A Wells Fargo employee asked the CEO for a raise — and cc’ed 200,000 coworkers

The Washington Post's On Leadership ^ | October 9, 2014 | Jena McGregor

[2ndDivisionVet]

Most people ask for a raise in the privacy of their boss's office. But one gutsy Wells Fargo employee emailed the CEO directly — and copied some 200,000 other Wells Fargo workers on the note.

On Tuesday, the Charlotte Observer reported that Tyrel Oates, who it says works in an Oregon office of Wells Fargo processing requests from customers trying to stop debt-collection calls, sent such an email to CEO John Stumpf.

His plea was not just to get a raise for himself. His proposal to Stumpf? Use the company's profits to give every employee a raise of $10,000. According to the Observer, Oates said the move would "show the rest of the United States, if not the world, that yes, big corporations can have a heart other than philanthropic endeavors."

An apparent copy of Oates' letter, with his name removed, has been posted on Reddit and includes that language. The letter cites Wells Fargo's second quarter profits, and reads: "why not take some of this and distribute it to the rest of the employees."(continued)

[Cementjungle]

the way it works at this bank (also probably at most other similar big company) is that you’d never get more than 5% raises, it’s usually 0-2% depending on your rating that year (also, we’re not allow to give a 5 rating anymore unless we write a paper justifying why the said employee deserves it). and also your pay percentile have a certain influence; if you’re over a certain percentile, your raise will get less and less.

Yep, I know how it works... did a few decades in the corporate world. My problem was that I eventually got bored in each position, so I would always seek out more projects within the company to get involved with. That tended to keep me from being too bored, and got me raises alot (and bonuses, end even stock options).

If I had just sat there like a lump doing the same thing year after year, I wouldn't expect more than cost-of-living increases now and then.

[RFEngineer]

“Who gives a s__t about the stockholders?”

Well, this is perfectly in keeping with the lawlessness that manifested itself in the “saving” of GM. Bondholders got zero’ed out, despite any reasonable interpretation of law, in favor of the unions.

In these little commie minds, every business is a collective, and all the “workers” are to be treated “equally”

Take $2B of stockholder value and give it to each employee as a $10k raise seems perfectly reasonable to these people.

And that’s the problem. The cure for communism is for people to live with the results of it. Right now with unemployment, EBT, Obola-phones, and disability-for-all everyone is deprived of the opportunity for learning the most basic economic lessons. No matter how stupid you may be in falling for this sort of stuff, you understand hunger and deprivation. That’s the cure for this sort of communism.

It seems we’ll be learning this en-masse, even though a good many of us already know.

[ctdonath2]

$10,000 each would be $2,649,000,000 ... about 10% of profits. That’s the kind of math that makes some think it’s sensible, while forgetting it’s not theirs to decide.

[MrB]

You’re probably right - if Tyrel was Timothy,

he’d be walkin’.