Here in the States, I worked at one company where two overachieving colleagues had been trying to get raises for years. In both cases, they got fed up and found other jobs. The interesting thing is that in both cases, their respective bosses at our company told them to immediately apply for the positions they were vacating at our company. In one case the employee was hired back into the exact same position with a very significant raise less than two weeks after outprocessing. In the second case, the employee literally outprocessed one day, took a single day off, and inprocessed back into the same position the following day, again with a very significant raise.