How to Ask For a Raise

Good day, class. Today I’m going discuss how to ask your employer for a raise.

Before we go into the mechanics of how to ask for a raise, let me begin by saying the era of asking for raises is dead. Today’s corporate and business-ideal-minded environment does not include any corporate approved process for a worker drone to initiate the wage increase. Set by an artificial mutual understanding and years of precedents, whether officially documented or unofficially followed, the company instituted wage increase process is for the employer to grant the employee a meager yearly bump to barely offset the rise in cost-of-living expenses. This raise is normally between one and two percent of the current wage.

The inability for a worker to request a pay increase rises up to the top tiers of the business organization. Not even officers in charge of the company can ask for a raise, as their salaries are established by their employment contracts or are doled out by boards of directors who hold the same “one to two percent” mentality. CEOs’ million-dollar salary increases only appear huge simply because of the large figure; the number simply happens to be two percent of the much larger fifty million dollar salary. Even board members, as stockholders in the company, are only reaping one to two percent dividends on the company’s lousy stocks without control over the process.

So the company trudges on, maintaining an even keel, passing on their meager stock value increases to employees. The only time a company actually comes out ahead is by cutting expenses through mass firings. Note these reductions also keep employees content with their piddly two percent raises, happy they have not joined the ranks of the unemployed. Company managers are also content they have no control over the raise process, as it takes all the messy decision making of who to grant raises to, and by how much, out of their hands. And during layoff times, managers don’t even need to decide who to fire; that dirty job is facelessly instituted through the employee yearly goals and performance management process.

Because there is no company-acknowledged process for asking for a pay raise, any employee who attempts to do so will cause their manager to view them as a maverick (i.e. not a team player) or the manager will be dumbstruck to the point where he will fail to comprehend the request. Should the raise solicitation move to higher management, the employee asking for the increase will be viewed as a maverick (i.e. not a team player) or a company destroying devil intent on bringing down corporate institutions from within. In the latter case, the employee will likely land in the employee performance bottom ten percent bracket and find himself terminated during the next round of mass layoffs.

As the employee asking for the raise, it is the former case you want to exploit. Here is how: Ask for a ten percent raise. When your manager questions why you think you deserve such a large pay increase, tell him, “Because I’m the only person on your staff with guts enough to ask for it.”

If you don’t get the raise, no loss. If you get fired, you can tell the next company you interview for that you left because you weren’t paid what you were worth. And if you get the increase, congratulations, you have just taken your first step towards bringing down corporate institutions from within.

Class dismissed.