So I recently started a new admin/operations job about three weeks ago. The work itself is fine if not a little less fast paced than I'd want. The pay is $35 an hour in Australia, not salaried, which is what I thought it would be considering it says in my contract a minimum of 30 hours per week.
A couple of things have happened that really have me questioning the decision I've made to switch to this company:
a) I actually worked for this company around 6 years ago and got fired/mutually terminated for reasons that were fair at the time. I was 19 and just wasn't taking it seriously. I was in a different role back then. What happened was my boss did not pay my superannuation (Aus version of 401k) and when prompted about it, was dismissive and told me to contact their bookkeeper (not my responsibility lol). It was eventually paid a couple of months later. I unfortunately only remembered that my boss did this about two weeks into my employment.
b) When I was going through the negotiation phase, I was pushing for a higher wage than what I had at my previous job. I feel like I know what I'm worth to a company with my skillset and vast industry knowledge but was eventually told that this wage was the highest they could offer. Eventually I decided I could live with the same rate of pay as this job promised more career growth and was also 90% work from home, which was an extremely large plus.
For some more context, my dad also works in an industry that we service and is always looking for more contractors for the right companies. After chatting with him, he said he could give us some properties to quote to service some of these properties, and if all goes well, it could be up to 80 contracts for different properties across the whole east coast of Australia. Some of these contracts being $3000+ per service on a yearly basis. I posed this as a great opportunity to my boss and asked if he would be willing to give me a finder's fee/commission for the first service of 5-10%. He said we'll talk about it. Then when in an unrelated call about something else entirely, he drops the hint that he “really doesn't like the idea of commission.” The entire reason I asked is due to the previous company I worked for, this finder's fee structure was set up on the first service at 10%. I feel like it wasn't an out of line thing to ask for considering the potential business opportunity available. He said on the phone “I don't know why you're worried about a commission, if the company grows, you'll grow too”. Heard this a million times and if you don't want to give me better pay now, it feels like you won't if the company does grow and my role develops into something else.
This all came to a head when my boss drops this joke on a training call, and I'm annoyed I don't remember the context, but he said “you're the world's biggest cheapskate name“. Then, a few days later, I go into the office for another training day, we were discussing my car that had broken down and how I had to get an uber into the office, and in front of another coworker, joked ” name will be asking for a company car next!”
Both of these were absolutely framed as jokes, but just came across as completely inappropriate to a new member of staff, and also frustrating considering he shot me down for a higher pay rate, and also shot me down for asking for a small commission on bringing him potential work.
Am I overreacting with this or am I right to be extremely upset by these comments and the lack of tact?
Happy to provide more context in the comments.