My pay is stagnant. How/should I ask for a raise?
I tried posting this in r/jobs and in r/personal finance and it got taken down in both subs. Someone mentioned I should try posting it here, so here we go:
I am a customer service manager at a car dealership. My duties are varied and plentiful. I have a team working under me. I also have not received a raise in 4 years.
I am salaried at $49,500, and grossed about 56k in 2021 when vacation pay and bonuses were added in. Over the past few years, I have also been handed an entire second department to manage for no compensation, and I single-handedly plan and arrange all work social activities and events. This is in addition to my ‘regular’ job and duties. For said work activities, I am expected to front the expenses myself and then get reimbursed up to 2 weeks later.
I have never been given a performance review. I don’t even know how to approach asking for a raise. My workplace is quick to place blame and slow to give praise, so I doubt they would deem me ‘worthy’ of a raise. I have had numerous, documented successes, but they typically get dismissed, even in conversation.
I know the advice would be to get another job, but I recently learned that I am pregnant, which kind of makes changing jobs a bit of an impossibility right now.
To give you an idea of management’s mentality: I will be leaving on maternity leave in the fall. One of my employees will be acting as team lead and taking over a majority of my duties while I am gone. I told my department head that he should have his pay bumped up because he will have more responsibility and more work to do. The reply was that he ‘has to earn it.’ I said that by agreeing to be trained in my duties and taking on that responsibility, he is earning it. The response was ‘we’ll see what happens in the future.’ Except that I need to start training him now, and I refuse to make him take on more until his pay is raised.
Should I try for a raise? I kind of figure that I’m stuck here anyway, so couldn’t hurt? I don’t know how to approach it. Has anyone experienced asking for a raise from difficult management? Or should I just leave it and try and find another job prior to the end of my maternity leave? Financially, I can’t just quit, as much as I would like to sometimes. I’m in Ontario, for context and my maternity leave will be about a year.