Haggling over a year of life

Three hundred and sixty-five days.

They are twelve months of waking before dawn, long journeys in the rain and the cold, hard shifts where the system froze and you brought the work to shore with flesh and soul. They are hundreds of hours of swallowing your nerves so as not to spoil the service to the customer, days when you set aside illness or family just so the operation would not stop. In short: you have given a whole year of the only life you have in this world.

And when this long road comes to its end, you sit down in the office to discuss the future.

Across from you sits the manager with a heavy, almost solemn face. They talk at length about global difficulties, about inflation, about the unstable market and the sacrifice everyone has to make. And then, in the tone of someone handing you the keys to the treasury, comes the big offer: a rise of thirty thousand old lek a month.

But it does not end there. Because this laughable sum always comes with the golden condition of corporate hypocrisy: If the budget allows. If the company does well this quarter.

Let me be completely clear. Thirty thousand old lek is not a pay rise. It is alms dressed up as merit, and a plain insult to the intelligence of every person who works with honour.

Let us do the arithmetic as it is, without any decoration. Thirty thousand old lek is a thousand lek a day. It is not even enough to cover the rise in the price of oil, eggs and bread over the year we have left behind. It is a sum so negligible that it cannot even keep pace with the loss of value of the money in your pocket. In fact, when a company raises your pay by thirty thousand lek after a year of uninterrupted work, you are actually poorer than on the first day you walked through that door.

And the greatest shamelessness lies in one word: budget.

This is the universal lie used every time a worker's sweat has to be paid for. Suddenly the company has no budget to pay the people who keep sales, transport or service on their feet. But the same company always finds a budget to replace the managing director's car with the latest model. It finds a budget for the board's luxury lunches, for newly furnished offices and for bills settled without a single question about the market crisis.

The budget never runs short for those at the top; it runs out with surgical precision only in the second it reaches the people at the base.

This kind of treatment does damage far deeper than mere financial disappointment. It kills trust. Because in that moment every employee understands that the promises of a career, of recognition and of growing together were just fairy tales to buy time. They are asked for total commitment, flexibility without set hours and love for the company, but when it comes to rewarding them, the company behaves like a petty trader counting the last coins at the bottom of a pocket.

I know well what that employee thinks as they leave that office with the letter of the rise in hand. They do not feel valued; they feel robbed. They feel as though someone has taken a whole year of their life, their youth and their energy, and in return has thrown a few crumbs on the table, even asking them to say "thank you".

And then, six months later, when this employee finds another opportunity and leaves the job empty, these same managers act surprised. They gather in their offices again and ask with feigned naivety: Why did they leave? We just gave them a rise.

They do not understand, or pretend not to understand, that people do not live on illusions, nor on crumbs conditional on the mercy of a hidden budget.

True leadership knows that the safest and most honest investment of a business is the dignity of the person who works. If a business cannot pay the real value of the effort after a year of work, that business does not have a problem with the market; it has a problem with its morals. And anyone who thinks they can buy a company's future by humiliating their own people's effort with thirty thousand old lek will very soon be left alone, with their budget untouched on paper, but without a single pair of hands to turn that paper into reality.