Will it work? eh….maybe not, but if you hit the right pressure points in the HR apparatus, (have a woman write it as if she’s narcing on the boys planning their exit) then you just might get a 3% bump?
I had something similar once, because they overheard us talking about jumping ship to a new place opening up nearby, we mysteriously had the partners approve a blanket ~8% COL increase of almost a dollar an hour. Nothing amazing, sure, but there wasn’t insane inflation in the late 00’s