After ten years at my job, I learned recently that I am earning the third lowest salary in my unit of about 40. I am a professor at a large public university, where our salaries are publicly searchable for at least as many years as I've been here, so I can see when my closer contemporaries' salaries lurched past mine.
The past ten years include the big crisis, which led to a five-year pay freeze. Because my university and my state were afraid of losing talent, our legislature grudgingly approved merit raises with very specific procedures. I have received the maximum on both of these, as well as a bump for being promoted. So in the past four years I was more than content with a 10% raise.
Then someone suggested looking up colleagues' salaries. People who came in the year or two before me, and then those after, got additional 10-12% bumps. They haven't been publishing more, teaching better, or doing more work. Besides, my annual evaluations have been putting me in the highest category. But I am outearned by the person who defended a dissertation in August, and my near-contemporaries outearn most of our untenured colleagues. The additional bump was to correct the salary inversion endemic to places like ours.
The only thing the people who received the correction have in common is children. Several did not receive a bump, but they were lured from elsewhere so began at higher salaries, but have been receiving the state-approved raises; these several are unbechilded. I can only conclude that the people with corrections were squeaky wheels, and the timing of the corrections that the public data make easy to see show the bumps corresponded with when someone had a new baby, when someone who came in the same year as that person demanded a match, etc. From a broad moral standpoint, I don't oppose this, but one's family responsibilities should have nothing to do with how much an organization communicates your value to it.
I very much enjoy my work and my colleagues. The people who have decided my raises are people I know socially and still count as my friends. But I feel betrayed.
They also know I'm very frugal. They know I garden and travel hack, that I am carfree and buy nothing new. I've never told anyone at work that I live on $16K without trying, but I am feeling undervalued and taken advantage of. I don't need the money, but I now find my salary insulting and want a raise, even though my university is perpetually strapped for cash. As I say, I enjoy my job and am damn good at it, but I am feeling so resentful right now.
I guess my question is the non-question in my subject line.
