Pay Me

Most of the regulars know my working situation, but something happened today that I find hilarious so I'm going to describe my employment again to set the scene.

I work for MegaCorp (which is of course a fictional name).  MegaCorp contracts to a government agency for services.  The section of the government I've been working with for the past 5 years awarded the contract to a different company, let's say XYZ, a bit over a year ago.  In order for me to stay with the same section, MegaCorp sublets me out to XYZ.  XYZ gets paid a flat rate for the contract, and then pays MegaCorp a portion for my services.

I have to record my billable hours in both MegaCorp's and XYZ's accounting system.  They have to match, because MegaCorp gets paid for my hours, and not a flat rate.  Today, I got an email from my MegaCorp manager telling me that there was a .5 hour discrepancy in my billable time between MegaCorp's system and XYZ's system.  She wanted me to figure our where I made the error and fix it.

That's not the interesting part.  The interesting part is that my manager didn't take out the email text that started this from the accounting clerk.  That bit of the email had in it.. the hourly billable rate that MegaCorp gets from XYZ for my services. It's $100 an hour.  An annual salary based on $100 an hour is roughly $208,000 a year.  I do not make anything close to that, however in addition to my gross salary, my benefits are valued at about $25,000 annually.  If MegaCorp was not to take their profit for pimping me out, I should be making roughly $175,000 annually.  If I could contract to the government directly, I should get paid a bit over $200k and then pay for my own benefits, like health insurance, which under Obama-Care starting in 2014 would be very reasonable.

Holy crap.. the accounting clerk just sent me a copy of the invoice.

Anyway.. last year I did some bitching about my pay rate to my MegaCorp manager, because I was getting offers from other companies for substantially more money.  Now I know why I was getting offers.  I do the work, they take a massive cut.  In any case, MegaCorp gave me a promotion to the highest level of SE in the company.  The promotion was supposed to come with a raise.  I haven't seen it yet.

My MegaCorp manager will be hearing from me shortly.  I'm not greedy, but if I'm going to be a whore, I better get paid for it.