First off, I want to explain this this without too many details, but enough I can get good advice off of. I currently work in a Healthcare IT related field as a helpdesk/specialist role with a degree in related field. A lot of my job is specialized in a sense of we have in house software that takes years to know how to navigate. This means issues related to the software are first handled by the techs, being myself. For the size of our company (over 200 clinics) our IT team is made up of about 5 helpdesk members, along with infrastructure and software team members.
We had an “incident” last year in which our systems were down over 2 weeks. The aftermath of this were pretty brutal, we had over a thousand open tickets by the time we got things back on track. Right before this I was cleared to work from home PERMANENTLY. I live less than an hour drive away (will be more important later). In the turn of this incident they brought in 2 contract help desk people, who were supposed to hit the ground running and clear a ton of tickets without much help. This did NOT happen, and I, along with my team had to hold their hand several steps of the way. 1 was let go months ago for lack of results, and the other one is still on for a few more weeks.
I talked with the 2nd one who was interested in staying full time as an employee. After talking a bit she mentioned she was hired for $40/hr on contract and I was absolutely floored. How the hell is she being paid $23 an hour more than me with less working experience? I thought to myself “ok, it makes sense she's on contract”. That was until she mentioned they offered her $23 an hour for the position, which is the same as mine and is REMOTE. Let's also not forget I was training her on things up until now. I only make $17 per hour and have more responsibilities. During this outage I was asked temporarily to set up computer hardware (images, QCing units) at the office. Something that was not part of my original job description.
A few weeks ago I told my boss I am refusing to do any more hardware work until my performance review is looked at, and he gave me absolutely great notes. My boss is a great guy, but is not in charge of this raise, the CIO is. He keeps saying he will talk with him, but I'm starting to doubt anything is going to happen and I feel like I'm at a standstill now. It's been a month now since my year performance review. I'm seriously contemplating sending our CIO something, but have no idea what to even say. My nerves are killing me each day this goes unresolved, but I'm tired of feeling undervalued and underpaid.
Thank you for anyone who reads all this, and I apologize for the ranting on top of asking for advice. I would greatly value any constructive feedback you can give. Simply quitting is last resort, as I have nothing lined up, and finding something remote is quite a bit harder. If anyone is crazy enough to write a email draft I'd definitely consider using it with revisions. If you want more info feel free to ask. I probably gave too much, but I'm at the limit of giving a fuck much longer.