I’m in a union, and somehow they are able to sell the party line that 3% is a decent raise.
It doesn’t even cover cost of living, so if you like your current job and position then you are stuck with ever-shrinking adjusted income for your term.
The side effect is that the only way to get decent raises internally is to position-hop. Level 1, level 2, level 3, then change to a separate business unit and repeat the cycle.
I’m currently peaked in my current position and, even though I love my job and my bosses think I’m a valuable kick-ass employee, I’ll be forced to say goodbye and pretend that the next business-unit-du-jour is the career path I really really want.
If you work for a large, publicly traded company, successful or not, standard raise should be historical inflation indexed for the last 15-20 years (or is it 12-15?). I got this figure from my new friend in HR. I have no idea where this methodology came from. It averages out to a base of 2.3-2.5%. Assuming there were no layoffs, the absolute bottom line raise in my company is then “gracefully rounded” (as my CFO puts it) to 3%. Success and failures of the company will modify it. We have one struggling division pay out 1.5%, some meager bonuses, mostly stock. On the other hand, the successful divisions were paying out 8-15%, with bonuses (if it’s like mine, then it’s 15-25%), and restricted stock units. Since I work for the parent and all money goes to us, but we also have a declining stock price, I’m going to guess that we’re going to be somewhere between 3.5-10% (but no one will get 10%, I’m sure), with bonuses (which were good last year at 25%), and some of us will get RSUs. The worst year we’ve had was 3-5% raise, no stock, 3-5% bonus, on average throughout the company. The sales and business development teams I work with made out like bandits if they hit their comp plan.
So, overall, imo, if it’s just 3% and nothing else, with a somewhat successful company (i.e. they operated according to plan), then that raise both sucks and blows.
And yet companies wonder why people change jobs every 2 years. Maybe because they get sick of new hires making more than them?