a reply to:
toysforadults
What I would say about this is as follows:
Since the banking collapse the value of work has changed drastically. No longer is it expected that a person, even a person working full time, ought
to be able to actually benefit from ones working day, in a direct and immediate sense. Business owners and executives no longer feel that part of
their responsibility to their employees, includes paying them a wage worth working for.
These days, it is perfectly common for a person to take work which does not do them the slightest financial favour in the least, with zero hours
contracts being more prevalent than ever, and wages relative to cost of living being an absolute joke in most positions. Now, having a job is not
about securing ones immediate living, because that is a pipe dream in any realistic sense for a HUGE percentage of the working population. Its about
setting up a history of work, either with the intention of moving up the ladder at a given company, or making oneself a more attractive hire to
another company some time down the line. If your Curriculum Vitae shows that not only have you worked for x company for two years, but have made
progress up the command chain in that company in that time, then future employers are going to look on that with appreciation. They do not care how
much you were paid, but they will take note of what responsibilities you had and how well you accounted for yourself while in the commission of your
duties.
So, having progression within a company on your record looks better before the eyes of future employers, but also shows willingness to advance to
your current bosses. Also, it must be said that supervising other people while they work, is normally a hell of a lot easier in terms of physicality,
than working on things yourself. For example, if you go from working the checkout, to being the checkout supervisor, you spend less time actually
customer facing, more time hitting the paperwork, making sure the tills are squared up right and that change is being transported from checkouts to
the safe at the correct times. Rather than being surrounded always by the noise of a busy store, you will spend more time in the counting office, or
discussing certain things with the stores assistant manager and manager. You will wind up doing some till work, getting customer face time, but less
of it than you did before.
So its perfectly possible that promotions of that sort could be beneficial to an employee in a non-financial sense. I think it really depends an
awful lot on what the promotion entails. If it really boils down to "Do the same work, exact same, but do another thing on top of that", then the
benefits will be solely about how it looks in your work history, but if it involves a drift away from one monotonous task, to a slightly less
monotonous set of tasks, then it might be worth it from the point of view of the conditions of an employees preferring the new conditions over the
old.
This being said, I know plenty of people who have taken promotions without pay rises, in jobs ranging from the technical to the fairly mundane, only
to have their workload explode, with both hours and expectations rising at once, not to mention with clauses insisting a person be willing to appear
at any moment, within an hour of being called, even if one is taking official holiday or something. Ugly nonsense when it gets to that point. These
sorts of things can cause what amounts to fatigue, because inhuman levels of effort are being expected of people who are so undernourished (because of
the small amounts of time and money they have to feed themselves), that its a miracle they even get up in the morning, leave alone perform any work at
all. These folks, young folks very often, are literally consuming themselves, destroying their health just for a positive check mark on their CV, and
I think that is the point where a person considering taking a no rise promotion, really needs to be careful and mindful of their health when making
decisions about their future.
No positive CV is worth giving yourself organ failure for.