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“Salary band”, this is an entirely artificial concept that in reality is an excuse to refuse to pay you more based on... based... I’m not sure what it’s based on to be honest. “You’re a 3B and you can only have more money if you’re a 3A”? https://twitter.com/thelextimes/status/1294116215518945282
I once years ago got told I couldn’t have more money because of my salary band. My response was “that’s not important right now.” which appeared to completely confuse my boss, but I was just making stuff up like he was. I got a raise.
For a long time, at least in the tech industry, we got told there's a raise "budget", but nerds are sticklers for the meaning of things, and "budget" means, "how much money I would like at most to spend on this", it's not how much money you've got, and nerds pointed this out.
So the business™ had to employ the euphemism treadmill, where as words take on specific meanings, you use new words to divorce them from the meaning. "We have a raise budget" gave way to multiple budgets, with cryptic names like "band 4"
It's literally, absolutely literally, absolutely. fucking. literally. a code phrase deployed as a completely context-less label for a budget.
Later, more elegant shitfuckery, established what those bands actually mean, because again nerds want details. So in your workplace "band 4, grade 3" might have a document these days that describes what someone in that band might look like, and what's needed to classify at one.
So again nerds got details, and we had to run the euphemism treadmill. So where "Grade 11c" was defined, people started pointing out they should be 11c. So the "can do <thing>" started to get abstracted to "demonstrates <value>"
We got across that one too. So the next piece of bullshit was to tie the grades to "group performance" which is where you don't get more money unless your department, or the entire business (whichever performed worst), hits some metric or other.
All of it is bullshit so dense that every gram of it weighs an ounce.
Word of advice for people who can (and not everyone can, you might not be in that place), labour is a cost. Your boss' boss thinks they can argue with you over the cost of your input when they can't argue with Origin over the electricity bill, or the building owner over rent.
When you get told "we don't have budget for raises this year", ask them if they have budget to pay utilities. Because what they are saying, is they're trying to elect to just not pay for something.
And they think that unlike utilities cost, you'll just say "ok well I guess you're still paying what you were before, even though the right thing is the cost goes up." Utilities companies don't put up with this, you shouldn't either.
Also, join your union. Even if you aren't EBA
Also, join your union. Even if you aren't EBA
Probably the primary piece of advice is give is, think of your job as a service you sell to your boss. A workplace telling you about their budget for raises is a shopper in Louis Vuton opining they have $12.95 for a handbag.
