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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

My perception is that there's always been a white collar/blue collar split that has hindered things.

My dad was involved in trying to unionize engineers at GE, a long time ago. There was a vote, but it didn't quite make it. It wasn't until like a quarter century after he died that I realized he might not have retired early by choice.

I have zero details on it, all I know is that it was pre-Jack Welch, and probably the majority of the engineers felt that they were too good for a union.

I am a member of a union that has a long and convoluted history, but I think the origin was basically about how office workers didn't want to belong to the same union as everyone else.

People said this was folly, that it was splitting the power of the employees to our detriment.

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I used to belong to a union and while helpful for blue collar work, the benefits go away pretty quickly when you can negotiate as an individual, have high mobility and strong demand for skills.

When I was in union you negotiated as a group. You bring up the bottom and pull down the top. Seniority determines most of your compensation, not performance.

> when you can negotiate as an individual

When can you negotiate as an individual?

Is the scenario you have in mind when there is an actual bidding war, when you go into a negotiation of salary with an actual offer from another firm, and neither one is offended enough to eliminate you from consideration?

How often does that happen to you and how often do you think it happens in general?

I negotiate every job offer. I also negotiate compensation by getting outside offers and benchmarking my internal pay to that.

No bidding war required. And nobody is offended. And it happens pretty often for white collar work in high demand industries.

In tech, this happens quite often. People like patio11 will explicitly say that you should always negotiate as it has net positive ROI [0] [1].

Just wondering, do you not negotiate? If so, you might be losing out on many multiples of your current compensation.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

[1] https://github.com/vlvagerviwager/salary-negotiation-tech

You can always negotiate, can't you? I except if the job is on a collective bargaining agreement, sure, but your average Dev job is negotiable, no?

You don't actually need another job on hand to negotiate terms. It's also up to you what you want to haggle over, money or holiday, on call duties, etc.

I think the key is agency. If you have it, you can negotiate. If you're always in a terrible negotiating position like certain blue collar workers, it makes sense to be in a union.

Mind you, I'm not sure if would be bad for white collar workers to unionize. Doctors for instance are white collar and have unions.

>You can always negotiate, can't you?

You can always try. If you have always made market rate, then have you ever really negotiated anything? To benefit from negotiation skills, you would have to be making way below market and then somehow convince someone to pay you what others are making. And do it without flat out lying.

Most of the pay gap between the top and bottom performers isn't much to do with direct negotiation, it's the cumulative effect of star performers being in high demand and therefore getting faster promotions, more and better offers, etc. If they get screwed on a promotion they can get another ten offers and pick the best one. Iterate over twenty years and you have a gigantic gap in comp between the top and bottom within the same industry.

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