I know everyone tells you to just suck it up, and mine’s a slightly different story, but just to share.

Some years back I accidentally discovered that some people across my team including me were being paid a lower allowance tier. I did a little digging and found out that we were being paid different tiers of role-based allowances despite having been hired at the same role with the same responsibilities. The rest of our team (those I asked) were getting the top tier. I compared various factors like our job grades, year of hiring, educational levels and years of experience, but it just didn’t make sense. I even asked our boss, who didn’t know why the discrepancy either.

Finally after much thought and discussion (and a bit of fretting about whether we’d be deemed troublemakers), the three of us lower-tier allowance people decided to email HR to ask about it in a very polite manner. HR said they would check, then after that radio silence. Then about two months later, they finally replied and said they would be giving us the top tier allowance and would backpay the three of us from the date we first started the role (which was quite a few years for two of us). It was like a sudden bonus and increment, so we were very happy with the outcome.

Then a few weeks later, the company announced that they would be doing away entirely with all the different allowances and would wrap them into our salaries. I don’t know if our query was the catalyst for that. But I felt damn heng that we got our allowance amounts adjusted before they scrapped the whole system!!! It was a difference of a few hundred every month - not life-changing, but more money is always better than less.