Woman Immediately Quits Job After $.13 Cent Raise

A man shared his frustrating experience in dealing with a 13-cent raise in response to a woman’s own story about how she quit her gig after offering her the same “offensive” per hour amount as her own former place of employment.

Graeson McGaha (@graeson.mcgaha.comedy) stitched his response to Keeley Collins’ (@keels.in.heels) video in a now-viral TikTok video.

In Keeley’s video, she appears to be sitting on some type of mass transit vehicle while wearing a pair of over-the-ear headphones and begins looking around the cabin. A text overlay remains on the screen throughout the entirety of the 7-second clip that reads: “When HR asked why I was quitting and I had to explain that giving $0.13 raises is offensive.”

In a caption for the post, she explained that the raise was the company’s way of adjusting wages for its employees for inflation, which only resulted in about $20 more per month for the TikTok user.

Other TikTokers who responded to her clip shared the merit increase gripes that they’ve experienced while on the job as well.

“Don’t forget the pizza party and ‘We value the hard work you’ve put in this year,” one user penned. Another said, “For me, it’s the ‘we can’t afford to give good raises/bonuses’ when the company is making record profits. And new people get hired at a higher rate.”

Graeson responded to Keeley’s clip with a stitched video where he speaks directly into the camera, “So I worked for a company that used to like to do those performance reviews, think of it like a report card for grown-ups. In order for you to get a raise you had to have a certain score.”

He delineated the process further, “I was not prepared the first year that I did it and kind of fell for it. That did not happen the following year. I prepared myself I had my scheduled hours the hours I was called in for overtime. The hours that I volunteered for an extra shift, along with my production on those days.”

According to Graeson, he was doing his due diligence, crunching numbers, and making sure that there was evidence for the extra work he was putting in to warrant a merit increase when it came to his salary. It wasn’t hard it took about an extra three minutes a day just to print off my daily report.”

Armed with this data he had been aggregating for a year, he went into his performance review meeting. “Then it came time for our little meeting and they were so excited to tell me I was gonna get about thirteen cents. And then I respectfully asked where do you base your numbers off of? Because this is what I’m expecting.”

Graeson revealed that the performance review rating was on an out-of-5 scale, “After viewing my documents you’ve still decided to give me a four, and I’d like to know what it took to get a 5.”

He then said that management couldn’t really give him a definitive answer as to what goes into a worker receiving a 5/5 rating: “A five means that you’re perfect and nobody gets a five.”

Graeson then asked, “Then why’s it there?” before going into more of his story, “And then, my favorite part is, when I asked to see how they go with their pay scale they said, well that’s private information.”

Graeson couldn’t understand that answer, “It’s private information for me how you’ve come up with this number?”

The manager’s reply, “Well if people knew how the system worked there’d be no incentive like there’d be no incentive to try.”

“You’re right because transparency when it comes to your employees is always been the worst model.”

Graeson went on to say that “anything under a dollar is not life-changing money and let’s be honest a dollar’s only an extra $40 a week so it’s not really much to write home about. I’ve heard companies complain that ‘if we gave an employee a dollar a year then in like thirty years you mean to tell me they’re gonna be making like $65 an hour? That’s crazy!”

He added, “No more than likely that employee’s gonna feel valued and bring far more value to your company than you could ever possibly imagine.

He then concluded the clip with some advice when it comes to negotiating your salary increases: “Just remember everybody’s got a boss. It’s a negotiation. And the first one to talk loses. You stay silent after they give you that piece of paper, see what happens.”

TikTokers agreed with Graeson’s assessment, like one who remarked, “A smart company knows that raises are cheaper than training replacements.”

Another also couldn’t understand why current workers would get shafted on their paychecks, but newer ones were paid more out the gate and are sometimes given a little extra for their efforts.

“I love it when they lowball current employees but will bring in new workers at that same level or higher with signing bonuses,” another remarked.

Someone else said that they quit their job when they couldn’t get a $2/hr raise on their paycheck, but then the business went and hired three project managers at $130k a piece.