Vent...Just got denied a raise. make $11/hr (30hrs week) at an i.t. service company. Coworker makes 15 an hour (full time), last guy made $34k/yr before he was fired. I work with a pitiful coworker who is overpaid, while I am underpaid. I do a very good job, with a very high satisfaction rate, although in I.T. nothing is ever perfect.

I asked for $14/hr (I have learned that companies are actually hiring for $18-19/hr full time, benefits and all. So I thought $14/hr was a great figure to work with, modest and so on...).

At the end of the discussion he mentioned he would raise this with upper management, but I made sure to ask him if he has any advice on how to live on $11/hr as a student. You wanna know what his remark was? If an engineer wants to make $100k/yr and his job doesn't call for it (say he made $60k now) he could go on up the road and get another job there, but my wage request was well with-in the norms of what people are paid in my exact same position based on other employees/searching on dice.com and other hiring websites for local companies who are hiring.

Since I did all of this research about other companies hiring in my exact same position I have a great list of places to start making resumes for, LOL.

Still...fuck that. $11/hr when my coworker who sucks at his job makes $15, and the last guy who worked there made $34k a year. In fact you should be happy to pay me $14, I don't work all the time and my cost varies as I work vs. the pitiful employee you have to pay a salary to (comes out to $15/hr + bennys, paid time off, sick days), I go home when there isn't work to be done, and I don't get overtime until summer time when my schedule opens up some.

It is just ridiculous, he is starting the Occupy Wallstreet movement in me. Now I am skipping my class, going to the gym because I am so ticked off that he had to nitpick on an imperfect hand off from one department to another. Cherry picking one example just to have something negative to say.

I believe he likes to not give college students the benefit of earning a "real wage" comparable to his out of college coworkers and he is put in a situation where the coworker that is being paid $15/hr is not capable of doing my job, so I have an absolute advantage and I am "strong arming him" to get a raise based on my poor coworkers inabilities. And I would have went from 10 - 11 to 14 an hour which is just a big gap, it is a "real number" I am asking for, not some 30 cent raise. I have no health insurance, I put 110% effort in to the job, I do my job well, life is not cheap, how else am I to do this?