I work in healthcare. At one point, I had a nurse under my supervision. She recently retired after 32 years. During her time with me, another nurse doing the same job asked for a raise. This led me to find that this nurse – who’d only been with us for 2 years – was making more money than the more experienced nurse.
….Many meetings with HR later, and after much rapport building with them, I was able to ask: why, in a system that claims to value pay equity so much, was this pay disparity allowed to exist? The answer: because systemic raises aren’t enough to raise pay through market adjustments to equal what you’d pay a nurse with this much experience if you were to hire them externally. In other words: HR is forced to confront and compensate a person’s level of experience upon hire, whereas post-hire they can LITERALLY FORGET ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE.
I’m in management and slowly learning just how far down this rabbit hole of amorality goes. For now, my lesson is clear: HR is like a short-sighted, greedy child. It will chase ceaselessly after what it doesn’t have while callously tossing aside what it does. Never in my life have I witnessed such a bare naked examples of greed and immaturity made manifest at the level of an organization.