What would you do if........

What would you do if……..
You work about 10 hours a week and are making $8.50 per hour in a high-volume retail pharmaceutical outlet. You get your annual review, with all good marks….a few suggestions for improvement, but nothing major. Overall, your score is 3.75 out of 5, which is a solid score. The person delivering your review is one of three making in the neighborhood of $100k/year, and while they have the technical skills and education to do their particular job, they have no skills in managing, coaching, or evaluating employees. One other bit of info – it was just in the newspaper 2 days earlier, that the CEO of your company had to take a pay cut this year, and will ONLY make $11.9 million. Boo-hoo.
This employee looks you square in the eye, and says with a straight face; “we (the company) can only give you a 1% raise this year. It is all we can afford”. A 1% raise for you is 8.5 cents an hour. Maybe they will be a little generous, and round it up to an even 9 cents an hour. At 10 hours a week, it will mean another 90 cents in your pocket BEFORE TAXES! We won’t get into the fact that the review delivery is about 3 weeks late, and the message that sends in and of itself. The question is; what would you do? How would you react?

Personally, I would find it to be an insult. My response would be to look her in the eye, and ask how she was able to deliver that message with a straight face. Secondly, I would tell her that; “the company is obviously in dire straights, and needs this money more than I do, so please inform the CEO that I am forgoing my raise this year”.
I would rather have someone look me square in the eye, and say; “I am sorry, but the economy has hit us hard, and we are not giving raises this year. We simply cannot afford it”. That, I could understand. That, I could live with. That would make me a team player. I would say, OK…let’s suck it up and hope for better. To offer up a 1% raise is a slap in the face. Now, having said that, I understand the economy of scale and all that BS. I understand that if you have 300 employees, and each of them receives a 90 cent a week raise, that amounts to $270 a week X’s 52 weeks a year, yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s still an insult, when the company has a bunch of incompetent assholes, in positions of responsibility, making too many thousands of dollars, every year. People who come up with bone headed ideas, because they are not close enough to the day-to-day operations of the business, to make qualified decisions. People who waste thousands of dollars in time and effort, trying to get their bone-headed ideas into practice. People who are rewarded for these idiotic ideas. People who are rewarded, for making terrible business decisions. People with no leadership skills, no management skills, no morals, no ethics. CVS is not the only company in question here. Look at the rewards the executives at AIG received. They are exactly the types I speak of. The fat cats who were rewarded for ruining the business. Our businesses today are rampant with this sort of incompetence and greed. They make their thousands on the backs of those that work for an honest pay, no matter how meager. I have no quarrel with the salaries of those who are true leaders, and managers. Those who take responsibility for their actions, including their good and bad decisions, are deserving of everything they make. My beef is with the nitwits, and shit-for-brains that work the system with a line of bullshit, and put more time and thought into working the politics of the situation then they do into coming up with new practices and ways of doing business.