Little Empires Everywhere

By Anonymous

Today, my boss told me to “know my place.” She didn’t say the exact words. Instead, she said things like…

“I’ve spent a lot of time doing things for you like going to HR,” when I was being bullied by an older male coworker, “and thinking about how to get you raises,” her literal job. “I’ve given you a couple of days off.” She means without making me use PTO — one of those was the day after Trump was re-elected, something she knew would devastate me as a trans person. “We’ve had kind of a rough year, you were looking for another job for a bit;” my neurodivergent self told her the truth when she demanded our whole team tell her if we were completely committed to the company or not while she was advocating for us — lesson learned.

For some context, I work for one of those companies that is always on fire. It’s a 5,000+ person company run by three people, two of which are a married billionaire couple. Processes are confusing and opaque, teams and departments are chronically restructuring, persons are always quitting or getting fired, and senior leadership withholds resources, manufacturing scarcity in every team in my department. Currently, my eight-person team is responsible for seven out of 12 of the marketing department’s (50 people) functions.

On Monday, I told my boss that I wanted a promotion into the role of my senior, who left the company last August and whose work and responsibilities I’ve been doing for the seven months since, after backfilling the role was denied. I told her the salary I wanted (what he was making) and the title.

At the time, she told me she agreed with me, that I deserved both the title and the raise and that she needed some time to think about “how to approach the throne.” Then, she thought about it for a day, decided I was asking too much, and pitched to the company president a salary increase of less than half of what I needed to match the salary my predecessor was making.

The above speech she gave me was a 10-minute preface to prime me before she told me “how excited she was” to let me know that she had gotten me approved for less than half. She told me how she “lost sleep over trying to figure it out,” how it’s a “really risky time for her to be asking for anything like this,” etc. Finally, she asked me what my thoughts were.

I told her I was disappointed.

Her face fell. She was hurt, surprised, and momentarily speechless.

She was surprised because I’ve spent the last three years fawning at her and she expected me to gush with gratitude over her bare minimum efforts. My trauma is such that I have spent my life being sickeningly afraid of authority figures and their power to punish me whenever they want. I was conditioned to be easy to manipulate deeply when guilt, shame, and fear are used on me.

But I’ve been doing a lot of work on that.

I told her that I know what the work of the position is worth and that, for me, that value doesn't change depending on what company I'm working in.

When she found her words again, she continued...

“Other people on the team don’t ask me for things like this [raises]. We’ve all been taking on work outside of our scope. I’ve gotten you more raises than other folks on the team. Even I think that increase is too much. Companies always pay less when they promote from within. I’ve spent this whole time trying to gradually catch you up because you’ve been being underpaid since they hired you, but you know we have to do it in small steps.”

You’re asking for too much. You don’t deserve it. Keep quiet with everyone else. The system decides your place, and it is your job to recognize it and comply.

This is living under Empire. Empire sustains itself throughout its many iterations by manufacturing scarcity to centralize power and threatening folks into compliance. And the continual enforcement of the hierarchical power distribution inherent in "knowing your place" is a pillar of empire.

Anti-imperialist work happens internally and externally. This is possibly the first time in my life that I've been able to self-advocate in a grounded and sustainable way in the face of an authority figure who has more power than I do. It is easier for me to reject her manipulations at this point in my life because I Know them. I See her. And I’ve done a lot of work on the trauma patterns that run inside of me that historically made these manipulations effective in keeping me feeling small and scared. Scared to ask too much, scared to be a bother, scared to be too loud about my needs and wants lest I draw unwanted attention and punishment. My internal work on being able to take action while being terrified of being punished is ongoing.

The punishment part is important here. When my boss uses the term “approach the throne” to describe going to our president, it is more accurate than she realizes. It is well known, and joked about, that you need to “keep your head down,” so you don’t attract the wrong kind of scrutiny from folks with more power than you. Become too “difficult to work with” (set boundaries, advocate for yourself and others, call out disrespectful behaviors or shitty practices), and your name will quietly disappear from your Teams’ chats and your coworkers will be told, “They just weren't a good fit anymore.”

My boss told me to take the weekend and think about whether I wanted to take the offer or walk away from the company. As of writing this, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Something is better than nothing, but where are my lines?

At what point do I refuse to continue to be undervalued?

At what point do I say I deserve more than this?

I've rejected Empire's narratives of "place" internally, how will this now play out in my external life?

I guess we’ll find out.

Introducing a New Miniseries

“Little Empires Everywhere” is a new article miniseries at Audacity. Our anonymous writer shares how they are navigating a hostile corporate environment in real time. Stay tuned to see how they fight for fair conditions while still trying to remain employed until better opportunities come.