Yuku free message boards

Hi Laura!

I do understand your affection for Miss Kim and your understanding of her fine qualities as a person because you know her far better than the rest of us, regular fans of GL, can ever do.

I can well imagine that with a big heart, Miss Kim did try to do good for all her cast-mates. I have never heard even a whiff of a rumour of any of them ever saying one bad word about her.

If she fought for other people's salaries being fair and lost the fight, I can well understand her anger and I am very glad that she is not in that situation any more.

This too had happened to me in one of the jobs I held. I came to find out that my boss (it was a University job), the professor, was paying all the women in the laboratory (including me) on a much lower pay-scale than that of equally-qualified men doing equal jobs. I went and asked him, respectfully, that all our pays be made equal and commensurate with our training and responsibility. He told me that we women had husbands who also made salaries at their own jobs whereas the men who worked for him had stay-at-home wives, and therefore, he needed to pay them more. I told him that the pay had to be commensurate for the work and experience, not commensurate with the financial needs of each worker. He simply refused. I could do nothing except to file a lawsuit for which I lacked both time and resources. I remember how angry I was ...

My story had a happy ending though, but for a different set of co-workers. I found another job, in another laboratory at another university, and this time, up-front, I asked the professor that he pay me according to the salary guidelines created by NIH for my job (which were a lot higher than what my former boss was paying me and other women in the lab). The new would-be boss was an honest and good man, who told me that his grant funding would not allow him to do that because this means he must do so for everyone in the laboratory, but he will do his best. I agreed, started working with him and really enjoyed my work. Several months after I started there, I had made some really good friends. One of them was this wonderful scientist from France. He told me, during the course of a nice conversation one day, that because of me, he and everyone else in the lab got a really nice pay-hike around the time I joined the lab. When I asked him to explain, my friend told me that as soon as I accepted my present job, the new boss came into the lab, called everyone together and told them of his conversation with the new scientist (meaning me) coming into the lab and what he promised her; he also told them that because of the promise he made me, he was going to raise everyone's salary to what he was offering me, and though it was lower than the NIH guidelines, this was the best he could do.

I can tell you that the second experience made me as happy as the first one made me angry.

If Miss Kim was trying to get a fair salary for all her co-workers and was failing, the anger would have simply eaten her heart's lining. I know that this was how I felt. All the more reason that I am glad that she is out of GL. Ultimately though, even as I did, she has to learn techniques for controlling and coming to peace with one's legitimate anger. After all, though there are days when you get the bear, there will always be days when the bear gets you.