From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Newsgroups: pnw.general
Subject: Re: Employment contracts
Summary: Submission to authority is the norm
Date: 22 Aug 92 18:36:07 GMT
Organization: >>> Eskimo North (206)-FOR-EVER <<<

In article <907@nazgul.UUCP> bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright) writes:
[...]
>I have had these "standard default agreements" shoved in front of me with
>a pen many times. The Human Resources gnome who does this is typically
>surprised that I pick it up and start to *read* it. Then I make changes.
>The gnome goes back to his/her boss, and the changes I made have *always*
>been accepted (except once for fun I made an outlandish salary demand!).
>The changes I make are typically a softening of the crud about anything I
>do, even on my own time with my own equipment, is owned by the company.
>
>(And, when I did my amendments, I told the company "take it or leave it",
>that I wouldn't work under the terms of the original contract. So far,
>no corporation has successfully "coerced, dominated, or manipulated" me
>into signing anything I didn't agree with. Unless you count offering me
>more money as manipulation... :-)).
[...]

Hmmm...every time I've tried that they left it.  Evidently the small
leverage I was able to exert was insufficient to sway them.  Eventually,
owing to economic imperatives, such as the need to get food and shelter,
I had to capitulate.  I. e., I had to get practical, moderate my "attitude"
(how the company or others in authority perceive things when I stand up for
my rights), grit my teeth and truckle to authority if I want to keep the
rent paid.  After more than 20 years of doing this, you'd better believe that
I now have a pretty bad attitude (that leaks thru on job interviews despite
my best efforts to dissemble same by trying to appear "nice"), and now, since
I essentially have nothing to lose (or, to put it another way, flat-out don't
give a shit for nuthin) and thus, have achieved a primitive form of
enlightenment, yeah, I can say "Fergeddit!" and walk out the door when they
ask me to pee in the bottle.  Of course, I'm still dependent somewhat on
people who *must* pee into the bottle, but I try to compensate them.
They must judge how well I do at that.  I'd rather be nice to them than to
some crummy fucking inhuman brain-sucker like Boeing.

It's my guess that with all the people out there who are willing to *not*
question the agreements they make with "authority" (the prospective employer),
that they have no need to deal with people who want to negotiate on
an equal basis.  Here it's a buyer's market.  It is indeed possible that my
talents were not so desirable as to cause the company to throw themselves at
my feet, as evidently is the case with you, Walter.  All I can say to that is
there are so many niches for unix kernel gurus on the planet Earth (and, due
to the USL/BSD litigation, that has been placed in doubt -- we may be seeing
some rapid extinction in the next year!), or whatever your particular talent
happens to be.  Those without niches must try other things.  As it happens,
people like secretaries or janitors can't dictate terms to their prospective
employers and still hope to influence the outcome of events in favorable
ways.  Naturally, they find this an unacceptable situation.

I think that it must be admitted that most people are pretty respectful
of authority and are unwilling to dictate terms to those under whom they
presumably would shortly be entrusting 1/3 of their lives.  After all, an
equivalent amount of time (within a binary factor of magnitude :) is spent
in schooling, which is only preparation for, and inculcation in the attitudes
necessary for submission to authority and for fitting within a heirarchical
structural organization.  I would have to say that by and large,
this training is successful and breaks down in the individual (rebellion)
relatively infrequently (but it happens).  Hence there will not be many people
with the temerity to question employment conditions.

Perhaps it is a myth that things like employment contracts are non-negotiable.
If this is the case there should be few objections if it is debunked, except
from said personnel gnomes, and/or control freaks.  I suspect that attempts
to negotiate contracts, and refusal of drug tests and such are simply used
as negative profile match-points to weed out non-submissive people.
Management types simply don't want to be bothered with negotiating for
jelly-bean positions, and scream like hell when they are forced to, like
with the janitor's strikes in the past few years.  They call it coercion
when labor unions (or other collectivity) negotiate from a position of
strength, but "the free market" when *they* negotiate (or dictate terms)
from a position of strength.
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
 "People who sign their own .sig are just net.personality wanna-bees." --
 K. Cockrum