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Comment by tchaffee | Hacker News Reader

You're far more likely to get what you want by having a well written contract.

You may have gotten contract wording changed with a small company, but the Amazons of the world will not do that. And these are exactly the companies where labor needs unions so they can collectively bargain against a powerful and organized management and legal team. You simply don't have the resources as an individual.

Being polite is always a good strategy but being nice would mean working for free. That would be very nice. Is that your approach?

It's also not nice to take your employer to court. What happened to your be nice strategy there? Why did you threaten with legal action? It sounds like you can't even follow your own advice.

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Being polite and nice certainly does not require capitulation. You can be nice, polite, and quite firm in what you want. Ceding things you don't care about helps, too. For example, Starbucks benefits include free college tuition. I'm never going back to college, so I'd be willing to trade that benefit for mo' money.

I'm told time and again that lil' ol' me cannot negotiate. Yet I do it with department stores, doctors, dentists, car dealers, all sorts of "non-negotiable" contracts. Try it some time.

I helped a friend recently negotiate a new car. The dealer started with a non-negotiable price. He settled for about 10% less. It was all very nice and polite and friendly, with lots of joking back and forth. We just made it clear the price had to come down or no deal.

I negotiate all the time and am quite successful at it.

What kind of long term employment contract do you have with your doctor, dentist, department store, or car dealer?

You seem to have lost focus on the topic.

May I repeat:

I've gotten the wording of employment contracts changed.

So have I.

At which companies? Amazon? Google? Target? UPS?

It's the massive employers with huge legal teams where you need a union so you can fairly negotiate with their massive legal team. The subject that started this is unions at Amazon. Not negotiating with your local restaurant about how much they will pay you to wait on tables.

What was the nature of the change? Did you get additional healthcare benefits? The kinds of things that unions negotiate about? Or was it something trivial? The details matter.

If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened? The lowest wealth gaps in US history were when unions were the strongest. Wealth gaps in Germany are much lower and unions are much stronger. All evidence points to you being wrong about individuals being good negotiators at getting a bigger share of the pie. And it's just common sense. The idea that most of us are qualified to go up against a big and highly trained legal team is laughable.

> At which companies?

Every company I've worked for.

> If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened?

Let's say I work for a company with big server farms as an engineer. I find a way to make the server software run 1% faster. This saves the company 1% on server costs. Server costs run into the $hundreds of millions. What's that worth to the company? I know software engineers who got pay packages worth a million bucks. None of them used a lawyer to negotiate their compensation.

The WSJ ran an article recently about how Barnes & Noble was going down the tubes, mainly because of competition from Amazon. There was much handwringing about it, and their stock was in the dumpster. B&N was headed for failure. Then, a couple years ago, B&N replaced the CEO. The CEO revamped the way their stores operated, from top to bottom. B&N has surged in profits and value.

That new CEO created $billions in wealth for the company and shareholders. It saved the workers from being tossed out in the street.

How much would you say that CEO was worth paying?

In a free market, people get paid according to the value they produce. Not the value other people produce.

To get more pay, think about how to improve the value you provide. Always be thinking about that.

You avoided the question of whether you've worked for a large employer like Amazon or Target.

Pay packages are not a change to the wording of an employment contract. What I'm talking about is a change to the contract that would have legal implications. You failed to give an example of an employee that has succeeded in doing that with a large employer.

Your example of highly in demand software engineers does not apply to the average worker - the topic is Amazon warehouse employees forming a union.

Your example of a CEO does not apply to the hundreds of millions of average workers.

In the free market labor can organize to get paid according to their collective value.

To get more pay think about being as organized and as powerful as management and the legal team of the company you are negotiating with. Always be thinking about that.

Have you done what while applying for a minimum wage labour job in a warehouse?

I've done minimum wage jobs, but not in a warehouse. I did negotiate the conditions.

How could you possibly be getting paid minimum wage when you claim to be such a good negotiator? Union jobs almost always pay more than minimum wage. They pay more because collective negotiation works better at negotiation than you did at "winning" minimum wage.

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