At my last job I made good money and always leveraged for wage increases. I’d get the increases I asked for. That job was costing me my health. That job was straining my marriage. When I put in my notice they asked if there was an amount that I’d be willing to stay for. I stated exactly twice my annual salary. They are a Fortune 500 company who’s maintained an incredible profit margin for many, many years. They always claimed that they couldn’t afford to budget another person in my previous role. For reference, I made just shy of $100k/year. I threw that number out there in case they’d bite. If so I could hire a personal assistant out of my own damn pocket making the same as I was making that could help reduce the workload.
For the amount of hours I was putting in every week between work, travel and late nights in hotel rooms catching up on emails and such, I was basically making $25/hour, provided that amount never increased for overtime. It’d be less if I factored in overtime rates. I was making the same hourly wage in previous jobs that were only 40-50 hour weeks and those didn’t require any travel.
I took a $30k pay cut for my current job. My health is slowly recovering. My marriage isn’t strained anymore. My point? If you get a job offer that seems to be too good from a major company, it probably is for one reason or another. That company would use up good people like sanitary napkins. Once bled dry, they’d simply replace them. I fell for it. I wanted to work for a brand that everyone knew in a high-profile analyst job. Work travel seemed like a good gig. It’s not. It’s lonely as hell. It sucks the very soul out of you. That’s the work culture in the U.S., though. Work inhuman hours and always at 100% balls to the wall throughput. Once you start to waiver, there’s plenty of other ambitious people waiting to get bent over the barrel and railed for their turn.
When I was on medical for 6 months while trying to deal with a rare condition and I wasn’t certain if I was even going to live or not HR was really kind. They’d check in, etc. The instant FMLA ran out they took an interesting aggressive posture. FMLA isn’t a formality that exists because employers want to do the right thing by their employees. It exists as a protection. It exists because it needs to. Every fucking rule that’s there to protect workers is because most companies would gleefully abuse workers if they could get away with it. Anyone that’s anti-union, please, please look up the reason that unions became necessary. Any worker who’s anti-union has been brainwashed.
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