Story Time: High level technical support contract for a federal agency. Started in 2016 and managed my entire region with only one guy helping helping me. My metrics put my region consistently in the top 80% of regions for my field of technical support. The other guy helped too. But ours was the only region with so few techs, most being staffed by teams of 4-7 people to balance the same workload. Mine was a position of respect and authority within my field and region, and while even then I was paid less than I believe my value was worth, the other benefits (which were later gutted) made it worthwhile to build a career there.
In 2021 the contract went back up for auction, and the company currently in control put in an absurdly low bid, easily outstripping all the other companies bidding for the contract. Once the new contract company took control it would employ a mix of it's own employees (mostly management types looking to “take on the next big challenge”) and “Incumbents” (the people like myself who had been doing the actual work for the agency and know how to fix things when they break) who they would pick up from the old contract. All of this is fairly standard in my field, and to the technicians like myself should have only been reflected by who send our paychecks out. The job wasn't changing, the only thing that was changing was who was expected to manage, train, and pay the technicians who do the job.
While everything was still getting ready for the transition COVID hit and the agency revealed that “everything was going remote, but not to worry because the new upcoming support structure would be 100% remote”. This came as huge surprise to all my collogues because the very nature of most of our work required not only on-site action, but extensive travel. A big part of the benefits was the travel reimbursement, which had been generous up to that point and regarded as the saving grace of the position. The idea that the position could be handled remotely was frankly insulting, and the loss of the travel benefits effectively killed the honeymoon. We later learned that less than 5% of technicians were being retained and the consensus was that these people had no idea what they were in for. That turned out to be profoundly understated. A few weeks later technicians started getting phone calls from uniformly harassed sounding managers offering them their jobs back with pay increases. The organization was the equivalent to a burned out dumpster fire behind one of those really evil animal processing plants. But people started picking the hammer back up and going back to work. With a lot of hard work and team effort we eventually stabilized the environment. It was right around that time management sent out a message saying that we could take a 15% pay cut or be laid off within the next few months.
Most people fled; by that time all of our most senior technicians had already found much better places to go, and as soon as that message came through pretty much every technicians who had previously worked the job left. The seniority went from approximately 50 senior (5+ years on the job) technicians totaling well over 200 years of time on the job between them, to myself and three other techs to total about 50 years of overall seniority on the job.
Since then I have almost completely withdrawn from the position except were absolutely necessary. I give the position as little of my attention and every as I can, and despite that I was today graded on my overall metrics for my annual pay increase and found to overall be in the 98th percentile. Of the 2500ish technicians filling this role, me and the other workers with seniority are pumping out more and better work than 98% of the other technicians.
Guess what my rate increase was this year? Less than 3%.
Guess what it was last year? Also less than 3%.
My managers are on the phone delivering this message saying I got a certain % more than the average technicians like I should be proud of myself. So I asked them if they knew what the Cost of Living increase was for 2023, and of course they didn't answer. When I told them it was well above 8% they went completely silent. I went on to tell them the “pay increase” doesn't even keep up with cost of living increases, and that the position was becoming less financially supportable. And that with the failure to match CoL in 2022 and that they had already gutted my annual income and were failing to maintain the same rate of financial fortitude they originally offered me, effectively paying me less for the same amount of work. I remember saying specifically “[Company name] is sending a clear message, and it's the same message they've sent every time they've had the opportunity. This is how little [company name] values me and my nearly decade in the field. The numbers speak for themselves, and year by year this position becomes less financially viable.
It was a tense conversation from that point that ended with me saying something to the effect of, “I understand that the people in this call are not the ones who had anything like an active decision in this increase or any others. [Company name] is the one who is charged with putting a monetary value on what I bring to the organization, and the numbers speak for themselves.”
Not sure what I want to do from here. I love the field I'm in, and I'm too old to pick up a new one now. I also love the organization I provide support for, which has been a major factor in my choosing to continue to support it despite my paychecks withering up. I've naturally always felt my skills were being sold for too little, but now there's a distinct bitterness to how I feel about my employer.