to increase my workload by about 20% with no increase in compensation (they want me and another guy to take over parts of the workload of a guy they recently fired).

I’m going on 17 years as in-house patent counsel for a Fortune 500 company and this is all work that they could farm out to law firms. But they want me and this other guy to do most of it inside because they’re in a budget crunch.

Even though I otherwise have a pretty good remote work arrangement with them, I pushed back pretty hard. Specifically, I told my boss that I would only take on the extra work if I am given complete discretion as to how much I can send out to law firms (which I expect to be most of it). Basically, I told him that I would only take on the extra work if I could farm most of it out.

We”ll see how this goes. I’m prepared to walk (or at least quiet quit) and I suspect the other guy is too as he has 35 years with the company and is very close to retirement.

As further backdrop to this story, they’ve only given us one pay raise (about 5%) in the last 5 years.

I know their perspective is that it’s only 20% more work and that I should “take one for the team.” But, remote gig or not, this feels abusive.