By Gregory Polcyn; Area Vice President, AFGE 1658
As our Local heads into negotiations on the Negotiated Labor Management Agreement (NLMA), aka the union contract, I decided to write an article on everyday negotiations. If the feedback is positive, I’ll write more articles on this subject. If not, I’ll write about how we defend employees who steal toilet paper from Government bathrooms.
There are four possible out-comes regarding negotiations: win-lose, lose-win, lose-lose and the coveted win-win. Most negotiations result in a win-lose situation, which inevitably involves compromise. I’ll provide a little vignette that I’m sure everyone can relate to:
It’s Friday night and you and your spouse/significant other want to go to dinner. Well, here’s the problem. You want Chinese and they want Italian. What to do, what to do? You can stomach Italian, but you’ve been craving beef and broccoli all week! You know that it’s going to take a lot of begging and cajoling to convince her (sorry, I mean “them”) that Chinese is the way to go. Also, did I mention that you’re already in the car and both restaurants are about the same distance? How do you negotiate in this scenario? I’m sure we all have our methods, but I bet it might go some-thing like this:
“Ok, we’ll do Italian tonight if we can do Chinese next week”. In this scenario, one party gets what they want (Italian) and the other party doesn’t. This is the common “win-lose” scenario, and this is a great as long as you are the winner. However, what if you don’t want Chinese next Friday? What if you get sick and can’t go out? What if you have to work late! Well you should have thought about that before you compromised. This is one of the problems with “win-lose” scenarios in negotiation.
I’m sure we can all see the flip side of the coin where you win and get your beef and broccoli; but what would be a “lose-lose” in this dinner scenario? Well, it turns out that you and your spouse are both “blah” on Mexican food. The funny thing is, you both think the other person really likes Mexican food. You don’t want to hurt their feelings by saying you don’t, so you continue to go Mexican restaurants – hating every minute of it – all the while thinking you’re doing the other person a favor. Sound familiar? I hope not.
Here’s the real question on most people’s minds: What would be a win-win? That’s a little more difficult to define, but there is a Chinese-Italian fusion restaurant where you can have beef and broccoli, and your significant other can have whatever they want. However, it is 15 miles further out, it will cost 50% more and since you’re in the car already and didn’t make reservations, you’ll be waiting 45 minutes to be seated. Hey, I didn’t say it was easy, I just said it existed.
What is the take-away here? If you want the coveted win-win, you’ve got to prepare for it.
