Yes, you should ask for a raise. All of you. Often.
Mashable's coverage
Raise your hand if you've ever heard something like this from your boss: "Sorry, we can't give you a raise. But be patient. We'll take care of you." Now, put your hands down if you were taken care of.
I thought so.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella nearly broke the Internet yesterday by telling an audience of women that they really shouldn't ask for raises, but rather should have "faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along." He then said that was good karma.
Nadella apologized on Twitter. Then apologized in an email. But the damage was done. Nadella sure looked like a man telling women to just keep quiet accept lower pay. That message is wrong and tone deaf on so many levels I don't have time to write about them. But unless you are hiding under a rock, you know that.
Brilliant friend and colleague Eve Tahmincioglu, who now studies work-life issues at the Families and Work Institute, saw something even broader in Nadella's off-the-cuff, off-the-mark comments.
"Why is everyone surprised that a CEO is discouraging people from asking for raises?" she said. "The goal of today's top executives is to keep costs down while enriching themselves. This has been the case for three decades now. They don't want to pay out raises."
Yup. I don't at all want to diminish the reaction of underpaid women to his comments. It's realistic to wonder: Would he has said that to a group of men? Or did he think he could get away with recommending patience and silence as a career strategy because he was speaking to a group of women?
But at the risk of being inclusive, I wish we didn't see this so much as a gender story. This is CEO labor relations BS at the highest level. I see it as a rare moment of honest dishonesty. You can almost hear him giggling in the back room with the HR department after spinning that line. A company that is struggling and in cost-contain mode does what it can to keep employees from speaking up. After all, it costs them nothing.
It's incumbent on every worker to know what he or she is worth, and ask for that on a regular basis. Corporations will do what they can to underpay you -- that's the nature of capitalism. It's also the nature of a recession: employers still have more leverage than workers in many cases, and will continue to enjoy that advantage as long as there is 100 resumes for every job. Workers enable this by maintaining an unnecessary silence about what they are paid, which helps employers maintain a divide-and-conquer strategy.
But be aware -- I've written about this as part of my Getting Unstuck program -- corporations always do better at the back end of a recession than workers. They have more information on when business has picked up. While workers still over-produce, fearful that they will be victimized by the next round of layoffs, corporations profit handsomely on the culture of overwork. That's one reason we see Wall Street raging while Main Street still struggles, why profits are up but wages are stagnant.
In short: Don't assume you don't deserve a raise. And don't assume your company can't afford one. As my old newspaper editor would say frequently, you don't know the answer until you ask.
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