So you want to talk about race, Ijeoma Oluo [p102-103].
My teammate Terrence, who had trained me… had been with the company about three years longer than I had. He was a hard-working black man, with a wife and three kids at home. One day I showed up to work and his usually cheerful demeanour had gone. In fact, he looked like he was going to cry…
He explained that he had been offered another job at a rival company. He didn’t want to leave, but his family really needed the increase in pay that had been offered. He had told our manager about his predicament, and our manager and director had agreed to match the hourly wage that the competitor had offered. Terrence turned down the job with the competitor, happy to stay at the company that he’d been with for years.
But that morning, our director and manager had say him down and said that they were not, in fact, able to give him the raise they had promised. They said that because he didn’t have a college degree, Terrence was not eligible for that pay level, and it had not been approved by senior manager. He was offered an increase of $1 an hour instead of the $5 an hour promised in the offer he’d just declined.
When Terrence told me how much he was currently making and what was offered, I was aghast. Even with the raise, it was less than I had made on my first day of work at the company, and even further behind what other team members made, all except for a Latinx mother of five, who we discovered was making even less than Terrence – barely over minimum wage for the complex technical work we did.
I left that company shortly after. I could not work at a place that I didn’t trust, a place where employees of color felt exploited and unappreciated…