I’ve written a short guide to the language of pay negotiations. You can access via the Napo website (www.napo.org.uk) or by requests here, through my LinkedIn page or @deanrogers25 on Twitter. Although focused on helping the amateur union volunteers understand sometimes technical and obtuse language it could be just as useful for professionals on either side of the negotiating table.
After spending much of August and September engaged in detailed and complex pay negotiations between Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Services Officials and the recognised trade unions, it was clear that even some of the professionals in the room were struggling with some of the “pay speak”.
Given that actual real pay negotiations have become something of a rarity that isn’t surprising. Whilst most unions recruitment member material will have “We negotiate your pay” somewhere near the top in truth it’s quite a while since that’s been a reality in many workplaces – even in the still heavily unionised public sector. For at least a decade, the Government’s austerity linked pay freeze has reduced annual pay talks to a few short meetings about how to best allocate the miserly 1%. Its been a technical process around minimal options with very little creativity or capacity on either side to even start trying to address the structural pay problems that have increasingly emerged, impacting upon recruitment and retention.
So people have forgotten the language through under-use. Understanding the language is critical to holding your own in a negotiations – otherwise the most gifted linguist will dominate and direct the conversation – dictating the outcome.
Negotiations are difficult enough without literally not knowing what they’re talking about. But as in most cases, the technical language that’s developed isn’t rocket science. Elected representatives who manage complex offenders in probation, challenging classrooms in teaching, complex systems in parts of the civil services, etc – all area where negotiating pay could soon be coming back into vogue – can be confident that once the language is explained in plan and relevant terms they should be confident not to be bamboozled. They may even enjoy catching their employer leads by surprise.
The next thing to master will be the maths and the data. That’s a story for another day, but it is worrying given that we’re constantly told our current schooling system isn’t teaching numeracy as well as back in the day to witness examples of near number-phobia and straight forward adding fractions to calculate pension pay outs or percentages tricking people up because its so long since they haven’t had a machine to do these sums for them.
However, if everyone at least remember what percentages are and what a pension’s for we’re beginning to get things back on track. No-one can be confident about the outcome of negotiations if they haven’t felt secure during the discussions.
So if you’re about to start pay talks anywhere, I hope this helps.
(If anyone can help me work out how to embed a pdf file into an article like this that would also be very welcomed…a bit too rational for me I think…..)
LOOKING UP! 