I work as an editor in California; I have fibromyalgia which my work knows about. Last week I hired a new assistant, who previously worked at the company, at a $2 an hour rate higher than my salary. She deserves it (and more) and my boss and I agreed to her counteroffer quickly. I’d learned in a conversation earlier in the day that not only had that assistant made significantly more than me in a lower-level role when we were on the same team prior to this role, but that the company changed the pay scale for my entire department except my team right after she left months ago because they were panicking about retention, and I’m currently getting paid much lower than other editors and not even in the editors part of the pay scale. They claim my department wasn’t changed because it’s the only one supervised by my boss, but they only said they’d chat about making the pay scale applicable to my department after I pressed them.
My boss, meanwhile wants to wait until my review in months to increase my salary and actually said he didn’t think I’d be offended getting paid less than the person I supervise again. He said he doesn’t think we communicate clearly enough about a certain subject when he hasn’t been asking me about it, and he wants our communication to improve and to have a review before I get a raise. A senior editor who helped devise the new pay scale says there’s no need for me to wait for my review to get a raise, while my boss is using my promotion and complaining about the overtime I’ve been incurring (from lack of help without an assistant) as apparent excuses for not giving me a raise now. Do they have any obligation to back pay for changing the pay scale months ago/is there anything I can do legally, or should I just walk?