Should one threaten to quit to get a reasonable pay-raise request fulfilled?

Question

I have a colleague who is a postdoc in a German university employed at level TVöD E13. She is currently in the early career phase but has very substantial responsibilities due to the circumstances of the working group. For example, taking over substantial responsibilities of the group leader in his absence over a prolonged period of time. Note that the group leader is almost always missing in action, i.e. very busy (due to reasons not relevant here).

Due to this, the group leader encouraged to promote her to E14 and they filed an application to HR. To promote an E13 to E14, it is usually required to show that “substantially more” scientific burden and decision making is involved. The wording is very important (according to HR). But they wont tell you what exact wording to use. Side note: The HR of this university is very incompetent and unfriendly in general. After five months of processing and two iterations of the application form (which includes reasoning as to why the new activities are more difficult) later, they have rejected the application once again arguing that they see the postdoc’s work as that of a ‘normal’ postdoc. Both the postdoc and the group leader are angry about this and do not agree with HR.

To resolve the issue, they proposed to have a meeting with the head of HR. However, a meeting was rejected and instead a reply came to this request repeating that: “The higher level of difficulty of the tasks is not recognisable”, and instead asked for a new (third) version again. However, the group leader remains missing in action (not taking this as a priority problem to be solved).

This has led to the postdoc feeling let down and less motivated. She knows that if she quits the group would be in good amount of trouble (no other person to guide the PhDs, etc). After bringing this topic up to the group leader many times in the past five months, no progress has been made.

Should she bite the bullet and say that she will quit if the university is unable to recognize her value and promote her to E14 or is there a more effective method to get the request accepted?

She wants to have a career in academia and is hesitant about breaking good relations with the group leader who can ultimately potentially promote her.

Answer 1

How your friend can possibly get what she wants

E14 positions are very rare in German academia. You hardly ever see them advertised (I would very roughly estimate you get one E14 for thousand E13s). Instead they are almost always acquired through promotions in later career stages, which are also rare. Moreover, goodwill alone doesn’t suffice as the university must have the funds to back this up. It already surprises me that the HR department did not directly send the group leader somewhere else to secure funding first.

Threats only help if following up on them would harm the person who can give you what you want, and in your friend’s case this may not be the group leader. If your friend really wants to pursue E14, I suggest that she finds other people who got such a promotion. This would usually be staff scientists, habilitated people (“Privatdozent”), etc. Also ask the department or faculty whether it has specific funds for this, because without them this is likely hopeless.

Finally, as already suggested by other answers, I would start with smaller levers than quitting such as refusing extra responsibilities.

… but does she actually want this?

Most importantly, your friend should think strongly about whether a salary increase is actually what she wants, for several reasons:

• The academic apparatus is not geared to rewarding people with money. In most fields, people who care about money leave academia, and academia doesn’t need people who are in it for the money. (This is not supposed to say your friend is obsessed with money or similar.) The rewards of good work in academia are rather that you get to stay in academia, get more funds (not for salary), etc., in particular before the professor stage. I would therefore suggest that your friend considers seeking alternative “rewards” such as a permanent position, personnel to help her advance her own science, etc. (Paradoxically, funds for this may be more easily available.) This is particular important as:

• The main risk I see for your friend is this: If she wants to pursue a classical academic career, one of the main thing she needs to show is her own research output. Taking over the group leader’s duties can give relevant experience in teaching, supervising, etc. and those have value in future applications, but they can only compensate so much for a lack of research. (Mind that this is a vague guess: Your friend may actually get a lot of career-relevant research under her name, in which case she may be already in for a long-term reward, as she has well rounded group-leader experience.)

  A salary increase does not address this and is worth very little if your friend has to leave academia – probably around the time when the benefits of the salary increase would kick in, because:

• The actual short-term increases to salary may be rather low because the German public salary system has two axes, one for responsibility/qualification and one for job experience. If you friend progresses on the first axis, she will probably take a step back on the other axis. She cannot lose salary (by law), but the real benefits may only manifest as she steps up the experience ladder faster and with more benefits. Details depend on her current experience. This contributes to why this is usually done only in latter career stages (for postdocs and similar).

Possible strategies

If it did not happen already, I suggest that your friend has a talk with her group leader about how the extra duties affect her career chances and what benefits she can expect in compensation (other than extra salary). She should also talk to other professors in the field about this. The field is important here since different fields differently weigh publications, supervision experience, teaching experience, etc.

In German academia, successfully applying somewhere else may result in a promotion (or permanent position) at your current employer and is a standard way to get this – usually but not only at the professor level. Instead of threatening to quit, I therefore suggest that your friend takes a look at the relevant job market and applies for suitable jobs, in particularly permanent ones. An external job offer or even being invited to interviews are a much more palpable threat than just saying you intend to quit. Moreover, this lowers the risk for your friend to end up without a job or having to concede that her threat was empty.

Your friend has to be the judge whether to seek her group leader’s support for this. They may support this, in particularly if leaving the group is not the actual goal – but they may also equate it to a threat to quit or feel betrayed.

Answer 2

If the plan is to get the raise, not to quit, then the threat is not productive. The harm would be to the group, not to HR, so nothing substantial changes: Giving a raise to avoid someone quitting also requires sticking to the formal lingo.

The correct course of action is to figure out the magic words required by the Tarifvertrag. A German university should have several options separate from HR to help with this: Many universities have a department for young scientist careers, and sometimes a separate one for employee development in general. Unofficially, the department head and other professors have dealt with such a situation with HR previously and should be able to help. If that doesn’t help, the Tarifvertrag is the business of a Union (ver.di most likely) and they usually have representatives willing to help.

If none of that helps and the postdoc is sufficiently motivated, they should reach out to peers and professors at other universities. On the one hand, they likely have a more cooperative HR. On the other hand, they may open up the opportunity to follow through with the threat.

Answer 3

As others have said, only threaten to leave if you mean it. If your bluff is called, you have to be prepared to leave.

The second thing to note is why would HR care if you left? What skin off their nose is it? You say your friend leaving would leave the research group in great trouble. But to be brutally honest, HR almost certainly doesn't give a **** how much trouble individual research groups are in. If the group fails to fulfil its responsibilities, that is the group leader's problem, not HR's problem.

Answer 4

It is only appropriate to threaten to quit if you plan to follow through on the threat. As another consideration: in more bureaucratic systems, those in HR probably do not have the leeway to accede to a threat — no matter how much hassle it might be to find a replacement — if they have already judged that the postdoc has not met the criteria for promotion.

A better way to proceed would be to ask to see examples of past successful cases, so that your friend can learn from the way they have been worded and the way the cases have been made clear. In my experience, HR usually has a few example successful cases up their sleeves, which they have obtained permission to share. If they haven’t, they might at least be able to put your friend in touch with someone who has been successful in the past, and who might be willing to discuss strategies with your friend.

Answer 5

Here are a few points to bear in mind:

• Never "threaten to quit" unless you actually intend to quit: Your friend should only threaten to quit if she genuinely intends to quit if her requirements are not met. She should have a definite decision in mind in advance, including a timeline for how long she is willing to wait. If this is a course of action she is considering, she should already be looking for alternative positions elsewhere and ideally she would have other opportunities lined up.

• Don't do charity for an institution that doesn't value you: You mentioned that your friend is reluctant to quit because "...if she quits the group would be in good amount of trouble (no other person to guide the PhDs, etc.)". That is tough luck for the institution. If they aren't going to pay her what she is worth then they can take the loss that comes with losing her. It is good for an employee to be aligned with the goals of the institution, and want to act in its best interests, but that should be a two-way street.

• Be cognisant of the "principal-agent" problem: The principal-agent problem is a well-known problem in economics and institutional analysis. Your university is the principal and the HR representative is its agent. So long as the HR representative gets to exercise her power over her little fiefdom, she might not give a shit if her decision leads to loss of a good staff member to the university. It is unlikely that she will pay any price for this if it occurs and it is unlikely that the university will penalise her, so she may act in her own interests and not necessarily the interests of the university. In view of that, you should bear in mind that any threat to quit, while possibly damaging for the principal, probably has no adverse impact on the agent, so it is likely to be ignored.

Answer 6

Several years ago, as a permanent assistant professor, I realized I was underpaid relative to my colleagues, and decided to go through formal channels and try to have the situation addressed.

To make a long story short, similarly to your colleague, my requests were refused -- although the situation was partially addressed a couple of years later.

One thing I did not realize at the time was how much it would take out of me: the process was thoroughly demoralizing, and for awhile I thought about my dean every day in anger. Although I believe my anger was "justified", there is a saying that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and hoping that someone else dies. Unfortunately, I didn't quite know how to let it go, and my productivity and morale tanked for awhile.

If your friend were in a permanent position, I would advise her to consider the situation carefully before doing anything more. Dealing with incompetent and unfriendly people (as you describe them) can exact a high toll. Given that your friend is doing a postdoc and will hopefully be moving on to a permanent position soon, in her shoes I would be reluctant to invest much more energy in this.

Answer 7

Has she considered the other route, asking for less work and less responsibility? She has a good point about feeling underpaid, and university groups are places where some people get a lot of work and good work is rewarded with even more work. HR probably won't care if she quits, and there's not much her group can do about it. She will only hurt the group and lose her current job. On the other hand, the group has the option of making her work situation less stressful. Threatening to quit might work for that, but it is not so unlikely that a reasonable feedback about having too much work will be accepted without threats.