For a lot of companies, this is economically sound thinking. If someone who is considering leaving because of a low salary is already a good few steps towards the door in terms of decision making, pre-empting any such motivation from occurring can be a lot cheaper than losing employees who are fully up to speed and have a lot of internal know-how. They're not getting an adequate replacement for the same salary after all.

The same happened to me this past week. A 30% "re-benchmarking".