I've been at my current job for a year now; I was trained along with the rest of my team in the same position. We're in customer service, fully remote, and we work for a big company. During the year we were “upskilled” to taking live chats and social media DMs with a new system from phone calls and emails.
The company overall isn't terrible. Benefits are good for the U.S., good work culture overall. Pay is mediocre.
We recently received indivudal annual reviews of our performance with metrics that were documented throughout the entire year. All of us received a “merit-based bonus” of 60 cents per hour. My coworker happened noticed that in the listing for new hires to our position, the pay rate is the same after the bonus. She and I brought this to our supervisor's attention, who acted like he didn't know. He said he'd bring it up to the higher ups. He asked us to keep it between the two of us for now.
Yesterday I had a meeting with him and he said we'd talk about it next meeting in a few weeks. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but my coworker told me she asked him in their meeting and he said he spoke to the higher up and they said there's nothing they can do. She told him we work hard and are held to strict numbers, we perform well and were even “upskilled” right before the busy season. He was backed into a corner and spouted nonsense about the economy, and whatnot. Our raise isn't even enough to cover inflation, not to mention in every company-wide meeting the higher ups talk about how the company has had record breaking growth. Every single time.
My supervisor asked my coworker again not to tell anyone, that he was going to break it to them himself. He also all but confirmed that he did know they were raising the starting salary by the 60 cents and that we were matching that, that it wasn't a merit-based bonus at all. At our team meeting today, he didn't mention it at all.
My coworker and I know we're being mistreated and hate the outright lying and scummy behavior. We want to make everyone else aware and see if we can bring this to the higher ups ourselves. Any advice would be highly appreciated. Also fuck capitalism.
TL;DR Merit-based raise turned out to match starting salary for new hires. Supervisor lied about this and is trying to keep it a secret from everyone who doesn't know.