Your first responsibility is to you.
Not your company nor your co-workers.
Your employers first responsibility is to themselves and to their shareholders.
You come way down their list.
Employees are overheads and treated not as assets that mature in value with experience but as assets with depreciation.
The payroll is like an emergency cash reserve, times are hard they sack people and make others do two or three jobs for the same or less money and then forget all this when times improve.
Once upon a time, in a land far away where Quakers were industrialists, the care and well being of their employees was important to them and the built elysian communities for them such as Port Sunlight, Bourneville and so on. They did their own time and motion studies and reduced the working hours below the legal maximum of the day and helped push down the legal maximum.
Sure, they got rich.
But back then they cared.
(The downside was that these worker's communities, though offering well designed homes, sadly also offered temperance houses and no pubs..., but you can't have everything).
It was usual even into living memory (i.e. I have worked with some of the last of them) for workers to work for one company from the day they left school till the day they retired, with time off for military service.
But today, while too much job hopping, especially with gaps in employment, is a a sign of a potentially unsuitable employee, the norm is now for people to use their mobility (the other factor in long term employment with a single company) to change jobs on a more frequent basis.
There are a variety of reasons for this, including that it develops a much wider and more valuable experience base to offer, but not least is that this is possibly the only way to maintain any kind of decent salary and rewards or to progress up the career ladder.
Anyone who stays in the same job for too long gets regarded as "safe".
Safe means that it is safe for management to overlook them for promotion and safe too to offer them less than the going rate at pay review time.
Safe also means they will believe the manager when he says "times are hard. I have only a small pot to share out but I've done my best for you and you've got a little more than some others so please keep this pay rise/fall confidential." The probability is that the safe employee gets less than the average which is why the "do not discuss" clause is added.
It doesn't do to be "safe".
A little bit of job movement is a signal that you can't be considered safe for any length of time.
Even internal promotions are suspect.
They will pay you more than you get at the moment but probably far less than they'd have to pay to recruit from outside and certainly they will pocket the cost of recruiting from outside.
That you can find a job offering 40-50% more than you get now is perhaps a measure of how far below the rate you have been for too many years.
This brings me to the question I raised in another thread....
Application forms often want to know what your previous salary was. This may give them a chance to quickly downrate the pay they will offer you but if there are any other reasons, I can't think of them.
I am reluctant to share this information but how do you not share and not lie?
I guess one answer would be that that is company confidential information, which it may well be because if they don't want you sharing your pay details with other employees, they really won't want you sharing it with competitors or other companies.
But how do others get round this?
JMW