Employee Wreaks Revenge On Boss After Their False Salary Raise Claim

Every job has its own quirk – however, there’s a quote that’ll be a perfect excerpt to today’s tale: “Our workplace has a strict honesty policy: we honestly lie about everything.”

The thing is, u/ThatOneCloneTrooper stayed at his old place on the condition that they’d raise his salary, but – surprise, surprise – the boss turned out to be a total con artist! 

This engineer, with a better job offer, agrees to stay at his old place as long as the company increases his salary to $38K

“Company lied about new salary so I told everyone and left” – this internet user took to one of Reddit’s popular communities dedicated to work-related struggles, to tell its members a story of how his boss’s breach of promise made him walk out and expose their wrongdoings to the entire office. The post managed to garner over 20K upvotes as well as 849 comments discussing the matter.

Did you know that according to a 2023 piece from The Muse, a well-known career platform, 64% of respondents have experienced a toxic work environment – and 44% blamed leadership? 

Now, a “toxic environment” could mean a lot of things: bullying, gossiping, harassment, micromanaging, criticism that’s far from constructive, breach of boundaries, discrimination, questionable office politics, power abuse, or as in today’s story’s case, a failure to uphold promises, let alone ones that revolve around such a vital thing as one’s salary!

Chances are the majority of you, or perhaps even all of you, know exactly what it’s like to be involved with a place that treats you poorly. It sucks big time, especially if the organization had previously advertised itself as being a “family” and claimed to have a very close-knit bond that’d take you to the great beyond career-wise. 

However, it just so happens that we live in this incredibly money-centric world where people, especially all the company bigwigs, often lose all of their common sense and overlook the fact that employment is a two-way service and that you can’t just deceive individuals and expect them to be OK with it and continue to lick your boots. 

Yes, sometimes you want to pay a professional courtesy to your workplace because of certain factors, yet we all ought to remember the biggest lesson of this r/antiwork story – loyalty doesn’t pay your bills, so think twice before making any compromises out of your goodwill.

Anyhowski, despite the original poster still getting their happy ending, the situation wasn’t all too sweet!

They had started the position half a year earlier and had managed to receive a splendid offer from another firm, the location of which was a tad bit too far away. But there were a lot of perks, like a good salary, a company car they could choose from a list, on-site charging, insurance, and private healthcare!

Still, out of good old courteous behavior, the employee decided to lay all the cards out on the table and try to negotiate with their current place. After a brief and rather hesitant talk, the higher-ups agreed to up the OP’s salary to $38K, and everyone went about their day!

Unfortunately, though, after a couple of months of back-and-forths with superiors and the same $33K on their paychecks, the author decided to act upon the issue and essentially issue an ultimatum until their promise was fulfilled, to which they were told that the new wage would actually only kick in at the start of the next year and that it had been clearly stated in that fine print of their new contract!

Naturally, the Redditor wasn’t going to play their games, so they quit on the spot and, as a little petty revenge, also told their entire office about the company’s lies.

Fellow online community members shared their thoughts and opinions on the situation