Why Your Salary Is Unfair

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I have been chronically underpaid by my company and obviously the way I am going about remedying this has not worked. I am hoping you can provide some pointers.

For salary increase guidelines my company has a policy where the industry range for each given position level plotted on a bell curve is used as the basis.

The company professes to pay between the 25th and the 75th percentile range on the bell curve.

I have consistently been outside this range, to the left (past the low range) of this bell curve.

I got a 2% increase last year, made no difference to my relative position on the bell curve, got no increase the year before.

My performance reviews say I do a good job and am performing at or higher than expected level for my position.

Having asked for feedback on why my salary doesn’t reflect this, I am told by the manager–she is new to this position–but feedback from other managers has something to do with it. What exactly, I am not privy to, but I did have problems with my previous Team Lead, so did others. He got fired last year!

The department gets a lump sum and a roundtable manager discussion ensues on how that pot is divided.javascript:void(0)

I feel I am being treated very unfairly.

To read the answer click here: Why Your Salary Is Unfair