TLDR: 3 of the 5 people in my department quit, my employer will not compensate me and the other remaining employee for taking on the extra work for several months (and more to come), and my new boss said despite taking on the extra work I actually don't deserve my salary.
My department at the time I was hired exactly a year ago was staffed with 5 employees, with the boss being C Suite. Csuite had a lead. One month after the other, after the other, three members of my team left. One took another position in the company, one took another job, and one quit outright after only two weeks of covering for Csuite.
The lead who quit last said the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, and their departure pissed off our CEO, who then dismissed all the candidates we had interviewed to re-staff our department. He said he wanted to hire a new CSuite before hiring anyone else. This left all of the workload on me, the lowest level in the department (without a degree, but with a heavy amount of college education and even more work experience), and the other employee in the department who did a very specialized role and who was not trained on our day to day tasks or how to complete them. The first departure was four months ago. The last was a month and a half ago.
CEO hired an outside company to temporarily stand in for CSuite. We have now hired permanent CSuite, who has been working here for two weeks. We have not hired anyone to help cover the lower level work. New CSuite is different towards us every day. Their approach to handling common problems is x one day, and -xyzabc2017 the next. New CSuite talks to Adjunct Employee and I like we are children, saying we are “doing so much!” And that we are “amazing!” And that they can't wait to watch us grow.
Adjunct Employee and I have not been rewarded at all for covering the entire department. No bonus, no raise, no title change, no gift card, nothing. The burnout is killing us both. I am now medically fatigued and on three medications to offset the exhaustion, and AE is on benzodiazapenes and cries daily over the stress.
Yesterday, I was talking through email with new CSuite about my frustration related to a task I am covering. I was saying that the task in particular was causing other departments to attack me and my work (my work is correct, save human error here and there; other departments are sweating because the task is making them look bad because I began notifying them whenever I had to make a change to their work. I do this not to be corrective, but to let them know that their finished work has been changed so they can update clients accordingly), and that despite her rule to not hire anyone else for another 60-90 days, I was tired and didn't want to continue working on it without being compensated or have my title altered to match the skill level of the work. Honestly, before new CSuite arrived, we all assumed they would take this task on given the nature of it. CSuite hasn't sat with either me or Adjunct Employee to see any of our work yet. They do not know the department's processes yet, nor all of the tasks we are covering.
In the email, new CSuite responded that they hadn't been with the company long enough to evaluate my performance, and they asked for a reasonable amount of time to do so. No problem. The conversation continued, and it eventually got to a point where new CSuite alleged that I was not fulfilling all of the responsibilities on a job listing for my role (I applied for another department, and HR pulled my resume for this position). I showed them the task list I was given when I started, and told them that I was covering the work assigned to me, as well as the things I took over from the departed employees. New CSuite then said that it wasn't my fault that old CSuite didn't lower my pay when they lowered my responsibilities by giving me the task list when hired.
Fuck my job.