The Sixth Conversation Thread

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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by loglorn »

They used to advertise their original stuff a lot, at least here, i'm not entirely sure why would they stop but youre right i havent seen Netflix ads in a hot second now.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by sangi39 »

One thing I really like about D&D and character creation, is just the random opportunity to throw a hint of conlanging nerdiness into it. My character, a dwarf, goes by Glodder Merkvel, but that's entirely because he's given up on trying to get people to pronounce his name properly as [ˈᵑɡʟ̝ɔː̯aˀ.ðar mʏr̥kˈkʷʰɛl̥ˀ] (we have someone at work from Portugal who, unfortunately, has done something similar, and my friend Ivan tried to go by John for a while, but it didn't feel right for him, so he just accepted people saying [ˈaɪ.vən] instead of [ɪˈvan]), and he's got a very sort of "I'm putting up with you doing this, and other stuff, because I need to be here" attitude to go with it (recently punched a general guy, who was only in his position through nepotism, in the face and broke his nose because he failed to lead by example and someone almost died)

The phonology of the language he speaks (I honestly don't care for the "one race one language" dynamic in D&D and instead go for a "okay, fine, members of each race have a sort of lingua franca that a fair few of them learn to speak allowing them to venture out into the world, but they also speak a separate language at home, and then Common") has the following phonology:

N /m n ŋ ŋʷ/ (nasalise preceding vowel)
B /ᵐb ⁿd ⁿdʒ ᵑɡ ᵑɡʟ̝ ᵑɡʷ/ (do not nasalise the preceding vowel)
P /p t tʃ k kʟ̝ kʷ ʔ/ (aspirated when the onset of a stressed syllable)
Z /v ð ʒ ɣ/
S /s ʃ x h
R /r l w/
And highly variable /ʔʷ hʷ/ which different between dialects and class, and have a number of allophones. In Glodder's speech, for example, they appear as [w~f f]

/ɪ ʏ ʊ / - /iː yː ɯː uː/
/ɛ ɔ/ - /eː øː oː/
/a/ - /aː/

/ɛɪ/ - /ɛːɪ øːʏ ɔːɪ~ɔːʏ ɔːʊ/
/aɪ~ɔɪ* aʊ~ɔʊ*/ - /aːɪ aːʊ/ *(the variants with /ɔ/ typically appear after a labialised or labial consonant)
/ɛa ɔa/ - /ɛːa ɔːa/
(I've listed the long and short variants sort of separately so the kinds of distinctions being made are a little clearer)

Only /ɪ ʊ a/ appear in unstressed syllables

Syllable structure CV(N/S/r/l)(ˀ) where /ˀ/ appears only on stressed vowels containing a long vowel and/or a coda consonant (stress appears on the first syllable of a root). This also leads to a situation where /ᵐb ⁿd ⁿdʒ ᵑɡ ᵑɡʟ̝ ᵑɡʷ/ contrast with /mb nd n(d)ʒ ŋg ŋɡʟ̝ ŋgʷ/, with the latter being longer in duration than the former, and the clusters causing allophonic nasalisation of the preceding vowel, which doesn't occur with the prenasalised stops


I do also have a vague "historical development" of the language worked out, beginning with:

/m n ɲ ŋ ŋʷ ɴ ɴʷ/
/b d dʒ ɡ ɡʟ̝ ɡʷ ɢ ɢʷ/
/p t tʃ k kʟ̝ kʷ q qʷ/
/s ʃ x xʷ h hʷ/
/r l/

/i e a u o iː eː aː uː oː/

With stressed syllables carrying either low or high tone (the low tone surviving as /ˀ/ in syllables more complex than CV)

The following historical developments occurred in the consonants:

/m n ɲ ŋ ŋʷ ɴ ɴʷ/ > /m n n ŋ ŋʷ ŋ w/
/b d dʒ ɡ ɡʟ̝ ɡʷ ɢ ɢʷ/ > /v ð ʒ ɣ l w ɣ w/
/p t tʃ k kʟ̝ kʷ q qʷ/ > /p t tʃ k kʟ̝ kʷ ʔ~h* ʔʷ~hʷ*/ *(allophonic aspiration precedes this step, so [q] became [ʔ] while [qʰ] became [h])
/s ʃ x xʷ h hʷ/ > /s ʃ x xʷ h hʷ/
/r l/ > /r l/

The prenasalised plosives come from older nasal+voiceless plosive clusters, and nasal+voiceless fricatives also gave rise to voiced fricatives, and old nasal+voiced plosive clusters led to plain nasals (through an intermediate geminate stage). The syllable structure was basically the same as the modern language, but is allowed geminate consonants

Vowels underwent the following changes (vaguely listed):

["i-mutation" and "u-mutation"]
[stressed short vowels lengthen in open syllables]
[stressed long vowels diphthongise in open syllables]
[long vowels in unstressed syllables shorten]
[unstressed *_rVCV_ *_NVCV_ *_SVCV > _rCV_ _NCV_ _SCV]
[unstressed *_VrV# *_VNV# *_VSV# > _Vr# _VN# _VS#]
[Loss of consonant gemination]
[word-initial unstressed vowels in open syllables without a preceding onset (a "bare vowel"), or with an onset /ʔ h/, are dropped)

Which I think should lead more or less to the state of affairs in the modern language.


So, for example, my characters name comes from an older [in-ˈɡʟ̝àːd-ara múrki-kʷèl]




And all that because of a name and a minor joke [:P] And I might steal this for Yantas, lol
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Khemehekis »

sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 01:57 And all that because of a name and a minor joke [:P] And I might steal this for Yantas, lol
Are you saying there's a joke behind "Glodder Merkvel"? Is it "Glad I'm working well"? "Glad America is well"?
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by sangi39 »

Khemehekis wrote: 18 Feb 2023 02:08
sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 01:57 And all that because of a name and a minor joke [:P] And I might steal this for Yantas, lol
Are you saying there's a joke behind "Glodder Merkvel"? Is it "Glad I'm working well"? "Glad America is well"?
Oh, the joke is "you can't pronounce the name properly", which is a play on people constantly spelling my name wrong, even when I literally spell it (I once signed off on repair work done at a previous work place, said my first name, spelled it, said my surname, spelled it, and said "always have to spell it, haha", only for the person to hand me the thing to sign for me to notice they'd spelt both name wrong [xD] ). My high school (so five years) literally took four years and a term to spell my name right on P.E. class lists.......

EDIT: The name actually comes, round-about, from Danish, ish, as "of-ash dark-evening"
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Khemehekis »

sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 02:44 Oh, the joke is "you can't pronounce the name properly", which is a play on people constantly spelling my name wrong, even when I literally spell it (I once signed off on repair work done at a previous work place, said my first name, spelled it, said my surname, spelled it, and said "always have to spell it, haha", only for the person to hand me the thing to sign for me to notice they'd spelt both name wrong [xD] ). My high school (so five years) literally took four years and a term to spell my name right on P.E. class lists.......
Oh, yes, that. I recall you talked about it here.
EDIT: The name actually comes, round-about, from Danish, ish, as "of-ash dark-evening"
I see the root for dark in the "Merk" part, but I can't for the life of me figure out, even with help from Wiktionary, how you got "ash" and "evening" into there.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by sangi39 »

Khemehekis wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:24
sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 02:44 Oh, the joke is "you can't pronounce the name properly", which is a play on people constantly spelling my name wrong, even when I literally spell it (I once signed off on repair work done at a previous work place, said my first name, spelled it, said my surname, spelled it, and said "always have to spell it, haha", only for the person to hand me the thing to sign for me to notice they'd spelt both name wrong [xD] ). My high school (so five years) literally took four years and a term to spell my name right on P.E. class lists.......
Oh, yes, that. I recall you talked about it here.
Damn, that's some memory! It happens to my brother a lot. Apparently my dad's thing was "names people know, but not the common spelling" (and we have a surname that people confuse with another surname very easily)
Khemehekis wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:24
EDIT: The name actually comes, round-about, from Danish, ish, as "of-ash dark-evening"
I see the root for dark in the "Merk" part, but I can't for the life of me figure out, even with help from Wiktionary, how you got "ash" and "evening" into there.
glød/glóðar, mørk, kvæld
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Khemehekis »

sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:32
Khemehekis wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:24
sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 02:44 Oh, the joke is "you can't pronounce the name properly", which is a play on people constantly spelling my name wrong, even when I literally spell it (I once signed off on repair work done at a previous work place, said my first name, spelled it, said my surname, spelled it, and said "always have to spell it, haha", only for the person to hand me the thing to sign for me to notice they'd spelt both name wrong [xD] ). My high school (so five years) literally took four years and a term to spell my name right on P.E. class lists.......
Oh, yes, that. I recall you talked about it here.
Damn, that's some memory! It happens to my brother a lot. Apparently my dad's thing was "names people know, but not the common spelling" (and we have a surname that people confuse with another surname very easily)
Thanks for the compliment on my memory. So they misspell Marc as "Mark"? No one has trouble with James (except those who write it "Jame's" even when it's not a possessive), but a lot of people treat Landau as a French name and spell it Landeau. (Landau is actually Jewish, not French; like most German and Yiffish surnames with AU, the AU is pronounced as in "sauerkraut" and does not have an E before it.)[/quote]

I assume it's just familiarity. "Marc" isn't, like, the "default" spelling for the name, to be fair, so unless you spell it out loud, most people will just assume it's "Mark" instead. The thing that always got me in school was that they would have had a record of it, and it was worse down in Bedfordshire when, speaking to someone at the council, they actively changed it assuming the "c" was a mistake [xD] James, on the other hand, well that's pretty much the only way I've ever seen that spelled, and probably the same for most people as well, at least in the UK
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by sangi39 »

Khemehekis wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:42
sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:32
Khemehekis wrote: 18 Feb 2023 03:24
sangi39 wrote: 18 Feb 2023 02:44 Oh, the joke is "you can't pronounce the name properly", which is a play on people constantly spelling my name wrong, even when I literally spell it (I once signed off on repair work done at a previous work place, said my first name, spelled it, said my surname, spelled it, and said "always have to spell it, haha", only for the person to hand me the thing to sign for me to notice they'd spelt both name wrong [xD] ). My high school (so five years) literally took four years and a term to spell my name right on P.E. class lists.......
Oh, yes, that. I recall you talked about it here.
Damn, that's some memory! It happens to my brother a lot. Apparently my dad's thing was "names people know, but not the common spelling" (and we have a surname that people confuse with another surname very easily)
Thanks for the compliment on my memory. So they misspell Marc as "Mark"? No one has trouble with James (except those who write it "Jame's" even when it's not a possessive), but a lot of people treat Landau as a French name and spell it Landeau. (Landau is actually Jewish, not French; like most German and Yiffish surnames with AU, the AU is pronounced as in "sauerkraut" and does not have an E before it.)
I assume it's just familiarity. "Marc" isn't, like, the "default" spelling for the name, to be fair, so unless you spell it out loud, most people will just assume it's "Mark" instead. The thing that always got me in school was that they would have had a record of it, and it was worse down in Bedfordshire when, speaking to someone at the council, they actively changed it assuming the "c" was a mistake [xD] James, on the other hand, well that's pretty much the only way I've ever seen that spelled, and probably the same for most people as well, at least in the UK
[/quote]

Aaahhhhh, noooo, I hit "edit" instead of "reply"! I've accidentally amended your post, Khemehekis, as if it were my reply to it, but I was only replying to one part of it [:(]
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Khemehekis »

sangi39 wrote: 20 Feb 2023 11:29 I assume it's just familiarity. "Marc" isn't, like, the "default" spelling for the name, to be fair, so unless you spell it out loud, most people will just assume it's "Mark" instead. The thing that always got me in school was that they would have had a record of it, and it was worse down in Bedfordshire when, speaking to someone at the council, they actively changed it assuming the "c" was a mistake [xD] James, on the other hand, well that's pretty much the only way I've ever seen that spelled, and probably the same for most people as well, at least in the UK
As an American, I'm used to Marc, because the first Mar_ I ever met was a boy in my summer school class named Marc. And, of course, most conlangers know how to spell Marc Okrand's name. I've seen the occasional American who spells his name Jaymes, but I've never known a Jaymes personally.
Aaahhhhh, noooo, I hit "edit" instead of "reply"! I've accidentally amended your post, Khemehekis, as if it were my reply to it, but I was only replying to one part of it [:(]
Oh no! [:(]
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Khemehekis »

What are all of your thoughts about the Oxford 5000? Do all of you think it's a good wordlist/core vocabulary of English?

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries. ... d3000-5000

(Once you go to the above link, you will see the Oxford 3000. To see the larger FIVE thousand list, go to the "Filters" button on the right, and under List, select "Oxford 5000".)
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by eldin raigmore »

Khemehekis wrote: 23 Feb 2023 00:11 What are all of your thoughts about the Oxford 5000? Do all of you think it's a good wordlist/core vocabulary of English?
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries. ... d3000-5000
I think I need it, and Im going to trust it.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

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I am now officially the twelfth-spammiest poster here!
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by sangi39 »

Honestly a little bit nervous at work at the moment. Work for a company that employs about 100 people, with an annual revenue right now of about £200million (about £16million gross income), in a team of 6 people doing fraud prevention stuff, among other things. Over the last four years that I've been here, at least, we've just sort of accepted whatever pay rises we were given (x amount one year, y amount the next), and definitely on my part I never gave it much thought because when I started I was earning double what was earning in my last job (part time, minimum wage), so just got complacent, I guess

We're discouraged from discussing pay (I think it's actually written into our contracts, but we regularly question the legality of that amongst ourselves), but the HR department back in March started handing out letters to other employees in other teams, got to us and basically went "oop, we've got nothing for you", when we all knew fully it was about pay (annual rise in minimum wage). Big conversation kicked off in our team once everyone else had left, and turns out we're all a bit unhappy with what we get paid at the moment, compared to what we were getting 5 years ago

End result - We wrote up a full-page letter basically saying "we're not happy with this, ideally we'd like this instead", handed it to our team leader/manager/whatever, who handed it straight over to the HR department... who then promptly did nothing about it, and failed to let the Managing Director know anything about. He only found out when someone on our team handed in their notice, and now he wants to have a meeting with us all, as a team, to talk about it (the HR department also seems to have scheduled a meeting with out team leader as my brother, whose like our "senior team member", I guess, but it doesn't look like MD knows anything about this either, which makes it look like HR are trying to handle this themselves? I don't know, we'll find out I guess)


But anyway, yeah, bit nervous. I've never been in a position where I've negotiated pay before, so don't know entirely how to prepare for it. Like, we've gone over the companies financial paperwork as best we can going back to 2018 (so pre-Covid, pre-Brexit) to get a sense of their revenue, gross income, net income, how much they spend on wages, looked into inflation, minimum wage, living wage, median income, etc. just to kind of go "okay, what seems 'fair'?", and what can be done to stop this happening in another 5 years, because apparently more or less this exact situation happened 5 years ago, high turnover within the team until the company went "okay, right, we'll pay you more to try keep you here then"

The idea of a meeting always makes me think we've done something wrong and are in trouble, haha. Sure we're not, but I also don't want to negotiate poorly and land us in trouble, or leave us feeling like we're still being, I guess, undervalued. New territory for all of us, I think, and a tad scary


Coincidence: "Money Money Money" by ABBA just came on the radio [xD]
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

IANAL, and I don't have any particularly valuble experience in this area. But having said that...
sangi39 wrote: 18 Apr 2023 12:40 End result - We wrote up a full-page letter basically saying "we're not happy with this, ideally we'd like this instead", handed it to our team leader/manager/whatever, who handed it straight over to the HR department... who then promptly did nothing about it, and failed to let the Managing Director know anything about.
That's not that surprising - you had an HR issue and HR dealt with it (by ignoring it). It's more surprising that the MD would be personally negotiating wages for individuals! But I guess it's a very small company.
but it doesn't look like MD knows anything about this either, which makes it look like HR are trying to handle this themselves? I don't know, we'll find out I guess)
It may be that the MD didn't tell HR that they were going to talk to you directly, or that HR didn't tell the MD they'd scheduled a meeting themselves. I'd assume that, unless your MD is a techbro or other psychopath, you'd probably have better chances with them than with HR - the MD only has to please themselves and you, whereas HR has to please HR, you, and also their worst-case scenario of what the MD might say.

It's also possible, though, that the MD is going to talk to you about wages, and HR is going to talk to you about your contract forbidding you from talking about wages...


But anyway, yeah, bit nervous. I've never been in a position where I've negotiated pay before, so don't know entirely how to prepare for it. Like, we've gone over the companies financial paperwork as best we can going back to 2018 (so pre-Covid, pre-Brexit) to get a sense of their revenue, gross income, net income, how much they spend on wages, looked into inflation, minimum wage, living wage, median income, etc. just to kind of go "okay, what seems 'fair'?",
The great injustice of wage negotiations: they know what their number is, and you don't. They're unlikely to have any interest in fairness. You're doing the right thing by being informed and looking like you're informed, but ultimately it's mostly just theatre - you show that you care about this and that you're looking at alternatives, so that they don't think you're bluffing. But most of you probably are bluffing (if you weren't, you'd already have quit - it's unlikely that you're all coincidentally really right on the undecided edge right now). The risk to you (not finding a new job) is obviously greater than the risk to them (missing a worker for a little bit until they find a new one, assuming they don't have someone already lined up as you work out your notice). And of course they can punish you for bluffing, whereas you can't punish them for bluffing. Fundamentally, if you're not all actually willing to quit next week then you're unlikely to be able to get the best deal.

Sorry, probably not reassuring you right now, am I?

Well done on getting your whole team together, though. That's a much stronger negotiating position - replacing a team in one go is much harder than replacing you one by one. Assuming that it doesn't get you fired for violating your contract (see some thoughts below).
and what can be done to stop this happening in another 5 years, because apparently more or less this exact situation happened 5 years ago, high turnover within the team until the company went "okay, right, we'll pay you more to try keep you here then"
Spoiler alert: it will happen again in 5 years. If you're not all on the verge of giving up and resigning, then they're paying you too much, and companies don't like to do that. They want to pay you the minimum that you'll work for, and unless they see evidence that they're at that limit (people not working for them anymore) then they won't see a reason to raise pay. [actually the big controlling input is usually recruitment rather than retention, since if they have a retention problem they've probably already got a recruitment problem... but in a small company in a stable industry, they may have limited recruitment needs and little prospect of promotion, so retention could be the first red flag for them]. They're unlikely to agree in advance to any 'regularly increase our salary' idea. You could try to improve lines of communication, but I'd guess they're likely to end up calling your bluff anyway. They probably like having poor communication - since that means they can take it seriously when you do jump through the hoops to complain...

You could maybe improve things on your side, though. Obviously ideally you'd be in a union who would negotiate on your behalf. But even if you're not, you could try to set up an informal union amongst yourselves - not to coordinate action against your employer (I'm asuming legal issues around formal union recognition there), but to communicate between yourselves better. You say that when someone raised the pay issue you were all in agreement - which suggests you might have been in agreement previously if someone had only raised the topic sooner. Talking amongst yourself more about pay and conditions - or just about job satisfaction generally - could help this happen quicker next time. Which is why you have that clause in your contract forbidding it. [although, of course, the fact you haven't demanded a pay rise in 5 years is part of your value to the company, and if the MD thinks this is going to be a regular occurence they'll offer you less this time! You want to give the impression "let's deal with this once and for all", not "we've woken up now and this is just the start!"...]

FWIW, IANAL, but my understanding is that, in the UK, pay secrecy clauses are still legal, and in theory you may have broken your contract by talking to your colleagues about your pay and agreeing to collectively ask for more. So... yeah, you may be in trouble.

HOWEVER! As I understand it, under the Equalities Act 2010, it's illegal to attempt to enforce a pay secrecy clause (i.e. punish you) if you aksed a co-worker about their pay for the purposes of assessing whether you were the subject of discrimination against a protected class. So if you have any black, female, muslim, gay, elderly, young or trans people in your team, you might want to consider sneaking in the phrase "[X] was just asking us about our pay to see if we were making more than them, and that made us realise we were all unhappy with our pay" if pressed, because you can't be punished for that, whereas "we were just chatting about how we were all unhappy with our pay and wanted to ask for more" might well be against your contract. In practice, from what I've heard, if you have can make any plausible case that your discussion was only motivated by a desire for equality then your bosses are unlikely to try to punish you, even if they think you're lying, because the repercussions of an equalities legislation prosecution against them could be much greater than the annoyance of people discussing pay in the workplace. But again, IANAL, and you may want to look into this before your meeting with the MD.
The idea of a meeting always makes me think we've done something wrong and are in trouble, haha. Sure we're not, but I also don't want to negotiate poorly and land us in trouble, or leave us feeling like we're still being, I guess, undervalued. New territory for all of us, I think, and a tad scary
Yup! Sorry, don't have any good advice for you on that!
The presence of the MD is probably positive, since they can get things done more easily, and it shows they're taking you seriously. On the other hand, they can also get bad things done more easily too.

Unfortunately, you're vey likely to leave still feeling undervalued. Fundamentally, real wages are headed down at the moment, because between Brexit and Covid and Putin we're all poorer than we used to be. You may be able to get a wage increase (assuming the MD doesn't play the "the company will go bust! we're on the edge! just wait until the economic environment improves!" card), but it probably won't be in line with inflation.


Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking bout, so please ignore me!
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

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Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22 IANAL, and I don't have any particularly valuble experience in this area. But having said that...
sangi39 wrote: 18 Apr 2023 12:40 End result - We wrote up a full-page letter basically saying "we're not happy with this, ideally we'd like this instead", handed it to our team leader/manager/whatever, who handed it straight over to the HR department... who then promptly did nothing about it, and failed to let the Managing Director know anything about.
That's not that surprising - you had an HR issue and HR dealt with it (by ignoring it). It's more surprising that the MD would be personally negotiating wages for individuals! But I guess it's a very small company.
Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22
but it doesn't look like MD knows anything about this either, which makes it look like HR are trying to handle this themselves? I don't know, we'll find out I guess)
It may be that the MD didn't tell HR that they were going to talk to you directly, or that HR didn't tell the MD they'd scheduled a meeting themselves. I'd assume that, unless your MD is a techbro or other psychopath, you'd probably have better chances with them than with HR - the MD only has to please themselves and you, whereas HR has to please HR, you, and also their worst-case scenario of what the MD might say.

It's also possible, though, that the MD is going to talk to you about wages, and HR is going to talk to you about your contract forbidding you from talking about wages...
Yeah, we thought he might be vaguely involved, but seems once he found out something was going on, and he was kept in the dark about it (for whatever reason), he just went “get it sorted”

My brother and our team leader had that meeting this afternoon in the end and the head of HR said, more or less, “we can’t prioritise just your team, we have other teams we need to look at as well, which is why the pay review will be in July”. Now, fair, completely get that, and, you know, we already knew that? Because they already told us that? Before we wrote the letter? That nowhere at all mentioned prioritising our team over any other team, nor did we indicate to our team leader (who also gave no such indications) that we wanted special treatment?

But, yeah, apparently MD has stepped in and said “get started on reviewing every team’s pay, and sort it before July”, which is cool (although I guess kind of indicates that maybe he didn’t know how slowly things were progressing on that front, but I suppose a lot of MDs tend to take a step back in general anyway), and he still wants to have a meeting with us about it. The meeting with HR was, pretty much, just them saying why they sat on it for five weeks. So as of this afternoon, at least, there’s been no consequences to discussing pay

Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22
But anyway, yeah, bit nervous. I've never been in a position where I've negotiated pay before, so don't know entirely how to prepare for it. Like, we've gone over the companies financial paperwork as best we can going back to 2018 (so pre-Covid, pre-Brexit) to get a sense of their revenue, gross income, net income, how much they spend on wages, looked into inflation, minimum wage, living wage, median income, etc. just to kind of go "okay, what seems 'fair'?",
The great injustice of wage negotiations: they know what their number is, and you don't. They're unlikely to have any interest in fairness. You're doing the right thing by being informed and looking like you're informed, but ultimately it's mostly just theatre - you show that you care about this and that you're looking at alternatives, so that they don't think you're bluffing. But most of you probably are bluffing (if you weren't, you'd already have quit - it's unlikely that you're all coincidentally really right on the undecided edge right now). The risk to you (not finding a new job) is obviously greater than the risk to them (missing a worker for a little bit until they find a new one, assuming they don't have someone already lined up as you work out your notice). And of course they can punish you for bluffing, whereas you can't punish them for bluffing. Fundamentally, if you're not all actually willing to quit next week then you're unlikely to be able to get the best deal.
That’s pretty much what me and my brother said in the car on the way home yesterday, and several times before. We have a number in our head for what we want for our work, the company has theirs, and chances are ours will always be higher than theirs (the old thing I guess, I want as much as I can get for as little as I can give, they want to give as little as they can for as much work as I can do)

Turns out one of us wasn’t bluffing [:P] Definitely fair point, though. We don’t want to lose our jobs, because we become less likely to pay bills, rent, and for food, etc. They don’t care too much if we do as long as they can reasonably replace us, because whoever they bring in, well, they don’t need to pay them more than they pay us


Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22 Sorry, probably not reassuring you right now, am I?
Well done on getting your whole team together, though. That's a much stronger negotiating position - replacing a team in one go is much harder than replacing you one by one. Assuming that it doesn't get you fired for violating your contract (see some thoughts below).
and what can be done to stop this happening in another 5 years, because apparently more or less this exact situation happened 5 years ago, high turnover within the team until the company went "okay, right, we'll pay you more to try keep you here then"
Spoiler alert: it will happen again in 5 years. If you're not all on the verge of giving up and resigning, then they're paying you too much, and companies don't like to do that. They want to pay you the minimum that you'll work for, and unless they see evidence that they're at that limit (people not working for them anymore) then they won't see a reason to raise pay. [actually the big controlling input is usually recruitment rather than retention, since if they have a retention problem they've probably already got a recruitment problem... but in a small company in a stable industry, they may have limited recruitment needs and little prospect of promotion, so retention could be the first red flag for them]. They're unlikely to agree in advance to any 'regularly increase our salary' idea. You could try to improve lines of communication, but I'd guess they're likely to end up calling your bluff anyway. They probably like having poor communication - since that means they can take it seriously when you do jump through the hoops to complain...
We’re fairly sure it’ll happen again in five years too, to be honest. I mean, it’s happened once, biggish pay rise to try and keep retention rates a bit higher*, followed by a few years of wages falling behind what you’d expect because, hey, we’re happy and complacent now, and probably won’t notice for a bit

*which, at least as far as we see it, benefits the company more widely [if they’re going to continue to rely on humans to do the job instead of going for full automation], because they longer we’re there, the easier it is for us to spot patterns, can respond quickly and efficiently to problems as they arise with minimal disruption to the usual flow of things, and it makes it a lot easier to train up temp workers for Christmas rather than relying on an entire team of people who’ve only been there for like six months themselves


Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22 You could maybe improve things on your side, though. Obviously ideally you'd be in a union who would negotiate on your behalf. But even if you're not, you could try to set up an informal union amongst yourselves - not to coordinate action against your employer (I'm asuming legal issues around formal union recognition there), but to communicate between yourselves better. You say that when someone raised the pay issue you were all in agreement - which suggests you might have been in agreement previously if someone had only raised the topic sooner. Talking amongst yourself more about pay and conditions - or just about job satisfaction generally - could help this happen quicker next time. Which is why you have that clause in your contract forbidding it. [although, of course, the fact you haven't demanded a pay rise in 5 years is part of your value to the company, and if the MD thinks this is going to be a regular occurence they'll offer you less this time! You want to give the impression "let's deal with this once and for all", not "we've woken up now and this is just the start!"...]
That… actually makes a lot of sense. Me and my brother do talk about pay a fair bit. We live in the same house, pay to the same bills, it’d be impossible not to, but, yeah, pay has never been discussed amongst the wider team at all, at least as long as I’ve been there (four years). Definitely do get the feeling, since we started talking about it last month, that if we’d been more willing to discuss things amongst ourselves, we would have been more proactive about it

I’ll keep that in mind, thank you


Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22
FWIW, IANAL, but my understanding is that, in the UK, pay secrecy clauses are still legal, and in theory you may have broken your contract by talking to your colleagues about your pay and agreeing to collectively ask for more. So... yeah, you may be in trouble.

HOWEVER! As I understand it, under the Equalities Act 2010, it's illegal to attempt to enforce a pay secrecy clause (i.e. punish you) if you aksed a co-worker about their pay for the purposes of assessing whether you were the subject of discrimination against a protected class. So if you have any black, female, muslim, gay, elderly, young or trans people in your team, you might want to consider sneaking in the phrase "[X] was just asking us about our pay to see if we were making more than them, and that made us realise we were all unhappy with our pay" if pressed, because you can't be punished for that, whereas "we were just chatting about how we were all unhappy with our pay and wanted to ask for more" might well be against your contract. In practice, from what I've heard, if you have can make any plausible case that your discussion was only motivated by a desire for equality then your bosses are unlikely to try to punish you, even if they think you're lying, because the repercussions of an equalities legislation prosecution against them could be much greater than the annoyance of people discussing pay in the workplace. But again, IANAL, and you may want to look into this before your meeting with the MD.
"[X] was just asking us about our pay to see if we were making more than them, and that made us realise we were all unhappy with our pay" was actually pretty much exactly how the discussion started. When the letters went round to the order processing team (most of them, anyway, since they’re generally on minimum wage, barring a few people), they asked us (the control team) what minimum wage even was. We told them (£10.42 an hour), and they were like “but I get paid [Y]… that doesn’t seem right, do you get paid that?”, which led us all to say “no, I get paid more than that” or “no, I get paid in this banding, so between [Z] and [W]” (so strictly speaking, barring that first value [Y], no-one’s actually said how much they get paid)

But then we all went “but we all do the same work… and we’ve all been here for roughly the same amount of time (between three-and-a-half and five years)… that doesn’t feel right”

I looked into what the banding would be for the work I did, noticed only one of us was in that banding (everyone was one or two bands lower) and then looked into what that wage should have been had it kept up in line with inflation, minimum wage, median wage, living wage, etc. explained what I’d noticed to the team and then, yep, everyone started feeling like they’d been undervalued. They were putting in the work for less than even the company was saying they should get paid (but never questioned it because, hey, a pay rise is a pay rise), and then the company was slowly paying us less and less each year compared to what they had been (not just us, but going back before some of us had started, and in different teams as well, from what I could find)

So definitely a case of “we noticed some of us are getting paid less for the same work”, and we explicitly mentioned that in our letter as an issue we want dealing with. The banding system started out great, and made a lot of sense in rewarding people for putting in the extra effort, but right now it looks like it’s being used to keep wages down, so we want it gone, and everyone brought up to the level they should be getting paid at

Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22
The idea of a meeting always makes me think we've done something wrong and are in trouble, haha. Sure we're not, but I also don't want to negotiate poorly and land us in trouble, or leave us feeling like we're still being, I guess, undervalued. New territory for all of us, I think, and a tad scary
Yup! Sorry, don't have any good advice for you on that!
The presence of the MD is probably positive, since they can get things done more easily, and it shows they're taking you seriously. On the other hand, they can also get bad things done more easily too.

Unfortunately, you're vey likely to leave still feeling undervalued. Fundamentally, real wages are headed down at the moment, because between Brexit and Covid and Putin we're all poorer than we used to be. You may be able to get a wage increase (assuming the MD doesn't play the "the company will go bust! we're on the edge! just wait until the economic environment improves!" card), but it probably won't be in line with inflation.
Oh definitely not expecting what we asked for in our letter, that’s for sure. We went pretty high on that front, but not without reason (“doing this level of work, people on this team were paid [X] above minimum wage when the banding kicked in, we want that rate restored” effectively), and we figured go high or go home, lol. They’ll 100% go below that, no question, but the problem so far, at least amongst ourselves, has been finding a minimum we’d be happy with without feeling like we’re being completely screwed over, which is my main reason for all the follow-up research (although, sort of along the lines of what you’ve said, there’s a difference between “feeling completely screwed over” and “feeling disappointed”)

And, to be fair, our company has done stupidly well since 2018, and the MD has gone round the office several times pointing this out (the fact he did that the day after we handed over our letter… he might have not done that had he known), with the company’s revenue more than doubling between the 2018/19 financial year and the 21/22 year (gross income over the same period has gone up by 68.5%, net income by 262%, but wages only 63%, most of which seems to be due to rising minimum wage), so I can’t see them bringing in the economy without being intentionally dishonest, so fingers crossed they don’t do that, but we’ll see





Either way, your reply was a help. There's some things we've just not thought about, and MD wanting to have a meeting with us, possibly as early as Thursday, and telling HR to basically "get on with it", I really don't want us left in a weak position, even if the "negotiations" are just theatrical. Hopefully some of things you've mentioned can help us further down the line as well
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

Post by Khemehekis »

Salmoneus wrote: 18 Apr 2023 14:22 So if you have any black, female, muslim, gay, elderly, young or trans people in your team, you might want to consider sneaking in the phrase "[X] was just asking us about our pay to see if we were making more than them, and that made us realise we were all unhappy with our pay" if pressed . . .
I don't know if you remember this, but Sangi himself is openly bisexual.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

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It has been brought to mine attention that I may suffer from bipolar disorder type I.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

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Man in Space wrote: 04 May 2023 23:32 It has been brought to mine attention that I may suffer from bipolar disorder type I.
Interesting. Maybe the manic phases are what allow you to create tons of logograms?

Space Dracula ("Spack") from the ZBB had rapid-cycling bipolar; he was diagnosed about a year after he was diagnosed with Asperger's and social anxiety disorder. He had amazing dreams from his Paxil (it created complex buildings appearing in his dreams) and would conlang/conworld in spates when he had his manic phase.

I have crazy sleeping cycles (my natural cycle is 16 hours of sleep alternated with 32 hours of wakefulness), and when I'm feeling highly awake I feel a rush wherein I conlang and conworld, among other things like songwriting, intensely. I doubt I have bipolar disorder, though, since I don't spend money and have sex recklessly during what would be my "manic" phases, nor do I go out of my way to do things for other people. I do identify with the artsy, emotional *personality type* of bipolar disorder, though (and made Alan Isaacs, the character in The Bittersweet Generation who's modeled after me, bipolar). On the other hand, I cannot identify at all with the introverted, shy, mindblind, special-interest-oriented, routine-driven, rule-loving personality associated with social anxiety disorder and/or Asperger's.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

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It’s official. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, type I.
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Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

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Wow. Better update this post.

Does it feel better to know for sure that you have it (along with all your other disorders)?
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