HR's lie of the day: "we didn't cut your pay"

The HR people just can’t help themselves; when it’s not outright lies, it’s lies of omission.  Once again they’re going around claiming that we’re not taking an immediate paycut, they say “We’re going to let the market catch up.”   That’s simply not true.  You will make about $13,000 LESS next year than you should be making, even if you weren't a lead.  Of course they don’t want you to know this, and they’ve used deceptive slides to ‘dampen’ or hide this fact but it IS A FACT. 

Besides the obvious immediate loss (Leads losing 10%) there are several real paycuts you are taking that will deeply affect you next year. They briefly touched on those cuts in one slide, but made the impact look almost negligible. 

I’ll admit they were clever about it, I didn’t catch it at first, they’ve skewed their numbers just a tiny bit to hide the damage and I’ll prove it.  This is the slide they showed you:

Note that they compared THIS year's pay (with our current pay) to NEXT year’s pay which includes a raise. A raise we SHOULD have already been given in Nov.   IF they were truly trying to compare apples to apples they should show what our pay WOULD HAVE BEEN if they didn’t mess with it compared to what it’s going to be with their new system.  They did this so their raise hides some of the damage. 

Oh, BTW, don’t forget that teeny tiny little disclaimer there at the bottom.  What does it say? Too small to read?  I’m sure that’s just a mistake–  let me help you:  “Even though we’re showing you numbers for a 2% raise in March, we reserve the right to fuck you out of that too.”  Alright, you caught me, I paraphrased it, but that’s exactly what it means.

Next!  Oh look!  How come they show 120% VCIP for this year but ‘happened’ to use 130% VCIP for next year?  (oh, and claiming you could get more as top performer is bullshit, you won’t be eligible for that until the 2026 VCIP payout in Feb 2027 and then only 10% of us can be in the “far exceeds” category.)

So let’s do the math.  I put their numbers back up just for a side-by-side and then we’ll actually compare next year's pay to what it should have been, apples to apples.

As you can see-  They padded their VCIP by over $2000 to hide some of the money they’re stealing from you by using a 130% payout instead of 120%.  And they hid $3,000 in base pay losses by comparing next year's pay to this year’s pay, that’s not counting the impact of the same wage increase would have on your other pays and VCIP, which was almost another $1,000. 

And that, ladies and gents, is how you cook the books. Not straight up lies, just little… oh I don’t know… modifications. Clever buggers they are.  It does make you wonder what they’ve been doing to their financial disclosures doesn’t it?  But surely they’re more honest with their investors than they are their employees.