Aside from a handful of survey respondents who said their responsibilities increased while their pay remained the same, there were few complaints about pay. Those complaints, however, are worth noting.
One such comment came from a representative from a small industrial products business in the Southeast. His beef concerned “company appreciation. If a salesman gets a new $50ꯠ-a-year account, he gets a bonus. If I save $20ꯠ a year on a particular item, that’s just my job.”
A professional from a large cosmetics/personal care maker in the Northeast expressed frustration with what he called “salary administration. Our new chief executive officer determined that base pay was too high in relationship to other companies. So, percentage increases are lower, salary brackets are frozen, and many employees have been downgraded in performance ratings after years of consistently positive feedback. This has had a major impact on morale, especially when we are receiving another message of only hiring the best and being ‘world class.’”
Bottom-line company concerns also bothered an employee with an industrial firm in the Midwest. She said, “Budgets are tight, and lately there has been even more pressure to cut costs. We have a small budget for packaging, and it is difficult to cut anything out. I find it hard to compromise packaging structure when we don’t cut back in other areas.”
Perhaps the most jarring response came from a respondent working for a chemical/cleaning products producer in the Southeast. He believed that “our company used the recent 9-11 events and the state of the economy to justify not giving average cost-of-living increases while the company posted record revenues and earnings.”
For more survey comments, see: packworld.com/go/w021
