Salaries and coworkers, Part II

So last week was pretty crazy at work. A couple of my colleagues had left over the past few months because of family reasons, and activity really ramped up over February. Our contract lead editor decided not to continue, and we've begun peer-editing each other's work before some more editorial help comes on. Anyway, it was pretty quiet on Friday when my boss came into my office to chat about something. My officemate was out and I thought it was "now or never" in terms of talking about my coworker's NYT article (see previous post).

"I've been meaning to talk to you about something. I read Jessica's New York Times article on Saturday," I said, more or less.

"You read it?" He sounded somewhat alarmed. "Yeah," I said.

What came out of the whole thing--the CEO sent the vice-president in to talk to me later in the day, since she's in charge of human resources--is that they claim my coworker wasn't getting paid as much as you'd think from reading the article. The impression I was supposed to get was: Yes, you're getting paid less, but it's not a $15k difference. And you're in line for a decent raise come your one-year anniversary.

I believe them. Or, I want desperately to believe them. If I was getting paid $15k less AND being lied to by my bosses ... well, that would be hard to deal with. So I'm taking this overall as a win for me. I certainly lost nothing from this whole incident. I have my peace-of-mind if I remember that God is leading me and will provide all my needs, and I was glad to be able to talk about compensation. The fact that I brought the issue up is something to be proud of, I think. It shows that I'm not an absolute push-over and concerned about basic fairness. And I think I came across as not purely greedy, but needing to talk about something that would bother me if unresolved.