Employee offered 2% raise after their 4th year at the company and a year of record-breaking profit, exceeding revenue targets by 40%: 'Bragging about record profits and expected us to just smile'

It's always something when you've had record-breaking years of work, only to be met with attitudes of economic austerity when it comes time to discuss raises, promotions, and all those other vague promises and carrots on sticks that have been dangled in front of you for the last year.

Regardless of whether or not those announcements of "record profits" are true, they're really just made and pieced together out of stretched truths so the directors and C-suite executives can justify claiming their bonuses, leaving everyone else to scramble for the scraps.

And that metaphorical carrot on a stick that was dangled out in front of you? It's never going to come to pass, regardless of how many times you get a first down, you're going to be subject to perpetually moving goal posts indefinitely.

The reality, as I see it, is this: Who is ever going to pay more for a job they consider already done? Psychologically, it's not something that most of us will ever be prepared to agree to. The reality is that if you go around making a profit without first securing yourself fair compensation, you're never going to see a cent extra that wasn't agreed upon in writing beforehand.

Imagine you've hired a contractor who has priced a job to build your bathroom for you, he's finished the work, and your shiny new bathroom is ready to go; you've already been using it, you've paid the final invoice, everything is finalized, done, and dusted.

But suddenly, sometime later, the contractor comes to you, asking you for more money because they did such a good job building your bathroom. They claim you might have had some conversation about it at some point, but nothing that either of you can really substantiate or put a finger on. You are going to be extremely reluctant to pay them in this instance, no matter how much you like your new bathroom. That's just the reality of such a situation.

And, while the employment relationship is certainly different, it still exists within the same reality. Someone only wants to pay you for what you will do, what you are able to do, and to make up for the time and resources that it would cost them otherwise to do it themselves or with a like replacement.

Nobody ever wants to pay more "retroactively."

As an added bonus (but not the one you're actually after) once management realizes that the work is getting done for a given cost, they'll expect it to be done at that same efficiency and same cost forever. 

So, while you've been hustling, working extra unreported hours trying to justify that promotion, you've just been setting yourself a new baseline expectation. Of course, it's a catch-22 because you can't outright go demanding that raise or up and quit because you didn't get it. A lot of workers are in employment situations where they don't have a lot of other options, and that reality puts them in a more vulnerable situation.

This topic comes up every year around the end and start of the year; it's understandable, something well worth revisiting since it's something that's on everyone's mind. This employee found themself faced with the reality.