of fostering a team-oriented, problem-solving approach, it fosters a counter-productive buck-passing, credit-grabbing, and blame-avoidance approach.   Note that both of the above intrinsically incentivize risk-avoidance. If you get paid for the number of projects that have your name on them, you find some way to get your name attached to every project, and then move on to the next one, whether the last one was done or not. If you get based on how ""successful"" the projects bearing your name are, then you avoid anything challenging and make sure only to be attached to the easy ones with the best co-workers. And so on.   - Alternately, let's say we keep the same, generic, salary-oriented pay-structure, we just make everyone in a certain ""tier"" get equal salary, that everyone knows. That sucks all the life out of everyone's sails so fast it will make your head spin: you cannot get a raise for doing a better job, you get paid the same raise as your worst co-worker, every year, for as long as you work here. We will never cut your pay, all you have to do is not be the canary in the coalmine-- so long as you can identify the worst performer in your group, and so long as it's not you, your job is safe. What time do you have to arrive? 5 minutes earlier than the latest-arriving person. How early can you leave? 5 minutes after the earliest one to check out. How much work do you have to get done? Only as much as anyone else is doing. What will you get for being the hardest-working, earliest-to-arrive, latest-to-leave? The same as the worst performer gets: you'll be splitting your raise with him, since we don't credit individuals here, just job-titles.   Most jobs that can be easily automated, are automated. If you need a human employee to do it, it's usually because it involves a nontrivial amount of ""soft"" skills and fuzzy-logic type thinking and behavior. A machine programmed purely to make as many widgets per hour as possible, and motivated to so with human-style skills, ingenuity, and incentives, will tear down the whole factory and dismantle all its co-workers and ignore all quality-controls in order to keep producing widgets.   You can't reduce human beings to input-process-output flowcharts (or rather you can, but they will invariably find unintended ways to outsmart your design criteria, with unintended consequences). The reason you need a person instead of an automated process is because you need a whole host hard-to-define, soft/fuzzy/flexible critical-thinking type skills.   **Everyone's job seems easier to the people who don't have to do it, and there is a tremendous hidden danger to de-valuing personal desire to do a subjectively ""good job"" by quantifying/genericizing the value of their contribution.**  Personnel management is very difficult to reduce to an engineering problem. You usually need good managers who can identify and motivate good employees, who will feel lucky to have the job and the salary they have, and who will come in every day trying to earn it. Posting everyone's pay on a bulletin-board negates all those ""soft"" skills, by putting a quantified, black-and-white, relative value on everyone's contribution.   Even in a very large organization, the ""marketplace"" of employees is rarely large enough, and the quality of real-time metrics is almost never good enough to ""digitize"" the bell-curve of employee performance. You end up making it a square-wave that demotivates all but the most extreme outliers." "To add to MrChrister's answer:  Canada also has a Consumer Price Index (CPI) used to measure inflation that is distinct and separate from that maintained by the United States. There are differences in inflation between the U.S. and Canada because our currencies are different, and there may be different items in the ""basket"" of goods that constitutes the index. You can find current information on the Canadian CPI at Statistics Canada, here: Latest release from the Consumer Price Index. Also, the Bank of Canada – our central bank – maintains a free online Inflation Calculator.  The BoC's inflation calculator is handy because you can enter a dollar amount for a past date and it will figure out what that would be in today's dollars.  For instance, $100 in 1970 dollars had the same purchasing power (under the CPI) as $561.76 in 2009 dollars! And you're right – if you get a salary increase that is less than the rate of inflation, then in theory you have lost purchasing power.  So, anybody really looking for a raise ought to make an effort to get more than the increase in CPI.  Of course, some employers are counting on you not knowing that, because any increase that's less than CPI is effectively a salary decrease; which could mean more profit for them, if they are able to increase their prices / revenues at inflation or better. Finally, consider that salary & wage increases also contribute to inflation!  Perhaps you've heard of the wage/price inflation spiral.  If you haven't, there's more on that here and here." Keep in mind that unless you have a contract that says you get a certain amount of raise every year, the employer is not required to give you any raise. The quality of a raise is too subjective for anyone to tell you how to judge it.  You either get a raise you can live with, it makes you content/happy, and you continue working there, or you get a raise that does not satisfy you, and you jump ship to get more money. Some (most?) employers know that raises can be the tipping point for employees deciding to leave.  If you consistently receive raises greater than inflation rate, the message is that the employer values you.  If the opposite, they value you enough to continue your employment, but are willing to replace you if you decide to leave. Key thing here is there are three ways of getting increased pay with your current employer.  Cost of living or annual raise is the one that we are discussing.  Merit based raises are a second way.  If you think you deserve a raise, due to loyal consistent contribution, or contributing above your duty, or for whatever reason, then ask for a raise.  The third way is to be promoted or transferred to a higher paying position.  Often times, you should also make your case to your supervisor why you should have the new position, similar to asking for a merit raise. It would make sense to refuse a raise when it pushes your effective marginal 'tax' (including reduced benefits) above 100%.  The working poor (family of 4, 20K-40K in the US) often face marginal rates above 100% when you consider the phase out of various government benefits (EITC, insurance, housing,etc.)  You can see the research here and here. "So you are saying the game is rigged.  You said that the average raise has to be 4% and that is pre-decided.  So that means the game is rigged.  Also you discussed good and bad managers.  Well over 90% of managers I have had were horrible.   The good ones were great but they were few and far between.  Also you mentioned about how money is not everything.  The reason money is not everything is because the employees know they are not gonna get any more money.  So that is why they settle for ""casual friday"" and other bullshit perks." The prices would only rise proportionally if labor was the only cost at play and everyone made minimum wage.  If you look at major expenses such as rent, gas, utilities and food there is literally no reason to conclude their prices would change proportionally to minimum wage. I work as a state employee and I can look at my coworkers' salaries and their title online. At first my coworkers were shocked that I would do such a thing, but they quickly realized it was of benefit to them when I told them that from my analysis, no one at my department ever gets raises. Prior to this, they were led to believe that there actually were opportunities for advancement here.  Knowing typical salaries can also help when looking at going into a new industry in which you are unfamiliar, otherwise, you have no idea if a job offer you get is in line with others' compensation.  So yes, I believe that knowing others' salaries can be helpful to the average employee and keeping it secret is par for the course because it's detrimental to the company. "Problem is, my CEO told me I would ""get a raise every 12 days"" ""dollar here, dollar there"".   It's been 5 months of excellent work on my part, no bonus, no raise, nothing. I mean, I'm upset, but I wish I at least got recognized for my work. If it weren't for me doing something that got the attention of his wife (who also works here), he wouldn't even recognize me." "TLDR:  You will probably need to move to a different employer to get the raise you want/need/deserve. Some employers, in the US, punish longevity through a number of practices.  My wife worked as a nurse for about 20 years.  During that time she had many employers, leveraging raises with job changes.  She quit nursing about 6 years ago and was being paid $38/hour at the time.  She had a friend that worked in the same system for 18 years.  They had the same position in the same hospital that friend's current rate of pay:  $26/hour.  You probably don't want to be that person. Given your Stack Overflow participation, I would assume you are some type of web developer.  I would recommend updating your resume, and moving for a 20% increase or more.  You'll get it as it is a great time to be a web developer.  Spending on IT tends to go in cycles, and right now budgets are very healthy for hiring new talent.   While your current company might not have enough money in the budget to give you a raise, they would not hesitate hiring someone with your skills at 95K if they had an opening.  Its common, but frustrating to all that are involved except the bean counters that looks at people like us as commodities.   Think about this:  both sides of the table agree that you deserve a 5K raise.  But lets say next year only 3k is in the budget.   So you are out the 5k you should have been given this year, plus the 2k that you won't get, plus whatever raise was fair for you next year.  That is a lot of money!  Time to go! Don't bother on holding onto any illusions of a counter offer by your current employer.  There will be too much resentment.  Shake the dust off your feet and move on.    Edit: Some naysayers will cite short work histories as problems for future employment.  It could happen in a small number of shops, but short work histories are common in technology that recruiters rarely bat an eye.  If they do, as with any objection, it is up to you to sell yourself.  In Cracking the Code Interview the author cites that no one is really expecting you to stay beyond 5 years.   Something like this would work just fine:  ""I left Acme because there were indications of poor financial health.  Given the hot market at the time I was able to find a new position without the worry of pending layoffs.""  If you are a contractor six month assignments are the norm.  Also many technology resumes have overlapping assignments.  Its what happens when someone is in demand." So how do we get the money from the people that did not earn it, to the people that did earn it without the government redistributing it?  I think you may be thinking that I am saying everyone should always be equal when I am saying that we need to have a more proportional income distribution which, if done correctly, would make things way more equal than they are now. ...and why is that?  Almost every job out there has competition.  It may take some time, but if you are really unhappy with your salary or work situation, you can find a job somewhere else.  I'm in the IT industry and that's pretty much the only way I've been able to get a raise higher than 1%. "Many in management seem to live in an alternate reality from those who work for a living. When IBM shunted some techs into another company they put them on probation for a year (even though they were high performers - some with 25+ years at IBM = no job security) and cut their pay 25%.  The next time they went to move workers the first question was ""how much is the pay cut this time"". Management's reply, ""No pay cut because we found when we did it before it negatively affected morale.""   I thought: ""No kidding. They had to actually cut people's pay 25% to figure that out? What planet DO they live on?""" I'm trying to get the numbers to work. I built a quick spreadsheet that allocated the lost time as stated against the overall pay increase, assuming 1.5x for more than 40 hours.   I can't find a reasonable number of hours worked where a 9% cut in hours outweighs the near 20% increase in wages. "And that is my point: without specific dollar amounts...this is USELESS information.    The problem with this crap information is that some crappy operation will find a reason to pay themselves more for being a ""good boss"" thinking that will make up for any raises.   I'd take a better boss over a 5-cent an hour raise (and yes, I worked at McDonalds when raises were 0-5-10 cents an hour...and yeah, I would have liked a better boss for 5 cents).    However, for an annual job that pays $500/hr I'll gladly work in horrid conditions with a horrible boss doing awful things."